Asset Link - Adobe Experience Manager Asset Series

Transcript

Bridget Roman, Senior Product Marketing Manager, AEM Assets, and Greg Klebas, Group Product Manager, AEM Assets. Bridget, you now have the floor. Great. Thank you so much, Anu. I appreciate the introduction. And welcome, everyone. We’re very happy to have you here today. If you’ve been following along and coming to multiple sessions, you know that you are on the fifth of five here with our entire Skill Builder webinar series for AEM Assets. So as Anu mentioned, we’ve got our resident expert, Greg Klebas here. He is the owner of Adobe AssetLink on the AEM Assets product team. And he knows his capability inside and out. And he’s going to take you through a very in-depth look at Adobe AssetLink and how to get started. And I thought it was really interesting to see the polling results just a second ago. There are a lot of folks on the call who are not yet using AssetLink. So today, you are going to walk away with all of the knowledge, the features, the benefits, how this works. You’re going to get to see demos and understand exactly what it takes to get started with Adobe AssetLink. So you are in the right place today. Very happy about that. I think, too, the fact that most of the people who answered our polling questions also said that they work with internal creative teams. This capability becomes more relevant than ever. So with that, I want to just take us through specifically what we’re going to cover today. So essentially, why you should be using AssetLink. That’s the first thing I’m going to talk about. And then I’ll hand it off to Greg. And he’s going to really take you through A to Z, getting started with AssetLink, how to upload new assets to AEM from Creative Cloud, discoverability, finding those assets within the creative tools from the dam. Then use downloading assets to open a copy of an asset in your app, a place to embed in your design. We’re going to talk about edit and work in progress, smart services, and then other types of AssetLink. So basically, AssetLink versus AEM desktop app. So you’ll get a feel for what’s the right tool to use. And also, stick around. I’m going to also introduce you to some of the sessions that we’re doing at Adobe Summit coming up in April. And you’ll want to be sure to hear more about the free access to Adobe Summit and what all of the great AEM assets sessions are that you should be joining in on and taking advantage of. All right. So let’s dive in specifically around AssetLink. Why AssetLink? This slide is just an illustration around what’s happening in the design and marketing world today. And I’m sure you are all living this each and every day. But essentially, when we look at this, Adobe sees kind of the key three challenges that face creatives and marketers today. So first of all, you’ve got large brands and agencies where creativity has really always been centered around designing how something looks, which, of course, is the critical centerpiece, that look and feel. But we know that this has evolved into designing experiences. So there’s more pressure on all of our creatives today to develop these multichannel experiences that are always on, always relevant, always fresh. So what that requires now is that designers not only have to work with each other, but they have to work with developers, engineers, product designers. And this is becoming a challenge. And then layering on top of that, I think what we’re all here today to learn about is scale. So we know that designing the look and feel, that’s sort of the cornerstone. Creating experiences across channels is a business imperative today. But how do we get to scale? And I think this year, this past year of all years, this has really been kind of in our face and accelerating. It’s really having to produce more content and more experiences than ever before, which requires content velocity. And that’s a huge element of why we developed Adobe AssetLink. So let’s take just a quick look at how this works on this slide. Basically, this is the Adobe ecosystem that we’re looking at. So first, Adobe AssetLink’s strengthening collaboration between creatives and marketers in the content creation process. And you can see what we’re talking about here. It’s Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and XD. And in that opening poll, obviously, people are using Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator day in and day out. A little less use of XD, but we’re going to take you through what that looks like today as well. Maybe that’s a tool that your creative teams are going to ultimately start to pick up in the future. So now you can access content stored in AEM assets in the dam without those creatives having to leave the apps that they’re most familiar with. And I think that’s why you’re all here today, to understand how does that work? How do we ensure that our designers don’t have to jump out of those apps, spend time getting into a dam, being in an environment they’re not familiar with? This creates lag. This slows the process down. And the reason we created AssetLink is to really simplify and streamline the upstream creative and the downstream marketing impact. So now also I want to add, we won’t talk a lot about it today, but it’s important to know that Adobe Stock also natively connects with AEM assets so that your marketing teams can easily search and reuse high quality stock images, graphics, and videos in marketing collateral, ads, digital signs, et cetera, whatever your end design piece is. So Adobe Stock does also play into this workflow, which is important to know. And we want to lay out kind of who the key people are in this whole experience. So of course, you’ve got the Creative Cloud for enterprise users. So your design team, these folks working in the CC apps every single day. These are the folks who are going to be using AssetLink. Then there is the marketer, the business user who’s working in AEM, the web UI. These are the people who want to be able to search, preview, license, and save Adobe Stock assets directly from the AEM UI. And then there’s the desktop app user. So this is your creative, your business user working on the desktop. This is the persona who wants to be able to open and edit any asset type in any desktop application. So we’ll learn a little bit more about these personas and how the tools work for each of those. Okay. And then this is kind of the high level. This is really the what happens. What is Adobe AssetLink and how does it work with AEM assets? So Greg is going to get into this, but how is this whole flow able to streamline collaboration between creative and marketers in the entire content creation process? So it’s all about that acceleration and velocity. So we’ll get into discovering, use, editing, the work in progress, uploading, and also single sign-on. So we’re going to see that in action as well. How easy it is for that creative pro to access the dam from inside their application.

