In today’s retail, banking, government, education, automotive, insurance, defense and software industries, reaching the consumer and users has gone beyond regionalization and localization of the language of the website. Business and IT managers are under tremendous pressure to deliver content specific to the user without losing the brand value or conversion rate, and while continuing to bring in new users and retain existing ones.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) helps companies to easily set up regional or departmental sites using Multisite Manager (MSM). Multisite Manager goes beyond creating multilingual sites, however. MSM provides capabilities to maintain brand and content across the regional or departmental sites, such as Rollout, Synchronize, Inheritance and Detaching.
In reality, corporations face multiple challenges in implementing global and regional sites. The following are a few of those challenges and how AEM Multisite Manager helps in resolving them.
Content Strategy
Every corporation is unique. Rather than have technology drive the business direction, the “business need” should be given higher priority over the technology. A company can derive their own content hierarchy that suits the business. These hierarchies can be a global site with multiple regional sites (A), a corporate site having multiple department specific sites (B), a multiple version of a product site (C), or various other structures. This way the brand and content can be maintained and consistent across sites.
Image courtesy of docs.adobe.com.
AEM MSM provides features like Blueprint, Blueprint Configuration and Live Copy in deriving a content hierarchy for the implementation. This helps the business to implement the best content hierarchy that suites its needs.
Content Governance
As live copy sites are created for targeting customers of specific regions or departments, the global content or assets may not be relevant to the live copy sites. Companies can have their own custom content creation policy specific to the region or departments.
AEM MSM provides features like ‘Rollout’ to push content from a global site to a regional site.
AEM allows users to create specific content for individual departments or regional sites by cancelling the Inheritance feature, and pull global contents through MSM’s ‘Synchronize’ feature.
The above example shows the live copy of a Spanish site (left) and French site (right) with different images for the Men’s page. The rest of the content on both pages is the same.
Cost
Companies maintaining regional and department level sites depend on IT departments and business budgets. This may delay (or even stop) a brand change to the regional or departmental sites.
With AEM MSM, the cost of maintaining the regional and departmental sites are either completely eliminated or minimized, as brand features like the UI look and feel, or global content, can be rolled out from Blueprint site to Live Copy sites.
Scaling & Time
When the need arises to create new regional or departmental sites, there is the need for IT resources to create the UI look and feel, as well as contents and assets. This leads to a delay in launching the new sites.
With AEM MSM, creating a new site is much easier, and content creators, with use of Live Copy creation feature, can launch a new site in no time.
Permission
Maintaining contents on multiple sites has always been a difficult task. There are potential conflicts when multiple editors are making changes to content on the regional or departmental level sites. AEM, with the built-in security feature of an access control list, or ACL, which can control read and write permission to authors for specific sites.
What capabilities of MSM do you find most valuable? Let us know in the comments section below.
