In the cutting edge advanced circle, client experience has gotten key for associations and their brands to fuel and drive brand-client connection. Since its inception, Adobe Experience Manager has empowered organizations to innovate, optimize, and deliver content across all digital channels in a smarter and faster way. The Latest Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) 6.5 was released in April 2019. There is a lot of buzz about the new features and the stronger infrastructure included in the latest Adobe Experience Manager to deliver the top-notch customer experiences. Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 release is customer focussed, it conveys development that empowers marketers and IT experts to work together on the quick conveyance of customized brand experience.
Let’s take a look at key innovations, features, and enhancements of Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 which help brands to achieve lead in Customer Experience Management.
New Single Page Application (SPA) Editor
The most anticipated new feature of Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 is most definitely the SPA support. SPA stands for single page application. These are JavaScript technologies like Angular and React that load all a page’s content in one go, making for a faster and smoother user experience. However, this advantage was eroded by the fact that, to use them, marketeers needed developer time to update the content. Hence content velocity would decrease painfully. By using Adobe Experience Manager SPA Editor, developers can easily build web sites using SPA Framework and authors can seamlessly edit content within Adobe Experience Manager. It is recommended to use the SPA Editor if your project requires a SPA framework-based client-side rendering (e.g React or Angular).
Smart Crop
Cropping images and video can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive endeavor that requires drawing, measuring, and cutting. Before Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 to fit into multiple layouts, you needed multiple sizes of each image in your design to suit each target screen size. With a website incorporating hundreds or thousands of images, this simply wasn’t practical. Adobe Sensei based Smart Crop features allow you to overcome this situation. Adobe Expereince Manager 6.5’s smart crop tool automatically detects and crops the focal point in any image or video out of the box.
Some key features of smart crop are:
- Videos/images are automatically cropped to new aspect ratios while preserving the points of interest.
- Smart cropping can be performed for an individual asset or can be performed for all assets within a folder.
- Smart Crop Editing Layout can be resized for better visibility.
- Published URL for the Smart Copped asset is available to be used with 3rd party applications that accept hosted assets.
- AEM Sites’ Dynamic Media component supports Smart Crop.
Headless Content Delivery
Earlier you needed to create a Content Fragment Model which is converted into the Content Fragment. This content fragment was placed on Adobe Experience Manager pages using Sling Model to export in JSON format. Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 simplifies the process. In Adobe Experience Manager 6.5, the HTTP API now supports the delivery of content fragments. All you have to do is create Content Fragment and then leverage the Asset HTTP API to export it in JSON format. It can be easily invoked by attaching “API/assets/” in the content fragment URL. This JSON format can be consumed across SPA, Mobile App, iOS App, and more. Publishing your AEM content to a single repository supports the Headless CMS paradigm, which content can be available to any channel (web, mobile, in-store signs and IoT apps for example) from a single source.
Digital Asset Search
Enterprise Content Management Systems can easily contain tens of thousands, if not millions of digital and content assets. Searching through your DAM for the correct asset can often seem like finding a needle in a haystack. With the beefed-up Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intelligence assistant, finding assets is now a fast and simple search away. With the automated machine learning under the hood the more you use the digital asset search functionality, the better it becomes.
Workflow Reusability Across Multiple Adaptive Forms
There was no concept of reusability of form workflows. Each workflow was tied to an adaptive form, so you had to create different workflows for different forms even if the workflow model was the same.
To solve the problem, Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 has introduced the same workflow across an adaptive form. Forms author can dynamically select the form associated with the workflow. This way, users can reuse workflow processes across multiple forms. It is achieved by Assign Task steps, which can be configured so that it can be automatically bound to particular adaptive forms.
Other new features in Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 worth highlighting are:
- Folders used to store asset and content fragments now support custom metadata.
- Permissions management within the Touch UI interface, no need to swap over to the classic UI to toggle and apply security User Generated Content (UGC) Importer. Import content added by the users of your site in the form of comments, reviews, social media etc directly into the UI.
- Content Distribution. Now you can configure publishing agents to distribute your content to a number of mediums as well as use the classic replication method. This provided Adobe Experience Manager administrators a huge amount of power to configure where content can be shared across the web.
- Content Smart Tagging. Using AI and machine learning you can tag your assets with a multitude of content.
- Multi-lingual asset management, again automated by Adobe’s Sensei and can be linked with the Smart Tagging feature.