And then lastly, I want to share just how do you get started with AssetLink? This is really good for you all to see, are you eligible? Are you using the right version of our product right now or both of the products? You need Creative Cloud for Enterprise and you need AEM assets. And you can see specifically here the various versions that you need to be working on. So with AEM assets, you need the license, you need AEM as a cloud service as well. So you can use this with managed service and cloud service, and you need to be on 6.5 and 6.4.2 or later in managed services or even on-prem. So you’ve got a lot of flexibility when it comes to AEM assets. You can be using on-prem managed services and AEM assets as a cloud service as well.

All right, so we’re going to play a short video for you. And I want to introduce, this is one of our customers under Armour, and they were a very early adopter of Adobe AssetLink. We’re really excited to have AssetLink to be able to have our photography team upload assets into the dam, to be able to do review process through a check-in and check-out methodology.

We’ve worked really hard to have great metadata on our assets, so having great searchability within the tool. And then speaking to going, extending that out, looking at other parts of the organization that could benefit from that. So with our product development teams, getting them involved, our e-comm platform, getting them involved with Target and integration with AEM. So lots of great opportunity for integrations.

All right, great.

So I know that was kind of short, but sweet. I think the key takeaway for everybody to really think about is just the amount of time and resources and budget that can be saved with the use of Adobe AssetLink with your dam. So with that, I am going to hand it over to Greg. He’s going to take you through all the things I’ve already kind of set up for him. And we’ll take questions as we go, but also have a Q&A session at the end. So be sure to add those questions to the Q&A, the Q&A or the chat pod, and we’ll see you on the other side. Thank you.

Thank you, Brigitte. Hi, everyone. I hope you can see my screen with a presentation.

So we’re gonna just get started. And what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna walk you through a lot of demos and best practices around how you basically use Adobe AssetLink and AEM.

Just to illustrate how you can simplify the connection to AEM, to digital asset management for the creative persona while ensuring that governance around assets is in place, which is the basic premise of digital asset management. So again, a lot of demos and best practices.

And to start with, I’m gonna try and set the stage for how do you actually get started? How do you enable AssetLink for your organization? And because we’ve done a lot of work for our newest member of Adobe Experience Cloud, sorry, Adobe Experience Manager, for our Adobe Experience Manager product with its cloud service deployment, I’m gonna focus on how you do that for AEM as a cloud service, okay? So let’s jump right into the demo. So for cloud service specifically, you actually start with our Experience Cloud and launch a tool called Cloud Manager, which basically allows you to create and get access to different AEM environments. And for the admin who’s starting to adding users to Adobe Experience Manager, pretty much the only thing they have to do is jump to Admin Console, which is our overall tool that Adobe uses for products to entitle users to them. And you can see for that environment, we have administrators, we have regular users, and all I have to do as an admin is to entitle my users by adding them to this specific product. And important is that AssetLink requires what we call a federated ID type of login. So I ensure that I added it here. And the second thing, once the user is added to the product itself, is to make sure that I as a user have access to all the content in digital asset management. And to do that, it could be already preset for you, but to do that, you need to ensure as an admin in AEM that my user is a part of a group that gives those permissions. And DAM users is an example of this group. And then as you can see, my user group here for this specific environment is already a part of DAM users, and I am automatically added to this group because it’s a federated access. So it’s really easy for the admin just to ensure that everything is in place. And then if they want to do some specific sharing of content with specific subgroups of users, they can either use our all powerful permissions console, or this can also be done directly from the assets UI, whereas you can go to a folder, you can create it as a private folder and then add the user as, let’s say a viewer in this case. So the user, and now I’m logged in as a user into this other browser, the user will see the folder that’s called read only here with just read permissions, right? So I don’t have a create button here. And exactly the same is gonna happen in asset links. So asset link will also observe the same rules. So your governance is guaranteed here. And for the creative, right? The only thing they need to do is ensure that they logged into their creative cloud. They can test the application using federated login. So this is what you see. You just need to ensure that you select company or school account or your email address, and then you’re basically good to go. And because we support single sign-on, creatives will open their extension and already be logged in to the very same environment and they can start using it. Asset link supports switching of environments. So like you see here. So typically you’d have one project you’d connect to, but you can also manage multiple ones.

