Modern Delivery Models for AEM Sites

Transcript

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining. We will be getting started in the next couple of minutes. Today’s session will be focused on transforming your content creation and delivery at scale.

Hang in there. We’ll just be one more minute. All right, as attendees are beginning to filter in, I don’t know if you might have gone to the next slide.

But I wanted to remind you all of our ultimate success offerings. And if you could pull up the next slide. All right. So today’s session has been prepared for you by our subject matter expert, Jean-Luc from Adobe’s ultimate success team. What you see on this slide is the foundation of our ultimate success model, which combines proactive strategic leadership with responsive technical support to help customers maximize value and maintain stability with their Adobe solutions. On the proactive side, we work hand in hand with your teams to align on a unified success plan, execute targeted accelerators, and support your roadmap through expert-led activities across technical health, strategic planning, and event readiness. At the same time, we’re here to ensure rapid response when needed. Our responsive model includes dedicated support resources and subject matter experts who monitor, prioritize, and resolve issues swiftly, whether it’s a P1 incident or ongoing incident analysis. Together, this approach ensures you’re not only covered for today’s needs, but are continuously moving toward long-term success and value realization. With that, I’m going to hand it over to Jean-Luc, and he’s going to be leading us through today’s discussion. Thank you, Tommy, and welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining today’s webinar. We’ll talk about modern delivery models for AEM.

My name is Jean-Luc Muidou. I’m Senior Assistant Manager at Adobe, and I’m excited to guide you through the evolving landscape of digital experience delivery. So moving forward, in today’s digital landscape, so delivering consistent and high-performing experience across channel and region is essential. And so organizations are moving beyond the traditional approaches, leveraging new delivery models to enable scale, agile content delivery, while optimizing the authoring experience. So for our agenda, we’ll cover and start by exploring the modern delivery model that drives speed and flexibility. We’ll then compare the helpful, endless, and hybrid approaches, and also have a focus on edge delivery services as part of AEM that you may have heard about. And we’ll then look at how core components and localization frameworks support multi-brand or multi-region scenario. And we’ll wrap up with an interactive Q&A session. By the way, if you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to drop it in the chat or in the Q&A module from the Teams interface, and we’ll try to answer at the end and make sure that, yeah, we can answer them. Let’s begin with the concept of modern delivery models. So the current digital world demands speed and flexibility. The customer expects seamless experiences, whether they’re browsing on mobile, desktop, interacting with voice assistant and other different formats. And modern delivery model empower organizations to respond quickly to market changes, launch new campaigns, and personalize experience at scale. So these models are built on cloud native API first architecture, enabling rapid innovation and adaptability. And in the era of AI, so customer experience management is transforming. Brand must deliver intent-based experience that anticipate customer need ahead of time. And so the gap between a customer question and answer has collapsed. Speed is actually everything. The modern CMS, content management system, enables brands to manage assets and content, fueled by Gen AI and predictive insight. For example, imagine Sandra and Joan. Those are wine enthusiasts dreaming about their next Eden gem discovery in Napa Valley. AI found them the perfect vine yard based on their taste, locate the wine estate, and get them personalized offer or bike discovery tour, for example, all in real time. And the journey from online purchase to real life experience is building loyalty and trust. And it’s a kind of a must have in terms of, again, scalability, speed, and also content accuracy. So this set a new benchmark for consumer expectation in the age of AI, of course, and brand must anticipate needs and deliver relevant personalized experience in certain. If we look at this speed and so the challenge is indeed to close the gap between the customer intent and the conversion. Over the year, the technology has shrunk this distance from miles to few inches. As you can see over the scale that is displayed here on the screen, the search engine, mobile devices, voice assistant, and now large language model, and LMS have made it possible for customers to get what they want almost systemically. So organization must adapt to this new reality where speed and relevance are critical to conversion on top of content, kind of quality and accuracy, of course. Fast and accurate delivery is now essential for intent based outcome. And so if we look at the kind of, you know, the three different angle discoverability, engagement, conversion, so we can see from the number that here 75 percent of users do not go past the first page of search results and the 75 percent. It’s quite low. Sometimes it can increase to even 90 percent about the first page results. Also, for example, we can observe that, yeah, one hundred and three percent increase in bounce rate could happen after just two second delay. Again, instant and quick delivery is a must have. 48 percent of users also have left site without converting because it felt fully curated or it was kind of not spot on with what they initially kind of, you know, expected as an experience. So to convert visitor, you need optimized personalized experience, discoverability, attract customer and engagement retain them. So the relevance, user experience and quality of content are non-negotiable. And as organization invest heavily in content creation, but to turn that into a customer, discoverability and experience must be first class. So as kind of, you know, summary, the key challenges are relevance of content, of course, as always, user experience and quality of content, how to deliver or to manage and make sure that, yeah, again, we target this conversion in terms of, you know, personalized experience. Now, if we have a look about the traditional and endless content delivery. So there is kind of, you know, a change or it has been some kind of, you know, updating to the different kind of delivery approaches. So the traditional delivery relies on the proprietary tools, legacy infrastructure and channel specific content. The endless delivery of flexibility, language and tools, agile content, cloud based infrastructure or even multichannel content that are accessed via API. So the endless content delivery decouples the content from the back end and enabling content to be reused across website, apps, devices, driving eligibility and scalability. On top of that, so the model delivery models are API first. So the content models and relationship are defined using content fragment model editor. And APIs. The content is created and managed via the rest API or WYSIWYG editor and are delivered endlessly using content services API, core component and GraphQL. We’ll dive a little bit more on this. This enables delivery through to single page application, for example, voice assistant, IOT or mobile apps. And other can create reusable channel agnostic fragments, supporting both endless and full scenario from a unified CMS. And so we’ll deep dive also on those kind of multiple scenario and we’ll see that it’s not only endless versus full. It can be a combination of both and multiple scenario to address multiple needs and requirements. Moving forward. So if we look at implementing a less strategy, it can actually deliver results. We have here a couple of examples that we wanted to highlight. So National Australian Bank that managed full time more contents update during the pandemics, delivering essential updates quickly across React apps, kiosk and web.

