Introduction to Creative Cloud Libraries and Asset Browser APIs

Transcript

Hi, everyone. I am Sid. Welcome to the session on Libraries API and Assets Browser SDK. I’m a product manager on Creative Cloud Extensibility team, and I’m responsible for Libraries API as well as the SDK that supports Libraries API, which is the Assets Browser SDK. For today’s session, here are the key discussion topics. One, I would give you a quick background on Libraries API. So we go over what are Creative Cloud Libraries, what you can do with the API, what is the upcoming roadmap, and the capabilities that we want to add to the API, and then how can you get started with the API with a link to the documentation. And over the Assets Browser SDK, along the same lines, we’ll talk on the key capabilities and the benefits of integrating the SDK. We’ll do a quick demo of integration with Magento and how Adobe is leveraging the SDK internally to solve for the key pain points and the use cases that developers face on Magento. And then finally, we’ll go over the roadmap of the Assets Browser SDK. All right. Now kicking things off, at Max 2020, we launched Creative Cloud Libraries API, which made it possible for our developer ecosystem to enable deep integrations of Creative Cloud libraries and their favorite tools. We have heard from our customers and our end users repeatedly that they leverage the power of Creative Cloud Libraries API in the tools that they use. So they want to the brand elements, like graphics, text styles, and colors, not only in Creative Cloud products, but also in other applications that they use in the end to end creative process. So here are some of the examples of screenshots of similar integrations of Creative Cloud libraries that have been enabled by some of our partners. So you can see the integration of Creative Cloud libraries with Mural on the right. There is another one with Google Docs. And there are a bunch of others, which in the interest of time, I won’t go into. But today, we have a healthy ecosystem of Creative Cloud libraries in which end users are leveraging the libraries API outside of Creative Cloud products. So what are the key benefits of leveraging the libraries APIs? So Creative Cloud libraries is Adobe’s solution of a brand management system. It is something that our end users and designers are using to store the key building blocks of a design document. Things like graphics, color themes, swatches, font styles, gradients, all of those elements that are essential to build a design document are part of the Creative Cloud libraries. Now, as a designer, you can organize these elements as groups, groups of groups, and then share them across your organization so that you can ensure brand consistency throughout the organization. And this also helps in increasing the productivity of the creatives, because they do not have to hunt every time for looking for the right asset to use in a document. So using the API, you can ensure that by integrating Creative Cloud libraries in different tools that are being used in your enterprise, you can have a brand consistency story. You can make sure that the used and created by creatives are used by marketers who are marketing your products across different channels. Because you can use the power of APIs and integrate the library’s experience in different tools of your choice, you can ensure that your stakeholders and your creatives can access creative content at your fingertips. And then finally, because the access to libraries is enabled by just an Adobe ID, it is available to all. It is for anyone, and they can access it from anywhere. Now let’s look at a sample business and what are the needs of a business and how do libraries play a role in our day-to-day functionality and the roles and responsibilities of different personas that exist in an organization. So a typical business has a need to ensure that there is a consistent experience or the brand promise that they want to deliver across every customer interaction. And to enable that, all the different personas in our business want to make sure that they are using the right assets at each and every touch point of your product, of your marketing campaign, and other activities that have a customer interaction. So for creatives, they need an ability to easily create, update, and share the most up-to-date brand approved assets that adhere to the usage guidelines of your brand across the organization and within their creative circle as well. Similarly, marketers, social media, salespeople, all of them are creating sale pitches and presentations for your customers. And they want to make sure that those sale pitches and presentations abide by the guidelines of your brand. So they want to leverage the creative work that your creatives are creating in an organization. Similarly, product managers and developers want to make sure that they reflect the brand quality and the promise in the product. They want to access brand logos, graphics, character styles, and everything which is a part of your brand to make sure that the products reflect those core values and those brand guidelines. So what essentially are the key features of a library’s API and what you can do today? So we bucketized the key features of a library’s API in three major buckets. One, you can get assets from Creative Cloud libraries. Two, you can save assets to Creative Cloud libraries. And three, you can get notified whenever an update happens. Now, getting assets, we think that accessibility is most important right now. People want to get stuff out of the Creative Cloud libraries, whether it means getting the actual elements out so that you can use them to design your documents outside of Creative Cloud applications, or it means just being updated on the metadata or the list of elements that are there in the library so that you can build an experience in which users can discover and see all the libraries which are present in their account in your third-party tools and services. The second part of the story is saving assets to Creative Cloud libraries. So we want to enable the end users to be able to add content to Creative Cloud libraries wherever the inspiration strikes them. So for example, if you are a creative and you never know where the inspiration strikes, and you are on a web surface looking for an inspiration for your next creative experience you want to create, and you come across a graphic which you feel you can use to design your next experience, then you can, if you have an integration handy, then you can use the integration powered by Creative Cloud libraries