So this is really a short demo of how it gets started. It didn’t cover all the aspects because we just don’t have enough time to cover everything end to end, but it pointed out the most important things.

And the best practices around just enabling asset link, or organization, is to really use enterprise ID or federated ID or single sign-on login for your account because this is the only type that asset link supports. It does not support a personal ID, right? Personal Adobe ID just won’t work. And as creative users, you can switch and manage those endpoint URLs to AEM environments in your panel. Admins can also deploy a configuration to your machine through IT systems to actually pre-connect you to a specific environment for this more advanced configuration type.

The second best practice is, admins control access to assets for creatives in AEM. And the good news here is that it works exactly the same way as with any other user type in AEM. Those users using web UI, it’s exactly the same. So basically you can use the permissions UI, which just gives you this all powerful permission settings that you can set up for your whole organization. You typically do it kind of once and it would just work, but then more tactically you can share the folders and collections using the browsing UI.

And the very important thing here is that to define this access to specific areas of the system, you would ideally use user groups as opposed to individual users. So it’d say, group A in my creative just needs access to this as read only and group B in my marketing needs access to read write and you would just use those groups rather than individuals. It just scales better.

And finally, asset link itself, we didn’t cover it here, but admins in creative cloud admin console, they can actually package asset link as an add-on into their creative cloud deployment in what is called a packaging flow. And then users will just get it in their machine. I mentioned they can send or deploy a pre-configured configuration file to connect to specific AM environment if they wanna ensure that users don’t have to know the URL themselves. And the very important thing, just be sure to use the latest creative cloud to get all the good features, good features there. So this was really how you start and super easy for the end users if everything is pre-configured for them. So you can move on to the second piece. And now we’re switching to the actual end user. We’re gonna be mostly creative users here because asset link is a tool for creatives. And we’ll start with, hey, how do I get stuff into that digital asset management repository directly from my Photoshop InDesign or Illustrator? So we’re gonna talk about the upload flow. And we’ll start with Illustrator. And let’s say I’m working on the logo that is still on my desktop.

I just open it and I do some creative work here. I made it simple. I just added a few pieces of text. And when I’m happy with this, I just save it as a local file still. And I can go to Adobe Asset Link, navigate to a folder into which I wanna upload it.

So I created a folder for myself called logos. And I’m just gonna click on an upload asset. It takes the asset that you see that is opening your application and it gets it into the system. We could even check that it’s in the system, but we’ll see that in the later demo. So I can just close it and we can actually move on to the next.

Best practices section. So it was really easy because it should be easy. So best practices, remember that upload is executed on the currently open file, open document. You need to select the folder into which you wanna upload and refresh if you wanna see the upload file. The file open in Photoshop InDesign Illustrator is now your local copies, almost the same as if you would upload it to the server using a browser. Then the binary stays on your system and you can sort of decide what you wanna do with this, but you already have a copy on your server. Very important thing in terms of permissions. So uploaded assets actually inherit permissions from the folder that they put into. Again, this helps with governance. Again, if you don’t have access to right into the folder as a creative, you won’t see the upload button. So we protect your content structure if it’s set up for read only access for some of those creative groups.

And then last but not least, you can only upload to folder in AM. Things get uploaded to folder and collections or just a type of curation from different places in the repository. And if you wanna upload in bulk or different file types, we have an app for it called am-desk-app. I’ll show you that app later. So now that we’ve uploaded an asset, let’s see how we can discover assets without really having to leave Photoshop InDesign or Illustrator as a creative. That’s definitely what you wanna do. So we’re switching to Photoshop. Let’s assume it’s a different user.

And what they start doing, right? They open their Adobe asset link and they start searching. So let’s search for the file name that I’ve just uploaded and lo and behold, it’s here for me.

No worries, but let’s search for something broader. Like I wanna search for images with mountains. So I get the nice list here. I can switch views as you would expect from list view to grid view to what we call a gallery view with nice juicy previews.

You can also search across your digital asset management backend and your own Creative Cloud account.

If you have assets there, you can also access them from here and of course you can sort and filter the results of either searches or folder browsing. Right, you can filter by file type or by last modified. So it’s kind of easy to zero in on a specific set of assets. And then you can preview, right? You can see the bigger preview of the asset. You can see the basic metadata as well as version information if there are versions in AM. This is really easy.