On the other side, a major US retailer that reused content 10 to 12 time on average streamlining workflow and delivering consistent experiences across email, web and social media. And less that it re-supports centralised touring and only channel content reuse enabling scale for brand managing millions of content fragment, including so again, website apps. And you can also think about partner systems like Apple TV or Netflix. Really content is at the centre. And so you have this kind of scalability and the reuse that is really streamlining the workflow and delivering consistent experience that we talked about in the different channel.

Now that we have talked about this, let’s kind of deep dive on the differences between the head full, headless and hybrid approach. And we will also have a focus on edge delivery services in AM just to kind of detail all the different components that we have. So as you can see, the edge full or additional approach for delivery is the kind of tightly coupled front end and back end together. It’s best for classic web experiences. The headless is decoupled. So it’s content delivery via API to any channel. And you have between the hybrid approach that combine head full and headless offering flexibility on different kind of scenario, use cases and technical or set up an ecosystem. So choosing the right model depends on your business needs, the technology stack and the desired customer experience. On top of that, so you have edge delivery services that leverage CDN and edge computing for ultra fast and scalable delivery to accelerate really the delivery in term of approach. And so AM, Adobe Experience Manager support all delivery model head full with HTML based web experience, headless with JSON based delivery for single page application, mobile, IoT, etc. And hybrid that combine both enabling again flexibility and scalability. And so this versatility allow organization to tailor the approach for again, each use case or each part of their ecosystem or the experience that they want to deliver.

If we look here, you have all the key pillars for the headless delivery in AM. And so let’s detail and let’s go a little bit deeper into each of them. So you have the model editor where you will define your content structure using content model, relationship and governance. You have then the content fragments allow you to alter structured content into a business user interface where you will also be able to create and manage content fragment in context. You have the GraphQL content services for efficient query based content delivery. And you have the experience fragment, which is unstructured content with contextual editing delivered as JSON or HTML. And these tools are really the business users to create, manage and deliver content at scale. The common question we have is what is the difference between content fragment and experience fragment? In terms of naming, it could be confusing. So let me just kind of debraive a little bit on this. So again, content fragment is a structured, reusable design agnostic content pieces based on the content fragment model. So the content fragment focus on content only leaving the layout and the styling to the consuming application. On the other side, experience fragment, it’s reusable presentation centric fragment composed of multiple AEM components, including the layout and the design. So experience fragment includes content plus design and can be exported at HTML or JSON for subparty system. And basically, you will have a decision tree out of all the different options available that you can have. And based on, again, the different use case that you have, you can really decide the right approach you want to follow.

