Metadata Mayhem to Mastery

Transcript

Today’s Learn from your peers webinar on the topic of simplifying your AEM assets and work front native connector implementation. My name is Will Harmon, and I will be your host for today. I am an adoption marketing manager here at Adobe. I’m so excited to be here with today’s speakers, Autumn Earl and John Lem. They are two Adobe experts who have seen the implementation top to bottom numerous times. They’re total experts and they have a lot of really great resources and learning to share with everyone. So as you can imagine, we have a packed agenda. But before we jump in, I’m going to do a bit of housekeeping. So if you haven’t already, while I do that, I invite you all to say hello to one another in the chat.

As our typical webinar warm up that we always love doing, some of you already got started in the chat I see, but using the chat, which you can find that icon on the top of your screen, you should see some notifications next to it if you haven’t opened it already.

I’d love for you to share the two quintessential webinar responses. Where are you joining from today and what do you hope to learn? A bonus fun question to get us warmed up for today’s session. Let us know what the last AI prompt you used for work was. For me, I recently used a prompt to generate SEO metadata descriptions for an upcoming Skill Exchange session at next year’s Adobe Summit. So shout out to that. Hopefully, I see you there.

While you’re in the chat, I will go ahead and share a few reminders for today. First, if you still haven’t found it, you can answer those fun questions in chat by clicking the chat icon on the top of your screen.

Next, everyone always asks, so rest assured, this webinar is being recorded and we will send out a link to the on demand soon. We will also share the slides in a post on the community and that will be available in a resources box on the left side of your screen once we get into the Q&A portion of today’s webinar. That community post will also include a few documents and templates and downloadable assets that will be discussed during today’s webinar. So you can pick them up there. So keep an eye out for that. And then, as I previously mentioned, we have time set aside for Q&A towards the end of today’s webinar. So please, as we go, submit your burning questions in the Ask the Presenters box on the left side of your screen, and then we’ll get to as many as we can after today’s webinar. And lastly, at the end, also, we’ll have a super, super short survey where you can give us feedback on the content of the session and let us know what topics you’d like us to cover with more experts in future webinars. So please make sure to take a moment to fill that out at the very end. And with that, let’s get started with today’s content. I will turn things over to Autumn and John to introduce themselves and kick us off.

Autumn Earle Alright. Hey, everybody. Welcome. Thank you for joining today’s webinar. My name is Autumn Earle and I’m a lead business consultant at Perficient. I have extensive AEM and Workfront experience. AEM starting back in 5.6 back in 2014. For anyone who worked on prem, moving into Workfront about 10 years ago as an end user, then moving into the project management space as an admin and fusion developer. My background really has evolved over the years to optimize content supply chain across industries. And if you’re interested in learning more about myself or my colleague, John Lemme, please scan the QR code for our LinkedIn profiles.

John Lemme Thank you. My name is John Lemme. I’m a solution architect at Adobe. I’ve got 30 years of experience in business application development and marketing technology. So I’ve actually worked in business units as well as in IT. The last 10 years of my career has been focused on Workfront with as a customer, as a Workfront consultant and also at Adobe managing our internal platform.

Most of my career has been a financial services. Somehow I found myself in technology, but that’s okay.

With that, we can move on.

I think we lost out.

So today we’re going to go through introductions, metadata fundamentals, metadata fundamentals, prerequisites for what you need for setting this up, setting up the native connector, a demo, metadata challenges, and the native connector versus fusion. It’s really the native connector with fusion. And then we’ll do a Q&A.

Metadata fundamentals. So metadata, obviously it’s crucial to everything you do with marketing, both reaching out to customers, contacting customers, influencing them. In AEM assets, metadata resides within the asset and it’s subject to field level permissions. While in Workfront, project metadata is often stored in custom forms and may not be editable. So the general workflow is you’re capturing the data in Workfront, but it needs to be in AEM for it to be useful by your marketing automation.

The AEM native connector is the tool we can use to do that. Establishing a source of truth. So Workfront feeds the source of truth, but AEM assets becomes the source of truth for maintaining consistency and enabling accurate reporting and ensuring compliance.

Change control mechanisms need to be in place to manage updates and maintain data integrity across systems. And understanding these fundamentals is the key to implementing an effective metadata strategy.

The prerequisites for using the native connector. So the native connector is a Workfront add-in. It is something that is available from Adobe and it basically automates a lot of the data connection between Workfront and between AEM assets itself. It requires two things. First, your Adobe admin console needs to be configured correctly. So you have, depending on the size and complexity of your organization, if you only have a single Adobe org, it’s straightforward because everything will be in the same org. But if you are in a large organization where perhaps Workfront is in one org, the instance is in one Adobe org and the AEM assets application is in a different one. Those have to be in the same org for the connector to work. The connector doesn’t work across Adobe. Because to the connector, it’s almost like you’re in different companies.

The second thing is that the essentials has to be assigned as a product to the user configuring the integration.

