Scaling Content Production and Increasing Performance with Adobe’s Edge Delivery Services

Teams that manage content and have content-related workflows received a powerful new tool from Adobe this week - Adobe Edge Delivery Services.

Adobe has teased the tooling under project names such as "Adobe Helix" and "Project Franklin" but officially released Edge Delivery Services at Adobe Max.

The tooling allows organizations to use Google Drive and Microsoft Sharepoint as a source of truth for document of content.

What is Adobe’s new Edge Delivery Services?

Edge Delivery Services (EDS) is "a composable set of services that allows for a high degree of flexibility in how you author content on your website." EDS will fall under the umbrella of Adobe Experience Manager products, and the content will be accessible between AEM and Edge Delivery Services (more on this below).

Highlights of EDS include:

• Google Drive or Microsoft Sharepoint as a content repository

• Serverless architecture to achieve a Google Lighthouse Score of 100

• Built-in experimentation framework for experience testing and execution

• Access to AEM's DAM asset selector

The most prominent feature of EDS is the ability to use Google Drive or Microsoft Sharepoint as a content repository for delivered experiences. Documents and spreadsheets, which content typically originates from, are now the author's primary interface for creating.

Adobe Edge Delivery Services is architected as a serviceless infrastructure. What that means is there are no back-end programming capabilities. Content from the documents and spreadsheets are translated into markup (HTML fragments) and delivered to your content delivery networks (CDN) edge nodes.

EDS's zero back-end loading times and delivery of documents at the edge layer result in a perfect Google Lighthouse Score of 100. For marketers - higher Google Lighthouse scores typically mean higher converting pages. For IT teams and developers - this means built-in performance metrics and an inherent understanding of UI changes' impact on performance.

Another tooling feature is the built-in experimentation framework that allows authors to create and execute experience tests. The experimentation framework is built-in, meaning there are no performance impacts that you typically experience when doing strange DOM manipulation techniques to alter content and experiences.

What is Adobe looking to solve with Edge Delivery Services?

This move from Adobe demonstrates their commitment to improving how content is thought about as organizations mature their Content Supply Chain and attempt to scale content production.

Some of the big complaints and challenges organizations face when working with a CMS, even Adobe Experience Manager, are:

• Implementation costs

• Author and developer onboarding

• Poor performance

• Scalability

Content authors know how to use Google Docs and Microsoft Word. Moving content authoring to this format reduces the effort required in training, producing documentation, and general knowledge of the CMS.

Developers focus solely on building the front-end experience and only require knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to be productive. Lengthy build times are a thing of the past, and performance is taken care of.

There is no more need for heavy customization and extensive authoring dialogs for specific content types. Adobe has accounted for all standard best practices like redirects, metadata, SEO, and re-useable/global content blocks to be controlled directly in spreadsheets and documents.

The content-first approach that Edge Delivery Services enables leads to improved flexibility in content production and dramatically reduces the overall cost of implementing web experiences.

We are optimizing content delivery with Edge Delivery Services. 

Rightpoint can help methodically incorporate Edge Delivery Services into your content management and workflows.

In the immediate future, this can include a hybrid delivery model where specific sub-sections of content can begin using the new tooling. In this hybrid approach, your global elements like header and footers are delivered from AEM while the content is delivered from Edge Delivery Services. This approach is suitable for text-heavy content or single-use experiences that don't take advantage of re-use in the traditional CMS paradigm.

The hybrid approach will allow quicker development times and experimentation and, ultimately, a reduced business cost and better customer experience.

Areas to consider include:

• Blogs

• Newsrooms

• Bios

• Advisories

• Homepages

• One-off experiences

Investigating your business' content workflows can help identify specific content types that will benefit from Edge Delivery Services and how to improve your overall Content Supply Chain.

Understanding your content sources and workflows is imperative as organizations move to a modular content approach to enable dynamic assembly and hyper-personalization.

Let Rightpoint help you make an informed decision with the Adobe tools.

Whether you use Adobe Experience Manager or not and want to learn more or see an Edge Delivery Services demo, Rightpoint is here to help.

Contact us today and meet with our Adobe Certified Experts and strategists to explore the options available to create a center of content excellence, establish a mature content supply chain, and improve the impact of content within your organization.