By integrating best-in-class rich content authoring and creation with best-in-class enterprise commerce, we can provide a single, unified solution for all consumer touchpoints. At the same time, retailers can optimize and personalize the shopping experience, in real time, by testing different content types based on purchase data. (Tom Griffin, Demandware)

Makes good sense, doesn’t it? The integration of best-in-class content authoring and publishing, digital marketing and analytics (Adobe) with an omnichannel commerce engine and storefront (Demandware) is so obvious that it’s kind of a no-brainer.

Of course, integrating content and commerce is nothing new. We’ve been doing it since the earliest days of the internet as a sales engine.  The two diverged as specialized platforms for first web content management, and then e-commerce, became the rage in the past decade—but the obvious next step on either side was to reach back out and embrace the other.

Certain platforms and software companies have seen limited success in this regard, but for quite some time the only way for an online retailer to achieve a “best-in-class” experience was through custom integration between a pure-play CMS and a pure-play e-commerce platform.

Born in the Cloud

To some extent, that’s still the case; Adobe and Demandware remain different companies with different software platforms and different licenses.  The value of this particular partnership, however—what sets it apart and makes it so exciting—is that it’s born in the cloud.

The Adobe Marketing Cloud is more than just the CMS—Adobe Experience Manager.  It’s digital marketing and analytics, rich media and more, and it’s a unified cloud platform offering the flexibility and scalability that software-as-a-service provides as its primary value proposition.  Similarly, Demandware is a purely cloud-based solution— and that cloud DNA is what sets it apart from the rest of its peers.  The ability to scale up or down quickly to meet demand is a huge advantage for any retailer—B2C or B2B—who anticipates seasonal or market-driven shifts in volume.

Not Quite Yet, Though…

Naturally, there will be challenges down the road as these software companies seek to present an integrated offering.  The integration itself is officially still in pilot mode, and big questions are yet to be answered.  As a wizened green Jedi Master told us back in 1980, “Always in motion, the future is.”  On balance, though, the prospects offered by this announcement are too exciting to ignore.

I’ve included a video of Cedric talking about new features in AEM 6.0.  Cedric demo’d the new features using a tablet to show how they’ve fully enabled the touch interface for the authoring environment.

The first new feature deals with language translation.  This release does a better job of managing translations.  A site contains a language master for the content and then Live Copy is used to created the translated content for each country.  A new References feature allows you too see where a content item is used and where it has been translated.  The translation workflow goes out to a translation vendor through an API that Adobe has built into AEM.

One common problem with language translation that Adobe has addressed is updating translated content when the master changes.  AEM also includes a ‘diff’ tool so you can compare two different copies and identify the differences.

Feature two deals with creating impactful content.  Creating good content is now what drives ranking in search engines, so there is added emphasis on creating good content.  AEM brings in interesting information to help a content author create better content. Content Insight brings charts about how your content is doing on the site or it could be a list of recommendations from third party providers.  These providers (like BrightEdge) can seamlessly integrate with AEM when enabled.

App Authoring – or PhoneGap Enterprise combined with AEM – allows you to create and manage mobile apps right in AEM. The application also runs within AEM, but it really consists of components that you can combine to create the app.  These components are specific to the mobile app, so you wouldn’t use it on the web site.  The best use case for Apps is a content heavy site.  By using PhoneGap Enterprise, you can include Adobe Analytics in the Adobe Marketing Cloud to track usage of the mobile apps. Other Marketing Cloud components (like Campaigns) can also be leveraged.

Adobe has brought a lot of functionality from Scene 7 and baked it right into AEM.  Scene 7 is really useful for changing images on the fly for personalization among other items.  SpinSet is used to take images and make them into a 360 view.  All the image manipulation you can do in Scene 7 will be available in AEM directly.

Digital asset management has been enhanced with workflow that allows you to create tasks on the fly.  Tasks are integrated with the AEM dashboard.  When dealing with multiple assets – like picking a photo from photo shoot – you can see all the images on one page and then pick or approve the one you like best.

When integrated with the Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Social, you can find and manage social conversations from within AEM.  This is done by pushing external content into Adobe Social where you can create content, reply to conversations. Adobe Social calls this Unified Moderation.  You can correlate user profiles on the website with users on social media.

In addition the Adobe Social integration, there are some social features in AEM.  Now you will be able to moderate posts in forums and other places where users can make comments.  You can also translate comments through the same translation workflow as other content.

communities.adobe.com is now available to discover and support communities across the globe.  This feature is not just for AEM, but is useful for all Marketing Cloud products.  Adobe wants to have communities for Marketing professionals and web site owners as well as developers.

Building sites more efficiently using Developer Mode.  Adobe has developed tools to convert HTML into the components that AEM requires to build a site.  This would eliminate some steps needed today to translate a site’s design into actual usable components.  Tools are also included to help a developer understand how a page has been constructed, how long each component takes to load, and also see what code is being executed in the components.

Adobe is also including a new tag language that can help you create components without code.  These tags can grab data from the server and put it into the HTML at run time.  This looks similar to using JSP tags on a page.