So moving on. Okay, so who plays a role in metadata strategy? So your project manager is responsible for making sure that the data gets collected accurately, making sure things are on time, etc. Your business stakeholders define the requirements. So your business stakeholders, generally, are defining the assets you need and how they’re going to be used. And your project managers are making sure that gets done. The technical integration team, it’s more than likely if you’re working with the native connector and AEM assets, you have resources and IT, or helping you set up all this backend stuff, especially things like the Adobe console and the Adobe orgs.

Your DAM administrators, these are your AEM asset. Well, it’s a combination of your AEM assets administrators, but it’s also the people who are responsible for the metadata. So if you have a taxonomy team, or data stewards, that all folds into this, and they’re responsible for identifying the data that needs to be collected, as well as the data that needs to be, how the data needs to be changed. And then finally, your change management and training leads. One of the challenges with workflow applications is every time you make a change to the application, you’re essentially changing the way people have to do their jobs. And so unlike, if you think of a typical agile is that we just release something new every two weeks. If you’re affecting 100 people who all have to work together in unison, changing the process every two weeks isn’t feasible. And so making sure that as your assets change and the metadata collection standards change, making sure that as all of this stuff is done, it is coordinated with users, so users always know what to do and how to do the job successfully becomes critical.

And we have provided some document templates to complete your metadata strategy.

Okay, so I don’t know what happened.

My Adobe Connect.

John, do you want to tell us where we left off? Hey, we just got to this side. Okay, perfect. You’re perfect to start this one from the top. Sounds good. As Mel will mention, we will be providing attendees with executable templates to take your team or leadership to start this journey. The Workfront Metadata Project template is to execute the strategy that we’re going to be reviewing today. The metadata governance policy is a framework that defines how an organization manages, controls and uses metadata across its systems and processes. Its purpose is to ensure consistency, accuracy and compliance, and how metadata is created, stored and maintained. The metadata matching matrix serves as a bridge to align and synchronize metadata across Workfront and AEM assets. We will take a deeper dive into this document on this webinar.

The change control documents purpose is to ensure that any modifications are controlled, documented and communicated to maintain data integrity and governance. And lastly, the training and adoption plan highlights awareness, ensures consistent application and rolls out the process with an iterative approach. As a bonus, we will be providing a few Fusion Scenario blueprints related to attaching a form to a document dynamically when an asset is uploaded and pushing the native connector automatically.

So let’s walk through one specific document on this list, and that’s the metadata mapping matrix. Effective metadata mapping begins with aligning field types, naming conventions and value formats across systems. A metadata matrix can be used to visualize relationships and identify the authoritative source for each field. This strategy helps prevent data duplication and ensures consistency. By clearly defining which system owns each field, organizations can streamline updates and maintain governance. These practices are foundational for building a robust metadata framework that supports scalability and integration. I personally think the new functionality of Workfront planning is best when creating a master data store using taxonomies within planning as the source of truth. There are other options we can discuss in a future call or an experience leak article.

So let’s get into the demo.

If you’d like to stop sharing. Well, thank you.

OK, in this demo, in this first slide, you can see is the metadata mapping matrix in Workfront planning. We’re not just mapping a Workfront field to an AEM field, but a robust matrix, including required fields, object types, and even a field that is expired or last reviewed. This matrix can be utilized for automation using Fusion or other logic based tools.

Going in, let’s start at our home page of Workfront. We’re going to now begin demoing the native connection. We’re going to go to our menu on the left hand side and go into setup. Here we’re going to go down to documents and to experience manager assets.

We’re going to click add experience manager integration in the name. I would highly recommend adding a name that’s specific to your to your environment. So I’m going to call this sandbox production, but it would be good to notify if this is production stage or dev environment. Next, we’re going to select which environment we want to link to our system. If you do not see your AEM environment in this repository dropdown, that means your AEM repository is not connected to the same admin console.

I’m going to cancel out of this since this is the demo and open up the one I’ve already created and go over the metadata mapping.

Here in the metadata mapping, we can see the Workfront fields directly mapped to the experience manager fields. I’m not going to go down this whole list of items that we’ve got here, but I do want to call out a few items. One is that it’s very specific or you need to be very specific when you’re selecting items within the custom field, especially that have the same name, such as name. For this example, I want to select the project name. As you can see, there’s a long list of hierarchy of names selected. The project name to then map to the AEM Workfront project name. What this does here, again, is aligning that the project title where the document lives in Workfront will then get added as the Workfront title under the AEM assets metadata schema. Unfortunately, we do not have time on this demo to go over linked folders, but if you’re interested in learning more about enabling linked folders, please reach out to us or do a discussion on LinkedIn or Experience Link. So at this point, I’m going to hit save and go into my metadata example.

Before we go into the documents itself, as we mentioned on a previous slide, we will have a Workfront project template that goes over this entire strategy, what you need to go accomplish, as well as how to implement and train and adopt your users for this exact metadata strategy scenario.