Moving forward, so we have also flexibility of authoring on how you can create content. And so we have different authoring options. So you have the page editor, which is the classic trusted and 4000th of website and the exact kind of page editing experience that you know. You have the content fragmented, as I mentioned, so for content fragments, which idle for endless content. You have the universal editor, which is the modern WYSIWYG user interface for content agnostic authoring available for edge delivery services. This is the module and the option that we were talking just before. You also have the document based authoring where you can create content in familiar tools such as Word, Google Docs, outside of AEM console and AEM user interface. So this method can be used exclusively or in combination. Again, depending on your project, on the population, I was mentioning business user, for example, just before that could now be enabled to really author the content directly from their document and from the application that they know without going into too much technical consideration.

And then you have the universal editor, of course, that is the kind of in context and preview in real time option that is really in that we see more and more used within AEM. If we deep dive a little bit, so you have here kind of screenshot from the interface and you have also link on the documentation for Experience League platform. So content fragment editor provides an intuitive UI for creating, managing and searching the modular structured content. It’s improved efficiency with streamlined workflow. You have multilingual support for localization. You create rounds and you can reuse everywhere maximizing efficiency and consistency.

For universal editor, as I mentioned, it’s increased authoring efficiency with intuitive WYSIWYG editing and real time preview. So you have a comprehensive content management, including workflow and governance. It’s out of process accessibility and custom usable UI for authors. And it’s a kind of a one stop place to create and edit live with visual preview. It’s really kind of also something flexible and scalable in terms of authoring. And then you have the document based authoring I was mentioning also before to empower any content editor so you can have easy content creation using familiar tools. You can have streamlined review and publishing directly in source documents. Zero onboarding because there is no specialized knowledge required and you can democratize again the content creation and maximize efficiency in your organization. And again, you have the link on the documentation from experience leak that will be shared as part of the resolution in the slide. So if you want to deep dive in, know a little bit more about the different option moving forward initially look at the EMA’s cloud service kind of architecture. So as you can see, we have edge delivery services for experience delivery, as I mentioned. So we have endless implementation, the content management and document based authoring and integration with SharePoint, Google Drive and browser extension. We have the universal editor and customer on front end that will be here as you can see and the cloud native approach and so scalability, reliability and flexibility. So again, if you need more details, feel free to reach out to your account team because they will be able to really based on your context, your requirement, do a kind of I would say a more detailed understanding of where you are and how you can leverage this. And last but not least, I have this kind of slide to help you decide, do we need to go endless or is another approach better in terms of CMS? So let’s go into each category. So the full stack. So in the full stack approach of the classical head full approach, as we said. So the content management system, AEM manage both the content and the presentation layer. So this is referred as full or coupled model where everything from authoring to delivery is in one single platform. Here what we call commerce led example is where the CMS is tightly integrated with commerce capability, manages both content and e-commerce workflow. So you have advantages, lower maintenance, faster to market as everything is managed in one place. But of course, you can lacks advanced features such as deep personalization, ABI testing or advanced analytics. You then have the hybrid approaches. So again, it blend the best of both worlds, leveraging the strength of a traditional CMS while enabling endless capabilities where needed. This is ideal for organization transitioning to endless or needing to support both legacy and modern experiences. In this example, so what we call vertical hybrid is the customer journey split between two solutions, one for content, one for commerce or any other experience that we can think about. So you will have an advantage, reduced development time as team can focus on their area of expertise into the different bit of solution. But of course, you will potentially lack standardization of the customer journey that can be challenging. And as user may experience inconsistency between the two systems. So it’s really where you need to focus on in terms of governance and standardization. The commerce-less hybrid, it’s really where the CMS and commerce engine are loosely coupled. So allowing faster value realization for AM while still supporting commerce workflow. So faster time to value as you can leverage AM strength quickly. Of course, you may like the full feature set and workflow of a traditional CMS, so requiring some compromises between the two. And then, as you can see on the right, you have the 100 percent headless or decoupled architecture. So in the fully again headless or decoupled architecture, the CMS is used purely as a content repository. Content is delivered via API to any front end or channel maximizing maximum flexibility and scalability. And so you have progressive web apps that could be one approach. So it’s modern web apps that behave like native apps consuming content from the CMS APIs. You can deliver rich app-like experience that can be leveraged AM for content. But you have content management that can be less flexible as authoring and previewing experience maybe may require additional tooling and additional step as part of your workflow. You have experience-driven architecture, so highly personalized experience built using the CMS with content delivered headlessly to various channels. So you can enable advanced personalization and targeting using the full power of AM. But you can have a longer time to market as implementing two solutions, so content and front end can be complex. And then you have also what we call the custom head. So it’s a front end that is fully custom built to align with the corporate legacy stack or unique requirement while content is delivered headlessly from the CMS. So it’s maximum flexibility to integrate with existing system and tailor the experience. But maintenance and feature development are more demanding and you’re responsible for both the front end and integration. So the key takeaway again, full stack, what we call head full is best for rapid deployment and lower maintenance, but may limit innovation and personalization. The 100 percent headless provide ultimate flexibility, scalability, it’s ideal for omnichannel and highly personalized experience, but require greater investment in development and integration. And you have the hybrid that offer a kind of pragmatic path, balancing speed and flexibility and can introduce complexity in the customer journey. You can see to anticipate and consider. So when deciding which approach to take, consider your organization goal, technical capabilities and the experience you want to deliver. So there is no one size fits all answer. Each model has strength and tradeoff. And the key is to choose the architecture that best support your business strategy, customer needs and the future growth as well in terms of scalability, as we mentioned.