Integration, Front-end Testing can also be done right within the interface.  Tests can be scripted and then run right within AEM.  This can eliminate some manual testing of web sites in the SDLC.  Results show you right in the interface where problems occurred.

There are new Heatlh Dashboards targeted for system admins.  The dashboard shows the status of various parts of AEM and highlights any areas where problems exist.  These dashboards can also show when maintenance tasks must be run.

Finally, Projects is a new feature. Projects group content together with other items, such as tasks, experiences, workflows, etc. These are presented as a Dashboard for the project so you don’t have to hunt for all these items across the AEM interface.

One of the first things I learned is that Adobe has grown tremendously over the past few years and has really cemented its place as the leader in digital content creation and marketing. What was made equally clear is that Adobe’s stable of world-class partners has been instrumental to Adobe’s success. In fact, joint engagements between Adobe and its partners were brought up numerous times as examples of customer successes. This was true across verticals (e.g., Retail, Media, and Financial) and Adobe solutions (Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud). Based on what I saw at the Worldwide Sales Conference, I expect Adobe will continue to engage with its digital agency and systems integration partners throughout 2014 and well into the future.

The second theme centered on the tremendous growth of digital marketing and the importance of creating a compelling and personalized customer experience. Marketers know that every interaction between a business and a customer is a marketing opportunity and a chance to drive revenue. The challenge is that customers control how, when and where they will interact with companies. In fact, customers use a multitude of channels (web, mobile, social, video) and devices (tablet, phone, computer) to engage with businesses. This creates a significant challenge for marketers to determine how and when to engage clients within each of these channels and provide a compelling reason for the customer to take the next step forward in the sales cycle. Adobe’s response to this was clear: Brands interested in driving significant revenue through digital channels must deliver the right message, to the right channel, at the right time. Creating this type of customer engagement requires a well-defined strategy and an enterprise-grade platform with deep solutions capabilities.

The final theme– which ran throughout the duration of the conference – was that Adobe’s strategy, vision, and product platforms – Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud – have made it possible for businesses to deliver the digital experiences that clients expect. First, I want to segue to a little history lesson that provides context to Adobe’s approach to digital marketing.

Adobe has a deep heritage in digital content creation solutions (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, etc). Legions of digital marketers have been using Adobe’s creative products to generate extremely rich and engaging digital content for many years. The challenge for those marketers was twofold: how to manage all of that content and how to get that content to their customers. Thus, the strategy and vision of Marketing Cloud was born.

The vision for Marketing Cloud was to provide marketers with one location to manage, publish, and analyze the content they were creating. The first strategic step towards the creation of Marketing Cloud was focused on organic product development and/or acquisition of market-leading content management, analytics, mobile, social, customer segmentation, media optimization, and marketing campaign orchestration solutions. The second step of the process involved seamless interoperability between the Marketing Cloud systems and the creation of a Touch Interface to manage everything. This provided marketers with a singular and actionable view of the customer and a singular interface for the management of all marketing processes and activities. The final step for Adobe was to integrate the full suite of solutions from Creative Cloud to Marketing Cloud. This created a unified content creation, management, and publishing system that covered the full marketing lifecycle. Adobe’s strategy and subsequent cloud-based platforms provide end-to-end solutions for creative and digital marketers. By having the right tools in place, marketers can deliver on their vision: to provide the right message, to the right person at the right time.

This conference offered an outstanding opportunity to learn more about Adobe’s business, their solutions offerings, and also engage with key members of teams. I came away from the conference with a fuller understanding of Adobe’s sales and product strategies along with their key value propositions and differentiators from others in their space. I’m excited to see how Adobe’s latest acquisition of Neolane – now Adobe Campaign – will help to orchestrate successful online and offline marketing campaigns designed to drive increased revenue for our clients. Based on the Adobe Campaign sessions I attended and the conversations I’ve had with clients since then, I anticipate tremendous success for this solution.

As Forrester & Gartner’s leader in Web Content Management, Adobe certainly has much to discuss and no lack of thought leadership within the Digital Marketing arena. However, what I found truly compelling about the conference was the level of transparency Adobe provides to its partners. Partners have full access to all sales and product sessions and are very deeply engaged with the Adobe team. This level of accessibility allows for tremendous learning opportunities for partners like Perficient. Here’s a peek into the top three themes that I learned from my 4 days in the desert with Adobe.

1. Adobe has cemented its place as a leader in digital content creation and marketing.
2. As marketers we are tasked with creating compelling and personalized customer experiences each and every day.
3. Adobe’s strategy, vision, and product platforms – Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud – have made it possible for businesses to deliver the digital experiences that marketers expect.

Adobe has created the market-leading, best-of-breed digital marketing platform while simultaneously helping their clients deliver a deep set of capabilities and engage their customers with “the right message, to the right channel, at the right time”. In the coming weeks, I’ll be continuing to blog about my Adobe experience and provide more details and context around these themes.