Before we add the document and push it over to the native connector, I’m just going to briefly show you the fields that we’re going to be looking for in our AEM instance under each asset.

For this process, we’re going to look up for campaign name, which is the program name and automatically created using an internal lookup, the audience as professionals, and the channel as paid media. We see all of these information are added into the project details. And when we go into our documents and upload a document, we should see this information attached.

We see an asset that I’ve already added here, but we’re just going to go start from scratch. So we’re going to select add new. We’re going to go to the document and I’m going to select this first image here.

We’re going to select document details and I’m going to add a quick description.

Just get that.

So we make sure that this description is added over when we come over to AEM assets. We’re going to hit save and go back to project details.

As this is a working demo, I am running the scenario to see a process existing asset. But for this example, since we’re running so short on time, we’re going to showcase that what I’ve done here and what will be attached in this future Experience League article is that these custom forms called AE project details and the asset details themselves are dynamically integrated using Fusion. I’ll just pop that over and show you guys what that looks like. Pop that over using Fusion of what we’re going to be seeing here in this Fusion scenario.

Going back into our project, we’re going to select our asset. We’re going to select AE demo connection since that is the connection that we’re using. And we’re going to select the folder in which this demo or this asset should live. You should see in the top right hand corner either a success or fail message. It’s great to see we have a success message. Another way to note that this is in AEM is that you’ll see the Adobe red icon attached beside the title. As well as if you hover over that Adobe icon, you’ll see what connection is pushed into.

From here, we can select the title and it’ll pop up to our new AEM asset. Again, this is a demo, so I’m just going to refresh the screen from our assets in AEM. I’m going to select the asset itself and go into the properties. And we can see here that the title has come over and the description has come over in the basic fields. Then we go into work front details and we see the campaign name, the project name, the audience and the channel all filled out for us within AEM assets.

And that’s it for my demo. I’m going to now pass this over to my colleague, John Lemme, who’s going to talk to you about the challenges and the wonders of automation using Fusion.

Thank you, Autumn.

I think we have to switch over to back to Autumn. Yeah, Autumn, you have a lot of experience on the screen.

Should be good now. Should be good now. Okay, thank you.

So this part of the presentation will focus on metadata. This is the metadata mayhem part.

So some common metadata issues. One thing with metadata, like well-managed metadata is essentially like fitness. Everybody knows how to do it. Most people struggle. And so these are some of the most common issues that we’ve seen. You probably have experienced most of them, if not all of them.

One thing is user errors. And a lot of times user errors are seen as the users are poorly trained or careless. What I’ve seen is sometimes that’s true, but a lot of times with user errors, it’s really caused by either asking users for information that they don’t have yet. I think the classic example is before you ask for me to create an email, you need to give me all of the information I need to create it. And by the way, I need you to tell me eight weeks in advance so that I can do resource planning. Well, eight weeks in advance, I may not know all those details. And so asking the user to provide the information before they have it causes bad metadata. A second user issue would be when your metadata is not clean and you’re asking them for ambiguous or confusing things, such as a list of regions that has APAC in Japan and China. Nobody can actually know what to do with that because the data itself is an invalid question.

The second issue has to do with, I’m calling it like alignment. It’s really the data consistency. Sometimes you just have systems that are not compatible with each other, the systems are legacy systems and they just use different terminology. Automation is usually the appropriate solution. But sometimes you have legitimate issues where two business units use the same terminology, but they mean different things. And that causes confusion, it causes inefficiencies, and that’s beyond the metadata. A lot of times that happens outside of the metadata world as well. And then finally, a lack of firm governance. Effective governance needs to have the authority to be able to govern, as well as having the… I think one of the most important things with governance is not just having people with the authority to say this is the right way to do things, but also having clear guidelines so that when people go to the governance board, they feel confident that what they’re asking for is either going to be approved because they’ve done it right because the rules were published, or they’re asking for a change and they understand why things are set up the way they are, and they understand why their change is important.

Turning governance into a game of, you know, ask for something and then arbitrarily be told yes or no just makes people avoid the governance process entirely.

I’m not going to go through every one of these out of mercy, but to talk about a few of the highlights of some of the specific metadata problems you might have and how you might address them or how I’ve seen them addressed.

One is inconsistent taxonomy. An example of this would be if you have a translation team, they might break the world up into language regions, whereas a legal team might break it up into legal regimes. So like to a language team, the US and Canada might be the same. I know there are spelling discrepancies. But to a legal team, the entire EU might be just one big region.

One of the mitigation strategies you can use there is simply changing the terminology so that instead of even though both groups refer to them as regions, calling them like language regions and legal regions, so that when all the data is mixed together, it’s clear exactly what we’re talking about.

Metadata functions is a little hard to describe, but you’ve probably seen it.