You can by the way, search across the repository or in the currently selected folder which takes us directly to browsing. So browsing again, as you would expect, you can browse the folder structure that is set up or created in your digital asset management directly from here, go up and down. And by the way, you can see the read only folder that we saw before is also shown here as read only. But we also have access to collections which are ways to curate assets either through search results, which is a smart collection or just manually. And an example is here, some uncurated surfing and skateboarding pictures here.

So this is really how you discover assets. We have a lot of stuff that you have in AM as well.

And an important thing is that the searches are actually using the full power of AM on the backend. Oh, I’m sorry.

My, sorry, I clicked on that.

Yeah, that’s the one. So best practices again. As I mentioned, searches executed on the AM server. It’s not a client side search. So all the setup, all the indexing and all the metadata that is set up for search on the backend is actually used which makes it super powerful. And when you try to zero in on something, you can use additional filtering or searching within a folder structure to nail down your results to a manageable number to make them more specific.

From the governance perspective, both browse and search and access to collections observe access control on a server. So everything is governed from the central permissioning which is super important for a lot of organizations. You can really define who has access to what, who can even see what, who can upload where this allows you to structure your repository and give permissions to reflect your governance needs.

And then again, end users can use sorting different types of views and previous to really get a good feel of what these assets are before they start using them. What’s really important here is asset link was built in a way that does not transfer the large binaries unless you really need them locally, right? So if you do previous, if you do metadata preview, if you do browsing, only the small thumbnails get transferred which makes it no scale better with remote access.

And last but not least, collections in addition to search and browsing folders allow you to get a curated view into the repository because if someone creates a collection, put some stuff in there, they can be from different folders in AEM. You have an easy access to those curated experiences in Adobe asset link. And it also works for what we call smart collections which really give the ability to save a specific search and then make it available as a collection. And again, collections can be made private, shared or public so the organization can set up specific curation governance as well.

Okay, now we’ve navigated to assets. We know how to find them. It is time for the creative to start really using them. And I’m gonna show sort of two, well, two and a half different types of using the asset. One is I basically download and open a copy as if I download it from a browser but it’s sometimes useful like if you have sort of a template of something and then you wanna start working on something you base on it, a download is a good starting point and then placing a very ubiquitous use case where you can embed or even create a live link to an asset in AEM but live link just works in InDesign.

So let’s start with the demo. So we’re still in Photoshop and I’m trying to work on the banner. I have sort of a banner template that I’m gonna download. And as you can see, I can do it from within my asset link. It downloads a copy and opens it for me. So now I wanna actually place the logo that was uploaded before because I like it much more than the placeholder here, but I can place a copy and it knows it’s Photoshop. So it creates a layer, behaves correctly. That’s what I would expect it to do. And I can work with this layers and see what the results are. I can do more stuff. I can, for example, go to mountains and see whether I can find a better background. And again, use place to see how it would work with my specific design. I’m just gonna make it bigger, align and switch over to see, hey, would it work better? I can play with those two to see what really works best for me. So this is really powerful. All those assets would be typically approved assets that I can use as a creative without thinking about it too much. They’re available for me in a dam. In InDesign, in addition to all this, we also have what we call direct linking. So let’s see how it works. I have a brochure design here that again, I’m gonna download. It would work with any type of asset, either local, downloaded, or even open for editing, which we’ll see later. But here you can see that we already have a few links here that are placed directly from Adobe Experience Manager. Those are kind of those direct links to assets. So InDesign will know the status of those links. How do I place links like that? So let’s see on an example. Let’s say I wanna place an image in a frame into this specific page of InDesign. So I select Place Linked, and just place it in a frame in InDesign like so. What this does, because it’s InDesign and we chose Place Link, it would actually create a new link, direct link. The link is pointing back to the asset. And from the InDesign team, from the InDesign perspective, I can start working on this design and using these assets. And we’ll know what happens next, how they help with governance. You can also relink, right? If you have a link that’s no longer available, you can actually relink it to an asset that is in AM as well and that will give us a very nice update to the logo that was there before with full quality, pointing back to what I’ve just uploaded in Illustrator before. So again, downloading, placing embedded or placing direct links is all supported by asset link and direct linking is only available in InDesign. All right. So what are the best practices around those flows? Right, so download, it’s important to remember that it just downloads and opens a local copy. So this copy is no longer connected to AM. This is by design, this is almost as if you downloaded a file from AM using browser. It just opens it for you. It’s a convenience method, but it’s also can be used in real life. If something like a template in AM and you wanna start new work, you would probably just download and start working on a copy as we saw in those two examples.