API to save the assets back into the library. Or if you’re an organization and you want to keep your Creative Cloud libraries and TAM in sync, then you can use the save functionality to move the elements from DAM to the Creative Cloud. The creatives can discover those assets within Creative Cloud products and use them on their day-to-day tasks. And finally, the key part is not every asset is something which is set in stone. We realize that updates happen, decisions change. So there is a huge need to get notified whenever a library gets updated or an element gets updated. So you can subscribe to web hooks and listen to any changes that happen on the elements. This is to make sure that everybody in your organization is using most up-to-date Creative Cloud library in their experiences so that the teams stay in sync and there is a consistent experience of your product right from the creating department to the marketing department. Because this is such an important and strategic piece of delivering the experiences in this modern-day world of digitalization, we want to continually invest in not only the library’s product itself, but also the API. So in Q4 of 2021, we continuously improve the API to make it even more performant than what it is today. And then in the first half of 2022, we are thinking of adding support of service to service authentication through JWT. We are also actively thinking about adding more collaboration features so that you can use the APIs to provision access to certain libraries within your organization. We are also working on increasing the upload limits and enhancing the upload capabilities through the API. And finally, team libraries, for those of you who know, there is a concept in which you can share a team, share a library within your team. So we are thinking of adding support to team libraries via the API in first half of 2022 as well. You can get started with Creative Cloud Library’s API. On Adobe IO, we have a very well-documented API with a bunch of code samples, documentation, getting started guides, three supplemental tools on helping you understand what are the libraries, what are Creative Cloud Libraries, what are some of the sample libraries that you can use to experiment with. So I would recommend, if you are interested, going to Adobe IO and checking out the Creative Cloud Library’s API. And there are sections there which you can use to get back to us for any feedback or questions that you have. And we are happy to help you and support you in your integration efforts. With that, I’ll quickly switch over to Asset Browser SDK. So one of the key things that we have learned by interacting with our developer community and our strategic partners is that they want to get up and running with the experience of Creative Cloud Libraries in their products fairly quickly. And they want to make sure that they can have a consistent experience of Creative Cloud Libraries within their products as their end users would have within Adobe’s products. Because our end users are accustomed to using the Creative Cloud Libraries within the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite apps, they want to make sure that they have a similar experience when they’re working on third-party tools like Mural, like Google Suite, and whatnot. So we launched Asset Browser SDK that makes it super easy and quick for a third-party developer to integrate Creative Cloud Libraries-powered experiences in their tools and applications. As I said, accessing is more important than ever. And Creative Cloud Asset Browser SDK unlocks just that. You can access the Creative Cloud Library’s content at your fingertips. So what are the key benefits of Asset Browser SDK? This is something which I just touched upon. And just to reiterate, we have intuitive pre-built UI components as the part of this SDK. So this is defined over the years of research and user feedback. And it aligns with how our users are used to interacting with Creative Cloud Libraries within our products. So we want to make sure that they have a consistent experience as they move from tool to tool. So it’s all built in in a simple and a quick SDK that you can integrate with minimal development effort. And finally, it unlocks the key workflows, which is accessing Creative Cloud Libraries and its content and using the content to design the documents within third-party tools as if you were to use them within Adobe App Store. So this is a quick screenshot of how the SDK looks and feels. As you can see, it is a pre-built UI component, which is super easy and low-cost way for you to integrate Creative Cloud Libraries in your product. Now, it is a web-based component. So it supports all the major web surfaces. And it’s a web-based component. It also supports all the major web surfaces and web-based applications. It has a couple of customizations available to you as an end developer. You can enable or disable multi-select. Let’s say you are a developer who wants to just enable the end user to select only one graphic at a time from the asset browser. You can configure the SDK to make sure that the end user is able to select only one. Similarly, you can allow them to select up to 10 different elements and across different element types. Now, the second part of the story is you can choose which elements to show, because libraries is actually a one-stop solution for saving different kind of elements, right, from fonts, graphics, to video. We want to make sure that you can tailor the experience of the SDK that meets your needs. So we want to be the capability to provide only selective visibility of the element in your third-party tools. So for example, if you are somebody like Google Docs, you might want to just show the font styles and the graphics, but maybe not other element types, which are part of the Creative Cloud library. So you can configure it to meet your own unique needs. And finally, for end users, it provides them the capability to discover personal, shared, and public libraries in a quick and easy way. They can use these elements to design the documents in the tools of their choice. And finally, if you integrate with events, which I just talked about along with the SDK, you can make sure that you can send notifications to your end users whenever the elements they have used in your product are out of date. All right, with that, I’ll pass it over to Dej to quickly demo the Creative Cloud library’s SDK, or the SM Browser SDK in Magento, and how we are using it internally at Adobe to address our end users needs. Hey, everyone. I’m Liz Mejia, Senior UX Designer on the