This is where the grain of your data doesn’t match the objects. So a good example is an email has a drop date, and people naturally make drop date an asset, a metadata element of email assets. And that seems to make sense until you realize that an email might get resent or an email might be part of an automated process. The drop date is really not an element of an email. It’s an element of an email delivery or marketing activity. And so making sure that your metadata is located on the correct objects is key because otherwise you end up with users who get confused because this email is being sent three times and there’s only one drop date. And so making sure you understand the grain of your data is important.

Ambiguity, this is actually something I mentioned on the last slide, but if you have a dropdown that you’re asking the user to pick one option and there are actually two or more options that are plausible.

An example I’ve seen is having like white paper and fault leadership, both as dropdowns, which to a user it might not be clear which is which. I’ve also seen things where you have like white paper and PDF as two different options. And so if your white paper is a PDF, you’re putting your users in a bad spot and half of them will guess one thing, half of them will guess the other thing and your data will be not as clean as it should be.

Excessive metadata, there’s an expression in the development, the computer development world called YAGNI, which is you aren’t going to need it. It is essentially free when designing a form in Workfront to say, oh, I would like to collect this piece of data and that piece of data. And the more data we have, the richer our marketing materials can be, the richer our program can be. Every piece of data you collect is a cost to the people who are filling in that data. That has two problems. One is it frustrates users when you have a form that’s like scrolls on for page after page. I’m sure most of you have seen that and some of you may have even built forms like that. I’m guilty of it. But also if you have too much data being collected that isn’t really being used effectively, there’s no feedback loop to the user. So if you have something like translation, the user who’s entering the metadata, if they enter the wrong language, they are immediately faced with suddenly seeing a document in Portuguese when they wanted it in Spanish.

That encourages them to pick the right data. But if you have a piece of data that you rarely use and the user is picking like the wrong value, not only is it possible they’ll never find out, but that can then turn into corporate lore where the user who’s picking the wrong value then starts training the new people on their teams to say, oh, for this metadata question, this is the answer I always give. It works great. Nobody ever gives me a complaint about it. And so if you’re collecting too much data, you’re causing metadata problems. You’re not actually solving anything by trying to collect more.

And then finally, knowledge mismatch. This is, again, what I mentioned on the last slide. But I have personally seen situations where users have asked for, like in workflow applications especially, when people ask for changes, most of the time, they’re not asking for changes to their environment. They’re asking for somebody else to do something different. So for instance, I’m a team that does some sort of processing. I don’t want to change the way I’m doing the processing. I want the team that engages me to give me more information so I can do my job more effectively.

That’s fantastic. But if you don’t include all of the affected parties in the change, you can end up in situations where people are being asked to provide information that they either don’t understand or maybe even don’t have access to the systems that would provide it. And that causes frustration, and frustration leads to users who sometimes cynically just stop caring about the data. So making sure that the questions you’re asking your users, the metadata you’re asking them for, is actually data they can give you at the time when you’re asking for it, is critical.

And then finally, redundancies. This is basically…now, my background is in financial services, so this might be, I think, more common there. But we often had pieces that were updated quarterly. And so you might have a piece that has 150, 200 revisions because every three months we’re publishing a new version of it.

If you’re asking for all of the metadata for that piece every three months because you don’t have, say, a good integration between Workfront and AEM assets, then what will end up happening is the users, as new users come in or as users forget what it was before, they will sometimes accidentally change a value because they didn’t actually fill it in with what it was before.

A solution to this, there are ways to have a centralized repository, and then use automation to ask the user, what asset are you updating, and then pull that information from a central repository rather than asking the user to provide it all. And then serving it up so the user can change something if it needs changing, but otherwise they can leave it alone.

That can go a long way towards making sure your data is accurate. I personally have seen things where certain marketing materials will become unavailable because a user entered the metadata wrong because they forgot to look at what it had been before.

So going to the specifically some of these solutions. So governance, one of the ways you can use automation to help governance. Governance itself is a very human activity. You can’t really automate that part of it. But I find that most companies don’t really invest a lot of energy into building auditing tools or monitoring tools. So having tools that run on the background, maybe once a day, maybe once a week, looking for work that either doesn’t comply with standards or is missing data or is new to the system and needs to be reviewed.

That can help sort of act as a smoke detector. So not only can it correct data problems or raise data problems before they become major problems, it can also identify maybe training gaps or users who don’t understand how things should be configured. So it’s a great backstop to your manual governance policies.

Data transfers, if you have systems again, AEM and Workfront would be an excellent example. But if you have two systems that both share metadata, eliminating the need to enter the data twice into two different systems and then keep that data in sync is a huge win. This is something that most people who use automation, this is one of the first things they automate. So this may be something you’re already doing. But if you have a repository of metadata or other sources, this is a great tool to keep data consistent between systems.

Centralizing the data, this is essentially with assets especially. If you have a centralized repository of assets with all of the asset metadata, it is better if you can use automation to enable the user to select just like this is the asset I’m touching.

And then keep all of the metadata in a separate place. This does two things. The first thing is you eliminate that data redundancy problem of asking the user to enter the data over and over. But the second thing it does is it lets you separate the work that you do to change the data or to update the data from the work you do to manage the metadata.

