AEM 6.1 - Avoid the Landmines , Build a Great Solution - Part 1

With the release of AEM 6.1, Adobe brings much needed significant integration with various elements in the Adobe Digital Marketing Cloud as well as making the Touch UI robust and the authoring experience in Touch UI much more cohesive.

I’ve already mentioned key updates in this Blog, 

Adobe have been working very hard in re-branding CQ to AEM and help promote a uniform stack of products that works seamlessly with Marketing Cloud. In doing so, many acquisitions have been asked  in the past, the latest of which is AEM Campaigns ( formerly Neolane )

AEM 6.1, seeks to provide a uniform platform from which to leverage these features  seamlessly and are a major step in the right direction, however the devil is in the details

The integration is not yet complete, there are overlaps and sometimes puzzling sets of functionality available to users, each of which may have  implications for solution architecture, deployment models and of course licensing and cost.

I wanted to write a series of posts to  taken an initial attempt at unraveling the key options available for a holistic enterprise content management solution built around a solid WCM system that is AEM. They are,

1. Personalization
2. Forms and Document Capabilities  ( Blog here ) 
3. Mobile Apps ( Blog Here ) 

Let’s get started

Part 1 - Personalization:

Today, enterprises are seeking to harvest information about their existing  and potential consumers from as many touch points as possible,  in order to draw insights and subsequently  publish relevant and targeted contented based on interests , demographics, subscriptions, spending habits, location and almost anything you can think of.

AEM 6.1 steps up the game in providing multiple options for different types of content to be personalized for end users.  They can be broadly categorized as the following and include some of the new integration and features for ‘seamless’ integration offered.

Note: Adobe Analytics is not mentioned below as a separate category, as it forms the core platform for data collection and analysis for all of these options.   

Native to AEM:

This was the most basic way to achieve some level of personalization within AEM without needing any additional components and still exists today.

• Create campaigns in AEM ( not to be confused with AEM Campaigns ) brands, touch-points, experiences, and segments within AEM and display relevant teasers to users based on their segment resolution from client context for both anonymous and logged in users.
• Segments can be enhanced using information either from Analytics integration , or  from Social Login components to leverage data from social media profile ( should the user choose to login via that channel ) ,

Target

Target brings in much more flexibility in being able to decide what part of your website you wanted to personalize. With the latest update, authors can choose to ‘ Target ‘ any component on the fly without needing to modify the mBox in the template.

Campaign

Adobe Campaigns allows authors to craft personalized content for targeted email campaigns, leveraging the information for users available in Campaigns Client Context.

Media Optimizer

Includes Audience Manager and Adlense and allows for the optimal delivery of ads across multiple digital channels  and helps you to understand how your ad campaigns are doing and respond accordingly w.r.t investments in that channel

Devil in the Details

As always, the devil's in the details and with so many options, the AEM stack is no exception. 

• Adobe Campaign, the newest acquisition has yet to be fully integrated and has its own data store of information of profiles which is separate to the standard client context. More details on Adobe Campaign below.
• Content targeting via Adobe Target, can be done via segments created in AEM, or Adobe Target or Adobe Audience Manager each separately licensed with Audience Manager providing advanced and more comprehensive segmentation capabilities through Personas
• All the options above benefit greatly from integration with Analytics for either segmentation or analysis of any content that goes out there
• Targeted content by way of experiences can live within and be delivered from AEM ( post resolution of segment in target ) , or can live within and be delivered from Target directly.
• Adobe Dynamic Tag Management offers a great alternative for integrating Analytics, Target and other industry leading analytic suite

Key Considerations for an Effective Solution

What form of personalization do you need ?

You will need to license and purchase different offerings based on what form of personalization you need , e.g.  Content on your website ( Native AEM or Target )  or for your ads delivered cross various digital channels, ( Media Optimizer ) , or email campaigns ( Adobe Campaigns ), you will need to license and purchase different offerings.

What is the level of personalization do you need ?

Can AEM’s native teaser based personalization deliver enough or do you license out Adobe Target that gives you much more flexibility over your pages. Target also integrates seamlessly with Adobe Analytics 

What kind of segmentation do you need ?

AEM’s native segmentation off the client context may be suitable for most web based personalization, whereas Audience Manager’s advanced personas may get you the granular targeting you need by combining data from multiple sources

What are your existing investments for analytics ?

Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager boasts being able to host multiple analytics suites including Google Analytics, but you may lose some of the seamless integration of AEM with Analytics

How are your personalization initiatives run in your company?

Ideally AEM projects should involve clear understanding on what content needs to be personalized and in what way, however quite often there are different teams managing these two aspects and as a results, you get different projects with different priorities. If your core AEM projects is separate to your analytics project, and you want minimal footprint between the two, it may be worthwhile considering using DTM to be the connector between Analytics and DTM, Adobe Target to begin with and then switch to a more traditional integration with Target later on . This works well with the latest release for Target where you don’t have to input mBoxes into the page beforehand.

What are the security considerations in my industry & geo ? 

Many of the offerings are cloud based and indeed your core AEM implementation itself may be on the cloud. You will need to assess and quantify the risk associated with collection of and storage of PII ( Personally Identifiable Data ) on the cloud, and possibly pursue encryption of the more sensitive information depending on where they are stored in the whole chain.

How important is Page Performance?

Since many of these offerings are on the cloud, what is the impact to page performance in case libraries are loaded from remote servers. E.g. Adobe Marketing Cloud pops may not exist in your region and may cause delays to the DOM loading on the page.

Gaps in the solution

With so many offerings on the table for personalization, including the OOB capability of AEM, there are quite a few gaps that I see  that may impact the efficiency of any solution in terms of superfluous license costs or time taken to reconcile data and draw cohesive insight from across the stack

It may be that Adobe are yet working on these or indeed may not even be considering these use cases. Either way, it’s good to know what we don’t know.

• AEM Campaigns is relatively new, and while the core functionality seems to allow for targeted campaigns across SMS, email, call centers, etc, only email is ever demonstrated and it’s unclear what the native Adobe integration hooks are for other channels,
• What’s the native integration between AEM Campaigns delivering across channels and Audience Manager refining personas with data from multiple channels ?
• With AEM Campaigns and Audience Manager data store each as a separate store of customer data, how do you begin to reconcile and correlate user data between them and thus truly achieve a feedback loop for insight to action across AEM including AEM Commerce.
• What’s the native integration allowing for insights in Analytics , including analysis of user generated comments, to refine customer data and profiles in Campaigns and Audience manager
• What’s the native integration for personalization of digital assets distributed through Scene7, especially for ecommerce sites ?

Bottom Line

AEM 6.1 leaves the core WCM functionality pretty much intact and brings instead brings a seemingly much more cohesive Customer Experience Platform in conjunction with the Adobe Marketing Cloud. It may look like it has made the job easier for content authors and digital marketers in reaching out to specific audiences with targeted content, and in many ways, it has.

However, what the suave demos may not show is that, there is significant complexity added not only in terms of getting a whole solution to work with multiple offerings to integrate, but also, and perhaps more importantly , in determining what you need and what option will fulfill your requirements without putting a dent in your pocket or extending inexorably your IT project timelines

There are significant benefits here but only if there is a detailed due diligence on your precise needs as well as a clear understanding of all options available as well as the related pricing

What’s Next :

In my next post, I talk about the Forms and Document Management Capability of AEM as a platform . In particular I will address how the ‘legacy’ platform of Adobe LiveCycle has evolved and is evolving into AEM Forms

Part 2 posted here.