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AEM as a Cloud Service | Click here |
AEM 6.5 | This article |
Adobe Experience Manager Assets is a digital asset management (DAM) solution that can integrate with Adobe Creative Cloud to help DAM users work together with creative teams, streamlining collaboration in the content creation process.
Adobe Creative Cloud provides creative teams with an ecosystem of solutions and services to help them to create digital assets. It includes desktop and mobile applications, cloud services like storage with desktop sync or web experience, as well as marketplaces such as Adobe Stock.
Read on to know what integrations to pick between desktop and the enterprise-grade DAM based on your use case and what are the associated best practices for the connecting workflows.
Experience Manager to Creative Cloud folder sharing is deprecated and no longer covered in this guide. Adobe recommends using newer capabilities such as Adobe Asset Link or Experience Manager desktop app to provide creative user with access to assets managed in Experience Manager.
Requirements | Use case | Involved surfaces |
---|---|---|
Simplify experience for creatives on desktop | Streamline access to asset from a DAM (Experience Manager Assets) for creative professionals, or more broadly, users on desktop working in native asset creation applications. They need an easy and straightforward way to discover, use (open), edit and save changes to Experience Manager, as well as upload new files. | Win or Mac desktop; Creative Cloud apps |
Provide high-quality, ready-to-use assets from Adobe Stock | Marketers help accelerate the content creation process by assisting with asset sourcing and discovery. Creative professionals use the approved assets right from within their creative tools. | Experience Manager Assets; Adobe Stock marketplace; metadata fields |
Distribute and share assets by organizations | Internal departments/local branches and external partners, distributors, and agencies use the approved assets shared by the parent organization. The organization wants to securely and seamlessly share the created assets for wider reuse. | Brand Portal, Asset Share Commons |
Value proposition for the involved personas | Adobe offering | Involved surfaces |
---|---|---|
Creative users discover assets from Experience Manager, open and use them, edit and upload changes to Experience Manager, as well as upload new files into Experience Manager, without leaving Creative Cloud apps. | Adobe Asset Link | Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign. |
Business users simplify opening and using assets, editing and uploading changes to Experience Manager, and uploading new files into Experience Manager from the desktop environment. They use a generic integration to open any asset type in the native desktop application, including non-Adobe ones. | Experience Manager desktop app | Experience Manager desktop app on Win and Mac desktop |
Marketers and business users discover, preview, license and save, and manage the Adobe Stock assets from within Experience Manager. Licensed and saved assets provide select Adobe Stock metadata for better governance. | Experience Manager and Adobe Stock integration | Experience Manager web interface |
This article focuses primarily on the first two aspects of the collaboration needs. Distribution and sourcing of assets at scale is briefly mentioned as a use case. For such needs solutions, consider Adobe Brand Portal or Asset Share Commons. Alternate solutions such as Brand Portal, solutions that can be built based on Asset Share Commons components, Link Share, using Experience Manager Assets should be reviewed based on specific requirement.
Use Case | Adobe Asset Link | Experience Manager desktop app | Remarks / Other Solutions |
---|---|---|---|
Discover - browse DAM folders | Yes | Experience Manager Web interface and desktop actions | |
Discover - access DAM collections | Yes | Experience Manager Web interface and desktop actions | |
Discover - search for assets from DAM | Yes | Experience Manager Web interface and desktop actions | |
Use - open asset | Yes | Yes | Open from Web interface or from Finder |
Use - place asset from DAM into a document | Yes - embedding | Yes - linking or embedding | Experience Manager desktop app gives access to assets as files on the local file system. These links in the native apps are represented by local paths. |
Edit - open for editing | Yes - Check-out action | Yes - Open action (in the network share) | Check-out in AAL saves the asset to user’s creative cloud storage account (synchronized by Creative Cloud app) by default. |
Edit - work in progress outside DAM | Yes - Asset available in user’s Creative Cloud storage account synced to desktop. | Yes | |
Edit - upload changes | Yes - Check-in action with optional comment | Yes | |
Upload - single file | Yes - uploads current active document | Yes | Upload via web interface |
Upload - multiple files / hierarchical folder structures | No | Yes | Upload via web interface or via custom scripting or tool. |
Misc - user and login | Creative Cloud user logged into Creative Cloud desktop app gets recognized (SSO) | Experience Manager user and credentials | Users of both solutions count towards the Experience Manager user quota. |
Misc - network and access | Requires access from user’s desktop to Experience Manager deployment over network | Requires access from user’s desktop to Experience Manager deployment over network | Adobe Asset Link does not share network proxy environment. |
Misc - Migrate large number of assets | No | No | Assets migration guide |
To support asset distribution use cases, other solutions should be considered:
This is a brief summary of best practices for Experience Manager and Creative Cloud integration. Read the rest of this document to get the detailed understanding of these.
Experience Manager and Adobe Stock integration provides Experience Manager users with the ability to search, preview, license and save, assets from Adobe Stock into Experience Manager. Licensed and saved Stock assets have selected Stock metadata, which can be used to search for them with extra filters.
A few important points about this integration:
Working with assets saved from Adobe Stock into Experience Manager in Creative Cloud. This integration is independent of Adobe Asset Link, but Adobe Asset Link recognizes these assets saved from Stock that way, and displays additional metadata and a Adobe Stock logo on these assets in Adobe Asset Link extension UI in Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign. The files are available for browsing, opening, and so on - because they are regular assets when saved to Experience Manager.