You can have a different team focused on the content and you can keep the people who have the expertise doing what they’re experts in. And you can use automation such as Fusion to connect those two things so that the right people can always be responsible for the right work.

And then finally, user automation, which most people who use Fusion, this is the first thing they go to. But aside from reducing errors and keeping your data clean, the second thing it does is the more busy work or sort of rote work that you can take off your users’ shoulders, the more time they have to spend doing the important things right, like making sure the metadata is configured correctly or making sure that the content is the best it can be. So this pays dividends beyond just user experience, although it pays huge dividends to user experience. And so going to AEM and the Native Connector specifically with automation, there are three ways to integrate Workfront and AEM. The Native Connector alone is the demonstration that Autumn gave earlier. And that basically automates the mapping of the metadata from Workfront to AEM assets. The user still manually has to say, okay, here are the pieces I want to upload. They click the button and it goes. You can enhance that with Fusion. When you do this, you’re still using the Native Connector. The Fusion work can be simple, although you can make it more elaborate if your needs require it.

What you’re basically doing is relying on the mapping of the Native Connector so that stays in Workfront where it can still be maintained by a Workfront admin.

But you’re automating the part where the user clicks the button. And where this can be useful is if you want to do a, say, data validation check before you upload it, or you want to basically upload it to AEM and then put a copy into maybe a vault.

It enables you to automate work for the user as well as add some additional validation or error checking to make sure everything is in good order and makes the user’s job a little easier, but still maintains the value of that Native Connector, putting the mapping into a place where the Workfront admin can maintain it. And then the final solution would be to use like just a pure Fusion solution where you’re connecting the Workfront API and the AEM assets API directly.

This lets you do things the Native Connector can’t do. So for instance, if you have, you know, maybe you have data that has to be transformed between Workfront and AEM, or you have to look up data in a different system, or maybe you don’t always want to put the document in the same folder, but based on the type of document or based on the person who’s asking for it, you may want to put it in different locations and AEM assets. All of that is available by using Fusion natively with the cost that now changes to the business process or changes to the metadata schema either need to be done by a Fusion developer or a Fusion like mapping system has to be developed so that the Workfront admins can continue to do the mapping.

And now I’m going to do a quick demo. So the purpose of this or the aim of this presentation is not to teach you how to do Fusion, it’s to show you how effective it can be and how simple it can be. So this is not a demo that you’re going to walk away being able to do it, but it is able to show you the capabilities and how straightforward Fusion makes these automations.

However, I can’t do a live demo because this involves credentials on a lot of things that aren’t appropriate to share outside of Adobe. And so it’s screenshots, but when you see how simple it is, you’ll understand why that’s okay.

This is a Fusion scenario that connects Workfront and AEM using the native connector. You can make it more elaborate, but it is as simple as one or two modules. The first authenticator module, these are the same, they’re both doing the same thing. The first one has to pick the connector, the connection. And then after that, in the same scenario, you don’t have to do that again. One thing to call out is that right now this relies on undocumented API calls, which basically means that Adobe reserves the right to change it. So know that when you build off of it. We’re using it internally. So it is something that we’re using in production, but it could change. It’s not like the Workfront API’s published piece that won’t change unless there’s a lot of communication about it.

So this is really tiny on my screen. I’m hoping it’s a full screen on yours. This is the contents of the first module. And again, this is really just to show you how straightforward it is.

The connection needs to be set up in the developer console. So you need somebody who has access to the developer console to set up the connection. Once it’s set up, any Fusion developer with access to it can use it. So the developer console is not something that needs to be used by everybody.

This is the URL of the API. You can see it says unsupported.

We just talked about that. And then send document to external provider. That’s the command that does the work. This is literally, this command here is the automation.

And then in the JSON body, you select the document ID from Workfront, the destination folder ID from AEM assets. And then the provider ID is from that list of experience manager options that Autumn showed. Basically, one of those providers is the one that you’re basically calling. So that’s the link between the native connector and your automation. Getting this ID, there’s an article about it on Experience League, which will be included in the resources, but it’s not yet straightforward. But you only have to do it once and then it’s done.

And then the only difference, every call after that in the same scenario is exactly the same except the provider ID is no longer needed.

So again, using Fusion to automate the native connector is straightforward and simple. And you end up with Fusion scenarios that are fairly easy to comprehend and to maintain. But you can do more things like data transformations within this as well.

And then… Oh, key takeaways. Sorry. And so finally, key takeaways. Basically, security and permissions are critical. If your work isn’t configured correctly, it’s going to be very hard to get things to connect. So the security and permissions are vital.

Syncing and automation.

Basically, the more automation you have with your metadata management, the more likely your metadata will stay clean. And clean metadata makes your marketing more effective.

A robust metadata mapping strategy is at the core of all of your marketing efforts. Workfront and AEM assets can help support that. But actually having an effective strategy is something that you need to do. And then finally, governance is difficult, but necessary.

