In this post, we’ll walk through how Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Perficient, a Platinum Partner for Adobe, can help customers accelerate their Digital Content Management with Adobe Experience Manager.

Digital Content Management Trends

As customer expectations evolve rapidly there is unprecedented audience demand for new content. With this comes many challenges for creatives and marketers such as:

1. Streamline digital asset creation, management, and delivery. Customers want experiences that are consistent and connected across every touchpoint.  Progressing from visiting a website to filling out an online form, as one example, should be a seamless process. Navigating digital properties should be a frictionless journey.
2. They want to deploy a powerful content management solution on a scalable and highly available platform and also shift focus from infrastructure management so that their IT teams focus on content delivery.
3. Then they need a platform that enables marketers to plan, predict, collaborate, evolve, and deliver their best work by connecting people, processes, and platforms
4. Finally, they need to augment human-powered efforts by adding intelligence to create, manage, deliver, and optimize great content and experiences for their customers.

Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) empowers customers to deliver connected and compelling cross-channel experiences across the complete customer journey.

AEM serves as a hybrid Content Management System (CMS) that enables you to deliver and manage context-optimized omnichannel experiences. It gives marketers the ability to manage and optimize content across channels without external dependencies and it creates a consistent and connected content experience at every touchpoint.

• With Adobe Experience Manager integrated with Adobe Marketing Cloud products, you can get personalized, content-led experiences into the market faster which combines digital asset management with the power of a content management system.

AEM Capabilities Include:

• CMS to easily compose and deliver digital assets across online and digital platforms.
• Adobe Experience Manager Assets – You can leverage automation and smart tools to rapidly source, adapt, and deliver your assets across audiences and channels.
• With Adobe Experience Manager Forms, you can activate and manage multi-channel digital enrollment, onboarding, and customer communications.
• With Adobe Experience Manager Screens, you can deliver dynamic interactive experiences across any screen, any platform, and any device.
• With Adobe Experience Manager Guides, you can use structured content to easily create, manage, and deliver product documentation, self-service help, user guides, knowledgebases, and support content.
• Finally, you can further optimize the content experience with Adobe and AWS Solutions and service such as:
  • Adobe Sensei, an industry-leading AI, machine learning solution to cut the time spent on tedious tasks like tagging, cropping, and adapting assets for each channel and device. With that, you can turn complex tasks into easy, automatic workflows.
  • With Amazon Kendra, you can tap into intelligent search capabilities to easily make important content searchable to boost workforce productivity and enhance customer experiences.

AEM Platform Overview

A standard AEM architecture consists of three environments: author, publish, and dispatcher. Each of these environments consists of one or more instances.

Author: The author environment is used for creating and managing the content and layout of an AEM experience. It provides functionality for reviewing and approving content updates, and publishing approved versions of content to the publish environment.

Publish: The publish environment delivers the experience to the intended audience. It renders the actual pages, with an ability to personalize the experience based on audience characteristics or targeted messaging.  The author and publish instances are Java web applications that have identical installed software. They are differentiated by configuration only.

Dispatcher: The dispatcher environment is a caching and/or load-balancing tool that helps realize a fast and dynamic web authoring environment.

Caching:  The dispatcher works as part of an HTTP server, such as the Apache HTTP Server, with the aim of storing (or caching) as much of the static website content as possible, and accessing the website’s publisher layout engine as infrequently as possible.

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Adobe Experience Deployment Strategy

Adobe provides three options to choose to implement AEM for customers.

1. Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Service (AEM as a CS): AEM as a Cloud Service is the new and latest offering from Adobe where AEM runs as a cloud-native product.  This enables customers to accelerate time to value and is extensible to meet your unique business requirements. This allows the customer to focus on application development hosted inside AEM as a CS, while Adobe support engineers focus on AEM product releases, service packs, and infrastructure-related activities.
2. Adobe Experience Manager as a Managed Service: Adobe also offers AEM as a managed service where AEM is hosted in a cloud platform and managed by Adobe support engineers, again freeing the customer from the platform and infrastructure-related activities.
3. Self or Partner-Managed AEM Deployment: This is a traditional model where the customer owns the responsibility of both AEM and application.  This offering can be either on an enterprise data center or hosted inside an AWS cloud platform taking advantage of custom automation and seamless integration with customer enterprise applications with their custom security policies and taking advantage of AWS-provided computing, resource, and tools cost.

AEM on AWS

Running AEM on AWS provides customers with the benefits of easily integrating third-party solutions for auxiliary experiences and providing additional tools for supporting mobile delivery, analytics, and big data management. You can integrate the open and extensible APIs of both AWS and AEM to create powerful new combinations for your firm. Also, AEM can be used to augment or create headless commerce architectures seamlessly.

Today’s consumers are not looking for choices as search results, they are looking for the accuracy of results to make decisions.  This can be delivered using machine learning-powered tools like Amazon Kendra, that provide intelligent search capabilities (leveraging ML) to the customers.  For more information on this please read this article.

Increase the call center operation efficiencies by using Amazon Connect to interact with AEM to prepopulate AEM forms. For example, to integrate a voice response experience for drivers license renewals with the DMV – you can build renewal forms with AEM responsive web forms with dynamic workflows and use Amazon Connect to prepopulate the appropriate forms to establish an appointment and processing forms that could utilize a digital signature using Adobe Sign. With this use case, you can implement the fully automated voice experience without agent involvement.

You can connect Adobe Experience Manager Sites to your eCommerce engine running on AWS to make content-rich, interactive shopping experiences and quickly scale them across your digital properties.

The Trifecta 

Running Adobe Experience Manager on AWS provides a secure and scalable foundation for delivering great digital experiences for customers. As you prepare for your AEM self-hosted migration to AWS or planned implementation of AEM managed service or AEM cloud service, Perficient can help simplify the deployment and integration steps.

Leveraging delivery blueprints, experience, and thought leadership, Perficient is eager to help more customers migrate to AWS and further amplify usage of this groundbreaking infrastructure that is presently solving real-world technical and business challenges.

To learn more about Perficient’s experience assisting customers to build, migrate, and evolve highly complex AEM implementations, check out the webinar that our own Zach Fischer, Perficient Senior Solution Architect recorded at Adobe Experience Makers Live 2022 with Kenny Rajan, AWS Senior Partner Solutions Architect. You can download it here.

More on Perficient + Adobe

Perficient is an Adobe Platinum Partner and an Adobe 2023 Solution Partner of the Year. We’re certified for our proven capabilities and hold six specializations in Adobe Experience Manager, AEM Run and Operate, Analytics, Target, Marketo Engage (the first in the world) and Adobe Commerce. Our experts will help you transform into an experience business. We deliver innovative solutions with more than 700 Adobe-focused global consultants working with leading brands providing an exceptional experience to their customers and solving complex business challenges. Learn more about our Adobe capabilities and offerings here.

More on Perficient + AWS

Perficient is a certified Amazon Web Services partner with more than 10 years of experience delivering enterprise-level applications and expertise in cloud platform solutions, contact center, application modernization, migrations, data analytics, mobile, developer and management tools, IoT, severless, security, and more. Paired with our industry-leading strategy and team, Perficient is equipped to help enterprises tackle the toughest challenges and get the most out of their implementations and integrations.