Potentially a wrap up is really this kind of headless authoring with universal editor. So enable, you know, live editing with the preview for any content aspect or implementation. So technology agnostic, supporting any architecture framework and hosting or token edit, AM page structure, content fragment, document and even subparty content sources. It supports layout, style, experimentation and personalized variation. So empowering practitioners to create meaningful journey for visitors. So it’s, I guess, a good summary of what we are, the headless or the modern kind of, you know, delivery experience that you can propose and you can have. Now, if you want to deep dive a little bit more about the core component and localization framework. So it’s essential to support the kind of multi brand or multi region strategies across your website.

And those are core components, enable consistent experience, efficient content management and localization at scale. So let’s deep dive on these. So it’s really the core component and the core capabilities of AM to support this modern delivery. The first one is the multi site manager. So it’s really to ensure the brand consistency. So you can use the same site structure and especially as you can see on the right, you have example of how it will be organized and structured from the UI. And so you have the same site structure and content to create new sites. And so you can organize really your site by country, by geography, by language. You can have also multiple kind of dimension that you can segment and you can organize. So it’s great to synchronize changes to the master site, reducing the manual effort. You can have localized content for regional team to ensure relevance for local audience. And so, again, you can give flexibility and give ownership of the content to local and regional teams. And you have seamlessly managed content. So across the multiple sites into a single platform. So it’s really the added value and the benefit in terms of scalability. Again, you have the documentation from experience that are linked here. If you want to discover more. Just so you know, on the experience, we also have tutorials available if you want to have a kind of a hands on demo and tutorial in video available. That will give you a more kind of hands on and in context presentation of the feature and of the module.

Next is the translation integration. So you have integrated translation management with major vendors and translation vendors as part of our ecosystem. So you can support both human and machine translation. So it’s also best if you want to combine potentially the two or if you want to have different approach for your different website or your different region or specific languages that require human. That’s just some older that are fully automated with matching translation. You can have flexibility to configure the translation rule for specific content. So again, on top of really the kind of the geography of the language, if you have very specific content that requires some specific translation rules, you can differentiate it and you can easily translate content for audiences, whatever they are. And so, again, you have this kind of thanks to this multi site organization, you have the different. So in a similar way here, the Long Wage Master. And so you can really apply it into as part of the different pages and the different sites that you have. And so you will be able to really configure the property for the translation and the setup that you want to do and the rules of translation for each of the of the site and the page that you want to do. And then so you have this what you call modular content. So it’s to drive efficiency so you can scale the content with reusable module across channel and audiences. You can create and edit multiple version for specific use case. So you have here again from the example here. So you have the document based authoring. You have also the variation. So powered by Gen. AI that can be really something to also consider. And so when you can create and edit multiple version for specific use case and where you can actually on top of duplicate, do also some kind of trigger between the different version. And at the end, promote, for example, from the one local variation that outperformed all the other one. You can promote it globally. That could be also a good kind of governance in terms of content, performance and content management. You can synchronize the change across the variations from the update and reducing the manual efforts. So also it’s really to remove the dependency of the manual kind of synchronization between each of the variation. So it’s really this create once and reuse everywhere philosophy that we want to reapply on this. And on top of that, the key takeaway maybe from modular content is really to maximize efficiency and consistency by reducing the content across the different channel. The sites, the region and the audiences.