You can reach out to Autumn or me on LinkedIn. And Experience League has so much information about this that you can leverage.

Autumn, any… Yeah, just two questions coming in. I would say that we will have this information that was effective on… Sorry, John, can you mute your mic? Oh, perfect. There you go. We will have all this information and a further deep dive into a lot of these questions that we see. The more questions that we have in asking the presenters. Please keep asking those questions. I’m trying to answer in the chat. Again, apologies, I had some technical difficulty at the beginning. Thank you, John, for running through with this, running through my slides with me. If you have more questions, please keep going. And we’re happy to start with these questions. But if there’s anything very specific, there’s at least a few in here that we will deep dive into, either as a perspectives article or just a general chat on Experience League.

Okay, we’re going to open it up to questions.

Thank you both so much. I will kick off Q&A in a moment for everyone here. Both my cats were pleasantly asleep when this webinar started. Now they’re up and at them, so hopefully they don’t show up on screen.

A big thank you to our presenters today. We are going to get Q&A. You should now see the resources box on the left side of your screen that I mentioned. The first link there is a link to a helpful resource on perspectives. And as a pro tip for perspectives, something Autumn has mentioned a couple of times during this call, we’re planning follow-up content, deeper dives, more downloadable assets for everyone. So if you’re not familiar with perspectives already, that content will likely live on perspectives. So you can follow that link and then go back out to perspectives and you’ll see some filters based on role, based on product that you’re interested in.

And the pro tip is you can set the filters that are relevant for you. So maybe it’s AEM assets and work front, one of the two.

And then if you bookmark it, it’ll save your search specifications.

So definitely recommend building perspectives kind of into your learning journey as you go from the experts like the ones that you saw today.

With that, we’ll get started in the Q&A. We have a lot of questions that came in, so we’ll get through as many as we can.

So let’s start with this first one that I’m looking at, which is, I think it’s for John. And the question is, can I automate work front AEM without Fusion? I already have some automations built and I don’t want to use too many tools.

Yes. Basically, the Fusion makes it easier to automate because it sort of does a lot of the tricky AEM. The tricky API work for you, but you can use any environment that acts. I have actually written things using Excel VBA that automate work front through the API. And so as long as you can connect to the work front API and the AEM API and your programming environment supports that, then any programming environment that can use web based APIs can be used for automation. Fusion makes it easier, but it’s absolutely not necessary.

Great. Thank you. And then second follow up to that, can you just give more details for that central asset data store, how that works, where it lives, what it does? Yeah, there’s probably honestly a webinar in itself, but there’s a few ways you can do it. The way I’ve done it that requires just work front is, for instance, you create a program and then in the program you create projects. And each project, these aren’t real projects, they each represent an asset. And you attach a metadata form to each of those projects that contains your asset metadata. On your form, on the lookup form the user fills out, you can then use a normal, like just a built in work front project type ahead field to let the user select the asset from that list of projects.

And then Fusion can notice that the type ahead field has been filled in, and then reach out to the project that is really actually an asset, grab all of the metadata and populate the form for the user. And the two things that does, aside from the user doesn’t have to fill out the metadata, you can restrict access to the program so that the people who manage the metadata are the only people who can change it. So that if a user sees something’s not right, instead of just letting them change it, they can actually fill out a request and have it done by the people who own the data. You can also do that with planning, where you can have the metadata in planning that is still fairly new, but it’s something that might work better for you. And then there are ways to do it with third parties. I actually do have a demo, which we don’t have time to go into here. But I do have a working demo. Maybe this is an opportunity for a future webinar.

Definitely. Yeah, I love that idea. Great. And a couple of these questions may have been answered in chat, but I’ll ask them anyway so that everyone can make sure that they have both pieces.

I’ll toss this next one to you, Autumn. Rahul’s asking, it’s kind of a two parter. So what are the best practices for extracting metadata and its attributes out of Workfront? And he’s asking both for best practices, extracting out of the box fields and also for custom fields across custom forms. Yeah, that’s a great question. So unfortunately, unless you’re using Fusion, you will have to do both of these items in each individual system. So I highly recommend pulling your custom forms. If you’re using multiple custom forms, attach it to a project template and then export that file from a template or a regular initial project. From there, you just need to map and make sure that each one of those fields that you want to have exist in your AEM asset are there in the metadata schema. There is a way to use Fusion to automate this process. It is a complex procedure, but it is not, once you have it running, it should not take too much to attach to the new custom fields into the AEM asset schema.

I think I mentioned also in the chat, I think this will also answer a few other people’s questions, a good source of truth or knowledge to understand is that whatever you’re going to use for your field type within each custom field, I would try and match that over into AEM schema as well. So for example, if you’re using an external lookup or an internal lookup in Workfront, such as you noted that on my campaign name was an internal lookup field, then I created that as a single line text in AEM because I know that it’s automating the source of truth is coming from Workfront. It’s never going to be changed in AEM specifically. It’s always going to come over from that Workfront asset.