The jump from CQ4 to CQ5 brought a considerable improvement in the product, wrapped with an elitist bow – aiming to enchant not only techie geeks, but marketers as well. Since then, Day overhauled its upper management echelons, kept up an aggressive research and product development schedule, expanded sales and marketing activities globally and, particularly, in North America, prettied up enough to get acquired by Adobe. Result? The product is now officially popular.

– RealStory Group, “CQ5 WCM development skills are hot — and scarce“

Adobe is a leader in Web Content Management, and CQ5 is a robust content management system. It integrates “multi-channel marketing planning, a social module for building communities and online forums and a targeting module that builds Ominture tools into CQ5 and enables marketers to better understand which campaigns are working and to target specific content,” according to Fierce Content Management.

Perficient is looking for CQ5 Web Content Management developers to develop, design, test and deploy WCM solutions and next generation web content management systems (WCMS) for our clients. You will work closely with clients, developers, system administrators, project managers, business analysts and end users to build a state-of-the-art WCMS systems and solutions. Learn more about the opportunity here.

First, Adobe purchased PhoneGap late in 2011 and has incorporated that tool into CQ5.5.  While in the past you could target CQ5 for multiple devices, with the inclusion of PhoneGap, CQ5.5 will take mobile to new heights.  In the demo, Adobe showed how easy it is to drop a camera widget on the mobile page and then preview the exact functionality via the device’s emulator.  So as you are building the mobile site, you can instantly see how each device will exactly render the page.

A second really nice feature is the Client Context view of your site.  Here you can open the site with a context viewer to see how the pages will look to various audiences.  In the context viewer, you can adjust user attributes to see how the page reacts.  You can click on a location in a map and the page will display based on that locale.  You can click on different devices and see how your page looks in that context.  This provides a great way to experiment visually with personalization rules.

Adobe is now including translations of your page into multiple languages.  For example, you can create a page in English, then click on the icon for French and have the page translated directly.  Translations can be configured to use Google Translation as the engine or you can integrate others.

One final new feature I like is the inclusion of Adobe Bridge.  This allows editors to seamlessly manage digital assets in CQ5.5 and keep them in-sync with other media efforts.  So from CQ5.5 you can open an image from the library, make changes to it through Photoshop and save the changes.  Or somebody on your creative team can make changes to an image in the digital asset library. Those changes immediately appear in CQ5.5 and then can be workflowed prior to publishing to the site.  Likewise, content and images used to generate brochures from inDesign can be reused in CQ5.5 directly.   The goal is to reduce the pain often associated with trying to sync the creative department with the web management team.

It will be exciting to see what else is coming in Adobe CQ5.5.

Interwoven’s Livesite let’s them do more than display static content and the personalization engine can be used much more easily.  It was a long time coming for Iwov but the addition of a run time gave them much more flexibility.

I think that represented a trend that the WCM vendors needed to take in order to survive.  Now let’s look at a list of functionality you see in Sitecore, Adobe cq5, and IBM’s WCM product:

• Personalization
• Marketing campaigns
• Deep integration with web analytics include A/B testing with oob marketing suites or separate but related products
• Sharepoint integration
• Microsoft CRM integration
• Out of the box web forms and integration to the web site
• Data Provider abstraction layers
• Wiki’s
• Blogs
• Forums
• Tagging
• Ratings
• Calendaring
• Open Social containers for gadget or widget support
• Surveys
• Advanced workflow engines
• WebDav integration
• Drag and drop component libraries
• Federated search

It’s a long list but you will see some similarities to portal.  You will also see some functionality portal products are now starting to deliver.

My View

So now the question about when to use a portal or a WCM system has a slightly more nuanced answer.  WCM system provide more functionality than they have in the past.  They make it easier to surface data and even interact with simple widgets and forms.  That said, they are not yet portals.  They don’t do application interaction yet. They don’t integrate personalization with both content and applications.  They don’t do as good a job in hooking to services layers and in creating other integrations to things like user repositories.

That said, you have more reason to do a full review of what you need before choosing to use either a WCM or a Portal.  Even with IBM, I’m seeing companies looking first to their WCM product and then to their portal product.

So my biggest question is how long it will be before portal and WCM merge? Or if they will merge?

• Web Content Management, including in-place editing of content, workflow, localization, personalization. etc.
• Marketing Campaign Management that can segment visitors for push marketing
• Mobile web experiences and you can preview your site in many different mobile simulators
• Targeting which integrates Adobe’s online marketing suite powered by Omniture
• Social Collaboration such as profiles, wikis, forums, blogs, etc.
• Digitial Asset Management with easy access from the content editing screens
• Portal integration can easily surface content on a portal or include JSR portlets on a content page
• Forms Builder to create forms for the site

It looks like CQ5 can be a standalone web content management system that will manage multiple websites and it can be integrated with other systems to deliver content.  The combination of Sling and JCR make access to content pretty easy, so you can build content into you custom applications too.

I’ll be taking a closer look at Adobe CQ5 and can’t wait to report my findings.