Creative users working in Creative Cloud apps with Adobe Asset Link extension present, in addition to having access to already-licensed assets from Adobe Stock into Experience Manager, can also use Creative Cloud Libraries panel to search, preview, and license Adobe Stock assets.
Assets from Adobe Stock licensed and saved into Experience Manager become available to the broader teams accessing Experience Manager Assets deployment, whereas creatives licensing assets from Adobe Stock via Creative Cloud Libraries panel make them available to themselves only by default in their Creative Cloud account.
To design an efficient workflow between creative and marketing/line-of-business (LOB) teams and choose the best support capabilities, it is important to understand when and why assets are stored in DAM.
Storing assets in DAM makes them easily accessible and findable. It ensures that the assets can be leveraged by numerous users across the organization or ecosystem, which includes partners, customers, and so on.
Most organizations choose to only store assets that are relevant to the downstream marketing/LOB processes (publishing to channels like web channel via Experience Manager Sites or other channels served by Adobe Experience Cloud - Marketing Cloud, Advertising Cloud, and measured by Analytics Cloud, providing to users/partners, and so on). In addition, organizations store assets that may be subjected to a review/approval process in DAM. This way, DAM stores mostly assets that have high chances of being leveraged, and avoids storing idle assets.
Storing assets is also subject to technical and resource utilization considerations. DAM provides additional services around stored assets, including extracting metadata, versioning, generating previews/transcoding, managing references, and adding access control information. These services consume additional time and infrastructure resources.
Often, storing all of the assets and updates is not desirable. For example, if updates to specific assets are of poor quality and consume excessive resources, the assets may not be stored in DAM.
Creative teams (and organizations) are usually not interested in storing assets at each stage of the asset lifecycle. For example, they avoid storing assets in the following cases:
Usually, the following classes assets are stored in DAM:
As a rule, only updates to assets that are relevant to the broader set of DAM users should be stored in DAM. It ensures that users (marketing and similar functions) only see relevant versions in the DAM asset timeline.
Typically changes related to major milestones in the asset lifecycle. For example, the initial marketing-ready asset or an official update based on request/review provided by the creative team should be stored and versioned in DAM.
The creative team’s update for review by the marketing team after a request for a change in the existing asset in DAM is an example of a relevant update. It should be stored and versioned in DAM for further reference or for reverting to the previous version.
The following are examples of updates that are typically not relevant:
Assets supports two types of users based on their access to the Assets deployment. Typically, users inside the enterprise network (firewall) have direct access to DAM. Other users outside the enterprise network would not have direct access. The user type determines which integrations can be used from the technical standpoint.
Typically, in-house creative teams or agencies/creative professionals onboarded to the internal network have access to the DAM deployment, including Experience Manager login. Experience Manager and network infrastructure can be set up to allow direct access to external parties - usually trusted organizations like agencies working for a client - to have access to Experience Manager over network, for example via VPN or IP allowed list.
In such cases, Adobe Asset Link or Experience Manager desktop app helps provide easy access to final/approved assets and lets you save creative-ready assets to DAM.
External agencies and freelancers without direct access to the DAM deployment may require access to approved assets or want to add their new designs to the DAM.
Use the following strategies to provide access to final/approved assets:
As discussed in this document, it is recommended to carry out major updates on assets, sometimes called work in progress, without having all the edits saved to the local file also uploaded to Experience Manager as changes. This speeds up a desktop user’s work, limit network bandwidth used, and keep the assets timeline clean and focused on controlled, major updates.
Adobe Asset Link offers a good support for this use case:
Experience Manager desktop app provides a network share for assets opened in the native app. By default, all the changes done locally are uploaded to Experience Manager automatically after a brief while. With such a configuration, frequent saves during the work-in-progress phase would all be uploaded into Experience Manager and versioned, creating a lot of network traffic and potential scalability challenges - not to mention unnecessary versions in Experience Manager.
The recommended approach here is to use an option in Experience Manager desktop app to turn off automated updates, and upload changes to assets to Experience Manager manually, leveraging the upload changes action in the app’s Asset Status UI.
You may have a requirement to simultaneously upload a larger number of files into DAM in some scenarios, for example:
The description refers to uploading files operationally (for example, every week or with every photoshoot), as a normal part of desktop user’s workflow. Large asset migrations are not covered here.
You can leverage the following upload capabilities:
If you use Network File Shares to manage digital assets, just using the network share mapped by Experience Manager desktop app could be seen as a convenient substitute. When transitioning from network file shares, Experience Manager web interface provides a rich set of Digital Asset Management capabilities that go well beyond what is possible on a network share (search, collections, metadata, collaboration, previews, and so on), and Experience Manager desktop app provides a handy link to connect the server-side DAM repository with the work on desktop.
Avoid using Experience Manager desktop app to manage assets directly in the network share of Assets. For example, avoid using Experience Manager desktop app to move/copy multiple files. Instead, use the Assets interface to drag folders from Finder/Explorer to the network share or use the Assets Folder Upload feature.
To plan and execute asset migrations from existing system to a new system or migration of large volume of assets stored on servers, see the Migration Guide. Experience Manager desktop app and Experience Manager to Creative Cloud integrations do not support such migrations. Due to the large volumes of assets to be ingested, and additional requirements around metadata mapping, transformation, and ingestion, migrations should be handled using different tools and approaches.