Great. Thank you. I saw you answer this one, I think in the chat, but this is a question I hear all the time whenever I’m speaking with customers, so I think it bears repeating. But Nick asked if the master metadata schema held in assets, or is the master metadata schema held in assets and then shared with Workfront or do they need to be maintained separately? They do need to be maintained separately, unfortunately, unless, as I mentioned, you use that fusion scenario.

Perfect. Another question here from Jeffrey, are there concerns about updates to campaign names in Workfront when triggering updates to assets in AEM and performance? So I think it I’ll let John speak more specifically to this, but if you’re using the native connector, that sync is automatic and I don’t feel like there’s a concern if there’s 2000 plus assets being updated because the native connector is running. If you’re using fusion, however, to update your and update and sync your assets, I do I would have a little bit of a concern with lag time. John, I know you can speak a little bit more to that.

I actually haven’t had any issues with lag time that.

Yeah, I haven’t really had any issues with lag time. I think that the question about the campaign name is something that I wasn’t quite sure. There is the data only flows in one direction from Workfront to AEM. I’m not sure if I misunderstood the campaign name part of that question. I think what they’re asking is if the campaign name changed in Workfront and it automatically updated to 2000 on 2000 assets in the documents when that sync goes over into AEM. So they’re already synced to AEM. If that change happens, the data automatically syncs using that native connector. So if they were using fusion instead, would there be any concern with having to run that scenario 2000 times because of that change? No, that’s within capabilities.

It might take a few minutes, but it’s not going to make it unstable or anything.

Thanks for clarifying that.

Mark asks, if you already have an asset folder established in AEM assets, does Workfront allow you to choose that specific folder? Yes, it does. Or you want to ingest the asset too? Yep, so it does. I didn’t get to really have some time to spend on linked folders, but I think we could definitely take a deeper dive or use this as another webinar just to talk about folders and a little bit more into the AEM assets piece of it. As I mentioned, you can specifically select linked folders in your AEM connection under the document setup. However, there is also a tab on the left rail in Workfront if you have your AEM connection set up that you can select a project folder within the AEM tab, not just within pushing to the assets within the documents tab. Let me see if I can, I don’t know if you want to pull it up again. I don’t know if I have something available, but that is one of the best ways to select when you’re using this folder within a specific project or even a specific project template.

And I can definitely add that into the perspective. So it’s a step by step guide. Yeah, maybe something to dive deeper into. I like that idea.

Kathleen asked a good question about are there any limitations to the data types that can be shared between Workfront and AEM assets? Any files that would block a transfer? Yeah, so I think the best, what I usually try to do, and I think I answer this one in the chat as well, is whatever asset types are, excuse me, custom field types are available in AEM. So you’re talking single line text, drop down, things like that. I would stick with those field types. As I mentioned in the chat, the example that I use is if you’re using an external lookup in Workfront, I would just use that as a single line text in AEM instead, just because we know that if it’s an external lookup in Workfront or even an internal lookup, it’s probably not changing in AEM too often. Most of this information, I like the source of truth to be coming from Workfront and almost never coming from AEM since usually that’s your final repository.

Great, thank you.

What about, this can be for both of you, do you have best practices to share around bulk asset use cases? So in Danielle’s case here, you’re adding 100 plus assets and you need to add metadata and sync to AEM from Workfront. Any best practice you can share for larger quantities of assets? I can speak to the bulk assets part. Basically, my experience with the AEM connector doesn’t include this, so I’ll let Autumn take the AEM part of it.

If the bulk assets are something that happens repeatedly, what I’ve done in the past is created a template that has all of the assets as tasks with the metadata pre-filled out as a template, and then you just apply the template and it applies because it’s stored on the template, it provides the same information every time. Copying old jobs has drawbacks, but that’s a really common solution to it. I think one of the questions would be whether you’re talking about having to do 200 assets at a time that are always a different 200 assets, or something like in my experience where we had 500 assets to do every quarter, but they were always the same 500 assets, they just got updated every quarter.

There’s more options if it’s the same assets every time. If it’s just a random bundle of 200 items at a time each time, it’s a little harder to automate that.

And then I’ll just add to that. If you’re specifically talking about adding the metadata into Workfront and then into AEM, what I showed on my demo is that I did not attach those custom forms manually to the assets. I actually have a Fusion scenario that dynamically adds those custom forms, pulling in fields from the program, the portfolio, the project itself, again, that’s attached to that asset document using that Fusion scenario, which you will get that blueprint eventually when we share that out on Experience League. You can do that a number of ways. I just had it uploading those custom forms to any document that gets uploaded, but using Fusion, you can use filters and such to say, I only want this uploaded to assets that are in a final folder, and that can be on a project level or a task level. And then when you push the assets over, if you change your view to the list view under the documents tab, you can select however many assets that you want to push over and select that AEM icon.

