What is Adobe Experience Manager Assets?

Why do you need Adobe Experience Manager Assets?

AEM Assets is all about storing and delivering assets to the users that need them – whether these users are internal stakeholders or end-user customers. Keeping all the needed assets in one central location with security, governance, and organization is at the heart of what a DAM should be.

In order to be useful, digital assets need to be available to be delivered at just the right time, to the correct audience, and in the correct format. Additionally, they need to have the versatility to be consumed across a wide variety of screens sizes and devices. AEM Assets is designed to help manage all these things through asset storage, management, and delivery.

Each asset in AEM has a set of metadata fields to help classify and define it. This helps users locate the asset more quickly or understand more about its properties. All that metadata becomes searchable, which is critical to delivering the correct asset when and where it is needed. And lastly, it is fully integrated with AEM Sites.

How does it work?

Digital assets can be loaded into AEM Assets either one at a time or through bulk load methods. Once an asset is uploaded, it initiates a variety of workflows to help create renditions that can be used in asset delivery.

Metadata: While the asset is the main part of a DAM, metadata is not far behind in importance. There are default pieces of metadata that get added to the asset that are part of the asset itself, but if additional metadata fields are needed, these can be expanded upon by using the metadata schema builder. Once the assets are in the DAM, they can be used for their intended purpose, either within AEM Sites or as part of an asset portal system.

Asset Governance: Authors also can customize the structure of the folder system of the DAM to ensure that assets are organized based on the unique needs of the organization. Assets can be placed within the appropriate folder or, using AEM’s move function, transferred to another folder. The folders themselves are just there to help group things together and provide structure for use. However, it is worth noting that Collections, while similar to folders, are simply groupings without the power of structure: they exist solely to group assets together.

AEM Assets Feature list

AEM has core functionality that is ubiquitous and spans across all parts of the software. Such core functionality includes a tag management system, users/groups and permissions, integrations with Adobe Sensei, a workflow system, tools for monitoring the health of the infrastructure, and a search tool. Along with these tools, there are also additional features that are part of the AEM Assets system.

Metadata and Schema Builder

By default, there are a set of predefined fields that can be populated upon upload of an asset, as well as other fields that can be filled in manually. There is also a schema builder tool that can add any other number of metadata fields needed. All these fields are searchable within AEM to aid in finding the needed assets(s).

Renditions

When you upload a visual asset, AEM creates various sizes and breakpoints of the same asset. These sizes are customizable. Additionally, rendition breakpoints can be manually adjusted to accommodate the use of a specific part of the viable asset. It also features Smart Crop, which allows users to adjust the positioning of the crop.

Content Hub, Asset Share Commons, and Brand Portal

A method to make a set of assets available to users on the web, either authenticated or unauthenticated. There are currently three recognized methods to do this: Brand Portal, Asset Share Commons, and Content Hub. Brand Portal is the most basic, using the AEM Author user interface. Asset Share Commons is effectively an AEM Sites implementation designed to deliver Assets, and is not officially supported by Adobe. Content Hub is Adobe’s newest system and self describes as an “intuitive distribution portal” for Assets, which will likely replace Brand Portal one day.

Content Fragments

One specific type of asset, called a Content Fragment, can store a variety of grouped content. It is almost exclusively text–based, though it can still link images to it. These Content Fragments are intended to be used to decrease the need for duplicate content entry and increase content reuse instead. It can also be used to help provide structured content.

Smart Tagging

AEM can automatically include derived metadata tags to image assets based on the content within the image using Adobe Sensei. These tags are editable by authors after they have been added.

Workfront Connector

The “Native Workfront Connector” allows businesses to connect their teams together to streamline how assets are created, managed, and used across the organization. Assets and their metadata can all be captured, stored, shared, and searched between Workfront and AEM Assets through their bidirectional sync.

Dynamic media

Dynamic Media helps deliver rich visual assets on demand, automatically scaled for consumption on web, mobile, and social sites. Using a set of primary source assets, Dynamic Media generates and delivers multiple variations of rich content in real time through its global, scalable, performance-optimized network. Dynamic Media has its own set of features as well, including Smart Crop, Interactive video/images, Spin sets, and more.