What is Adobe Experience Manager Sites?

Why do you need AEM Sites?

There are a variety of use cases that AEM Sites can solve for organizations. At its core, AEM Sites is all about content: content delivery, control, presentation, reuse, velocity, and consumption. Marketers can create, update, or delete content as it makes sense within the cycle of the latest marketing plans. With AEM’s various tools, marketers control everything related to content, and they are not reliant on anyone within IT. Gone are the days of waiting for the development team to push out new content, layouts, or styles on the website. By putting the content control in the hands of the marketing team, development teams can now focus on other responsibilities.

The modern technology landscape has shown that organizations use many different platforms, some new and some old, to manage their various software needs. As a platform, AEM Sites allows you to connect these 3rd party systems (social media, PIM, workflow, etc.) so that your marketing tools work together. And while it is fully capable of integrating with third-party systems, AEM already works with many products within the Adobe Experience Cloud (Analytics, Workfront, Target, Commerce, etc.). It can even integrate with other content management systems in a headless or headful way, though the option isn’t binary. AEM offers the versatility to make the most of the advantages of both models in one project.

How does it work?

The major purpose of AEM Sites is the ability for non-technical people to be able to create immersive experiences for users of the website. While there are other ancillary tools built for managing the systems and handling other operations, the heart is creating content that will help engage users to create a lasting impression. All those tools serve to assist and facilitate the creation and serving of content to users. Within the authoring system, authors can create pages from scratch, build them using a set of core components, or set of templates that contain all the components necessary to immediately begin content entry. Once a page has been built, authors can preview the experience across any screen size and device to ensure that it meets expectations.

Built into AEM is a workflow engine critical to many different facets that stretch beyond just Sites. To assist with content creation are workflows intended to help add structure for content publishing approval. These workflows can aid in content collaboration, IP/legal review, and final in-page context review/approval to ensure that everything that gets published has gone through the appropriate channels of review.

AEM Sites 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 functionalities, there are also additional features that are integral to AEM Sites.

Multi-Site-Manager (MSM)

A system that controls how content is pushed out to other parts of the content tree (this is used almost exclusively for language versions of the site), reducing the need for manual creation/duplication of the content tree. This is usually hooked into the out-of-the-box translation workflows.

Editable Page Templates

Content authors can create page templates and manage the policies for them to define what can go on them, freeing them from needing to be created by developers. This includes tools for laying out the content for specific devices and breakpoints, as well as preloading components that a page will need.

Core Components

A set of predefined components that come ready to use. These components are owned and maintained by Adobe.

Style System

The ability to alter the style of a component that affects only its visual appearance without needing to create a new component or modify the existing Core Components.

Experience Fragments

A method to combine or group components for content reuse. Authors can create Experience Fragments and use them in a variety of places through the site, while controlling the content in one single place.

Digital Asset Management Capabilities

While it makes sense that it is already hooked into AEM Assets, and many other products in the Adobe Experience Cloud, it is fully capable of connecting to additional DAMs to facilitate asset usage and delivery.

How Rightpoint can help you

Implementation

Whether you are starting from scratch with a new implementation, looking for enhancements or maintenance of an existing setup, integrating with another system, upgrading to AEM as a Cloud Service, or need some help with staff augmentation, we can help you. We have done many AEM Sites implementations for a broad spectrum of businesses and applications, and we can find the right balance that works for your organization and fits within your timeline (including Digital Foundation Blueprint and Quick Sites).

Hosting

There are a few ways that you can host your system. The simplest is through Adobe with AEM as a Cloud Service or Adobe Managed Services, hosted on their cloud environments. You can also choose a self-hosted model either through the cloud or with an on-premise physical server. All these options have their own varying selling points and drawbacks. Our team of DevOps engineers and SysAdmins can guide you through the challenges of ensuring that your infrastructure is secure, scalable, and reliable (won’t go down).

Specialized and Certified

The people at Rightpoint have been working with AEM Sites since 2012. Our team members are certified by Adobe as Experts and Masters in working with this platform. Additionally, we hold Adobe Specializations in AEM Sites, AEM Assets, and AEM Run & Operate.