For content fragments, so it’s really this modular structured content. Experience fragments is a group of components with content and layout that are included. The fragment blocks, so it’s really where you can have reusable pieces across multiple pages. And so when you author with content fragment editor, universal editor or document based tool, you have different options really to do the content authoring. And this approach ensures your content that is always relevant, consistent and scalable. So it’s really maximize efficiency and short consistency. And I guess it answer very well the initial objective that we have described as part of the, I will say, AI era. And think about, you know, the speed and scalability of the content that you need to have to this modern delivery really enable you to address everything. And so please refer to each different kind of option. Again, it’s not one approach that can answer everything. As for head full or head less, here as well, you can use different kind of, you know, universal editor that is document based for different population within your organization. It’s also part of change management exercise that you have to do. And sometimes what we see is the document based because it’s outside of, I would say, the content management system or website or HTML or even WYSIWYG. For some population, it can be good to embed them into the content authoring. But of course, universal editor, I guess, could be a good approach to have this kind of real time preview, etc. And the content fragment is really to have modular structured content that you can reuse and you can scale across a different website. Moving forward, so we have also if you’re interested into diving deeper into those type of, I would say, consideration. So we have a great what we call success accelerator as part of ultimate success. So it’s use case mapping to solution capabilities. And so what we have is really those kind of, you know, engagement where we can define the use case, try to understand in terms of value, what are the KPIs kind of that we can associate with each use case. And in front of that, we will link the solution capability or potentially multi solution capability as part of your extended CMS ecosystem. And basically have this kind of, you know, mix from your business objective, your technical requirements, a list of prioritized use case, a list of KPIs that we can put in front and the list of solution capability or solution features that we can we need to map to all the use case and make sure that there is no gap between each of these. So it’s a great, I guess, methodology and framework if you want to also approach and deep dive on the content that we have presented today. And especially if you want to really understand what are the scenario between headless, hybrid and full between, again, the different content authoring option that you have between the different AM key module and capabilities, multi-side translation, modular content that we talked about. And it’s really also can help you to really, again, from the privatized list of use case, understand what are the solution capabilities that you need to really consider and need to almost master in order to be successful into the activation of your use cases. And again, we try to link it always with the business objective and potentially also any technical requirement or consideration. So it’s really something that we try to do. So they know guidance for developing and privatizing use case and KPIs. So if you’re interested, reach out to your account team, your name, CSM and your technical account manager. And I guess they will be able to really set this up with you and you will hopefully have the chance to work with your whole team also to deep dive on this activity and to potentially illustrate what I have presented as part of today’s presentation. So that’s pretty much it in terms of content. I don’t have the view right now on the question. Tommy, should we move forward to the Q&A maybe? Yes, so we can move forward to the Q&A session. One thing I will note is we don’t currently have any questions in our queue. So if anyone has anything, please submit them. But in the meantime, I’m going to launch a poll. It’s just a really quick couple of question poll just to get your feedback on how you felt about this session. And you can also help us kind of influence the roadmap as to what our future sessions would look like. So here’s that poll. It should be coming up momentarily. Also, as I mentioned, if you have questions, of course, feel free to add them and we can take it live. Also, do not hesitate to go to your account team and also your name, CSM, your technical account manager and your Adobe account team. So they can also really explore and deep dive based on your context, requirement, ecosystem, as I mentioned, to go further into the details and potentially find the right approach and mobilize the right resources on Adobe side to really answer and find you the best example. As I mentioned, there is no one magic solution that can fit everything. But yeah, I’m quite sure that we can find it.

It looks like we do have one question. Will the presentation and slide deck be made available to review? I believe the video will be posted, so this will be reviewable a little bit later. Yes, of course.

You should receive it because you have subscribed and you are joined in the next couple of days or week. But you will have everything. Any other question or any other comment? Let us know. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining the session. Thank you, everybody. We’re going to call it a day. So great. So you will have the recording and the presentation will be shared as well as follow up of the session.

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