Adobe company. And I’d like to set the stage for you a little bit by talking about the personas that are impacted by this really valuable integration that Finn was just talking about. So I can talk to you about how our research with the 5PEEP team informed one of the biggest points of asset passing between a creative persona, like a designer, and a communicator, like a marketer or merchandiser. So a designer might be thinking, how do I quickly edit image assets and get them to a shared space for my stakeholders? And the communicator on the other side is thinking, how can I quickly find and upload the most recent assets into my commerce storefront? So today, we can see this workflow can have lots of different variations. But a creative might start in a CC app like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. And after working on the image assets there, they might save them to a shared file storage like Dropbox or Microsoft folders. They might even put them into a zip file and send an email of the assets. Then on the other side, the communicator will have to navigate multiple file locations to get these assets if they’ve been uploaded to a shared file storage. And then they would have to upload them to the commerce store. And that would be without having some of the benefits that Sid highlighted around getting notified if there are updates to the assets and just having a more streamlined workflow from the designer who’s working within a CC app into commerce. So now this integration, which our contest developers, Pawan, Mittal, and Sandeep Agarwal worked on to address the asset management and shared storage pain point, now we can get directly from CC libraries integration working in the CC app to saving from the CC app directly to a shared CC library that our communicator has access to. And the communicator can then access the CC library directly in commerce, making this workflow a lot more streamlined and seamless. And so that helps us to address one of the pain points that we found when it comes to asset sharing and management around the shared storage component. And then in the future, we’ll think about solving another pain point with bulk image editing. This is just one of our first commerce integrations, and we’ve got a lot more coming up. So I’ll show you the demo. So a creative, like the designer that was in our workflow example, might make a few changes to an image per a request from a user. So making some changes to update the look and feel, some cropping, and now some of the enhancements that have been communicated to the designer are updated. So the designer has a folder set up, and this one is already pre-configured the commerce integration. And from here, can quickly click to add a graphic, and it lives in the folder here. It can be renamed. So we can say integration jacket, and now it’s available. So at another point in time, the communicator, who is maybe a marketer or a merchandiser, comes into their commerce instance and can navigate to a product. Maybe this is an image that they now want to add to an existing product. So they can look in their product catalog and type to find the specific product that they’re looking for, edit the product, and go down to images and videos. So where before they might have to browse a local machine or some other storage, now they can see a nice call to action, a prominent browse CC library. And they can click here. Let me go back and try this one more time. OK, so we’ll edit this. Navigate here. This is looking better. And click to browse CC libraries. So as it’s shared in the screen graph, the user can navigate to one of several shared folders that they have. And the image that the creative has already put in place in this shared CC library is right here. So you can click here and done. And the image will appear. So once you save, the image is now part of this product. And it can appear on the product store. So this is what’s really great about this straightforward workflow. It’s something that Adobe is perfectly positioned to deliver, facilitating these relationships and exchanges between creatives and communicators from CC apps to commerce. And I will hand it back over to Sid. Thanks, Dej. That was a fantastic demo. OK, guys. Getting back. Cool. So that was Creative Cloud Assets Browser as you saw in action within Adobe products. And we want to make sure that we provide exactly the similar experience that you can leverage for your products. Now, the other part of the workflow, which is different from accessing the pieces in the Creative Cloud library, is saving back to Creative Cloud library. And for that, we also want to launch a new SDK, the Creative Cloud Asset Saver. This is something which we are actively, again, working towards. Now, the key developer benefit would be a similar easy and low cost way to integrate Creative Cloud library save workflows in third party services. And for end users, it means that with a single click, they can save an element or a graphic to the Creative Cloud library used across all Creative Cloud applications in the design process. Finally, if you want access to the SDK, we are right now doing a private beta with a handful of partners. And if you want access, you can reach out to Drew Endig at adobe.com or Ingo at adobe.com for requesting beta access to the private GitHub repo. And we can take it from there. That’s it for now. I guess there was a problem in me sharing the screen. Probably I just see it right now. Let me try it again. OK. I think it’s working now. So this is the. Yeah. So this is the saver which I was talking about. It will provide your end users as an easy way to save back to Creative Cloud libraries, just as the browser gives you an easy way to use the content in the library. This is something which we are working to launch in the early quarter of next year, Q1. And then I was talking about getting access to the asset browser SDK. For that, we are doing right now a private beta with a handful of partners. If you want early access, feel free to reach out to Drew Endig at adobe.com and Ingo at adobe.com for requesting beta access to the private GitHub repo. All right. With that, I think we can stay here for any questions. But that was more or less, are there any questions? Not really. I didn’t see any questions in the chat. I think your presentation was clear for everyone from the looks of it. So yeah, no questions from the chat so far. All right. With that, have a great evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks, everyone. OK, everyone. Have a great day, night, whatever time it is where you are right now.