Yeah, one other observation. First of all, I want to apologize. Every time I mute my microphone, my camera turns off. So that’s why I’m blinking in and out of existence. But one of the things with Fusion, Fusion has tremendous amount of power to automate things. A really good practice with Fusion is to differentiate since Fusion developers tend to be more expensive and less common, and they also usually don’t understand the business as well as the actual business people and marketers.

Being thoughtful when you build your Fusion automations to ensure that the information that the business should own is maintainable, either in a mapping table, even if it’s a spreadsheet attached as a document in Workfront, just making sure that the Fusion scenario does not include all of your business logic, but whenever possible, the Fusion scenario is looking to a place that a business person owns to say, okay, how do I map this data? What do I have to do? How do I do it? That does two things. First, it makes sure that the people who are the experts are maintaining the data that they’re experts in. The second thing it does is it reduces the number of times you need to change your Fusion scenario. Most companies, especially if you have like a centralized IT department that’s doing your Fusion changes, there’s a backlog, you have to get prioritized, get squeezed into the backlog. Whereas if what Fusion says is, okay, let me go read the instructions from this area that the business owns, then the business can change as fast as the business changes rather than only as fast as your Fusion developers can work.

And again, I’ll say to that, the whole reason we showed that metadata mapping matrix in Workfront planning is for that exact purpose. If we have a way to update the records in Workfront planning and then Fusion calls upon those records, it’s some way a place where, again, a developer doesn’t have to have a data store that they have to make a manual change to, as well as the expert to that data is able to go in and make those changes and not have to use a developer.

Thank you for that thorough response from both of you. And that’s a good segue into a Fusion-esque question where, can you confirm if the native connector only sends data one way out of the box? And if that is true, have you experienced the need for a bi-directional flow of data? How did you solve for that? Can Fusion achieve that? Yeah, I’ll take that one. So yes, the native connector does only work one way. Personally, I’ve never seen a bi-directional sync, or I haven’t had a need for a bi-directional sync from AEM back into Workfront. Not to say that that cannot be the case. This is achievable using Fusion. I would personally use the native connector sync initially, using the native connector going from Workfront to AEM. And then if you need to sync back from AEM to Workfront using Fusion, however, there are a number of potential issues that you could run into, a never-ending cycle of updates. So you want to make sure that anyone that’s making that Fusion update clicks that exclude that user. Because otherwise, your fields are going to just be updating constantly back and forth with each other with that bi-directional sync.

Bi-directional syncs typically should be avoided. And I do believe that Workfront should be your Workfront or Planning should be your source of proof.

Yeah, another observation with that, and this gets into that metadata grain thing. But essentially, Workfront is a record of changes. Whereas your AEM assets repository, your dam is a record of assets. So it’s sort of like Workfront is verbs and AEM assets is nouns. And so if you have an asset in Workfront, even if it’s like an email where you’re only creating it once and there’s only one set of assets, what are you bi-directionally doing? And basically, you have a project, the project finishes, another project is closed. And so the way people typically use Workfront, a bi-directional sync would be like updating a closed project, which at that point, are you using Workfront to maintain a record of the work you’re doing? Or are you using closed projects as a database or repository of metadata that you can reuse later? Like the need for a bi-directional sync might indicate you want to rethink exactly how you’re doing things because you might be on the wrong path. That gets exacerbated if you have a situation where like assets are updated regularly, where if you have one project every month or one project every quarter to update a piece, to update an asset, you can end up with dozens of examples of metadata that are all like copies of metadata for the same asset that maybe have evolved over time. So in that case, when you’re bi-directional, are you updating like every example of it? Do you have a master version? It’s probably more of what Martin Fowler would call a bad smell rather than a valid use case or a good use case.

But if you have a good use case for it, I’m not trying to say that there’s no good reason to do it. Absolutely. These are all our opinions about what we will account for. Everyone can have their own opinion.

Oh, you’re muted, Will.

Thank you so much. I would just say that response brings us exactly to time. So I’ll do a super quick wrap up. But before I do, I just want to thank you both, John and Autumn, for putting this amazing content together for everyone. And I’ll let you say any final words before I do a quick wrap up.

Just want to say thank you for everyone that has joined. Again, apologies for the technical issues earlier, but we will make sure to get everything out into a perspective and experience late articles and make sure that any further deep dives that we see necessary are getting added to the calendar. So see that coming out shortly.

I want to thank you. This was a lot of fun. Thank you for the opportunity to do it. And I hope we get to do it again.

Thank you both. There are plenty of questions we weren’t able to get to. So I think there’s a lot we can do with that perspectives article and in answering further questions of that we didn’t get to today. So lots to work on. Again, thank you both. Thank you, everyone, for joining. As a reminder, the recording will be sent out. The slides will be available on that community post. So keep an eye out for that. And we’ll be definitely having more helpful content and webinars for you in the future. So thank you for participating and we’ll see you next time. Have a great one. Thanks, everyone.