Assets are basically saved to a predefined folder structure that kind of maintains the folder structure from the server. So at some point you can sort of go there and figure out if you want to, if not asset link will just manage it for you. If you wanna edit something and provide the update back to AM, you would use checkout versus download and checkout will take care of next. And because nowadays people work with files that get bigger and bigger, you need to ensure that your network connection, including the last line to your desktop, has sufficient bandwidth for your assets. We have specifically for cloud service, we have CDN integration that helps get those assets faster to the system, but still if assets are large, they sometimes would need time to just upload and download. So you need as an organization, this is one of the most important thing to ensure that those connection points have enough bandwidth and low latency if possible, so that creatives can work nicely. Asset link itself takes care of saving the bandwidth because it doesn’t fetch big binaries if it doesn’t have to really. From the workflow perspective, you use one of the discovery techniques to locate your assets using asset link, then have a document open, and then you would be able to place embedded assets just by either clicking on place, copy, or just dragging and dropping, that would work as well. And it knows which application it’s in, so it would create a layer or a frame depending on which applications it’s in, so it’s kind of contextual that way.

And then last but not least, for InDesign specifically, in networks starting with InDesign 2020, it would support what we call direct links, so you can place a link and the link points back to the asset in the repository. The links panel in InDesign will know that it’s a specific type of a link that points back to the server, and it has a lot of benefits. One of them is whenever the asset gets updated on the server, the creative opening, the InDesign file with this link will see a notification or an indication of a change on the server, which we’ll see very soon.

And we also support something called for placement only workflow as well, typically used when large InDesign documents use a lot of print imagery, which has high resolution, 300 DPI typically, which makes those image files relatively large, in this case for just simplifying the place operation and the initial phases of work, you can turn on something called an FPO rendition on the AM side, and if it’s available for a specific asset, AssetLink will use it and will indicate that you can flip it for the full size image if you’re at the end of your workflow, you’re let’s say generating a PDF output, right? So FPO is supported as well if available on the server.

So now I think we talked about discovery, upload, using the files, now what happens if you, as a creative need to update a file? That will take us to edit and work in progress. And the gesture for it is called checkout, and then checking to get an update back into AM, but there’s much more to it. There is the whole creative cloud ecosystem with services storage collaboration that allows you to work on those files that are checked out, work in creative cloud, collaborate with your creative team without really having all the minute changes being reflected in AM, because what you want is actually to the major updates to only get back to AM and create a new version or quote unquote a marketing user or a downstream user, line of business user. So we’ll see how this works in practice next.

And again, we’re gonna switch back to Photoshop just to show different facets of how AssetLink works. And this time we wanna edit one of the images.

Just, I’m not sure if you remember, but that’s the image that we placed in InDesign.

Doesn’t matter, but we checked out that specific image. So what happens, it’s being opened for us for editing. It’s marked on the server, hey, someone’s editing it. And what’s really important, it’s place, it’s a local copy for me, but it’s connected to the asset. So AssetLink knows where it needs to go. So I’m gonna do a change that’s visually very distinct. So make it black and white, save the file. And then I’m gonna talk about where this file is actually located. So it’s on my local disk, but what is important here is by convention. You can change that in a configuration by convention. The file is actually stored in my local synced Creative Cloud folder.

So it’s really in my Creative Cloud synced folder in a similar structure that reflects folder names in case I’m working with multiple environments. What this means is that once this file syncs back to my Creative Cloud, if I have sync turned on, I can actually go to Creative Cloud, for example, for the web UI and open it. So I think that was a folder where I had a different file that was removed after. So I’m just navigating to that file in my CC web UI.

And this file is here. What I can do with this now is I can, for example, share this folder with some creatives, I don’t know, my creative director to get their feedback so I can collaborate. I can let them edit the file if they want to and just send an invitation. They will receive it in their Creative Cloud. And it just, at this point, it’s in a heavy work in progress within the creative team and it lives in my Creative Cloud. So let’s assume that I’ve gone through a number of those cycles. Now I just wanna get the new version into a YIM. So what I do is I do a check-in. I can leave a comment. This case, I would say it’s black and white now.

And now it’s checked in. It’s actually removed from my local disk and from Creative Cloud just because there’s a new major version that’s in a YIM and we can see that here.

As you can see, if we jump into the new folder, oh no, the links folder, no, the new folder. I got this right. The file is already uploaded and processed. It’s black and white. And you can even see the version that was created in a version timeline. So the current with the black and white comment is there available for everyone. And you can also preview what changed since the last version with this little nice slider. So it really allows you to do updates or retouches relatively easily from the creative perspective and then maintain your overall governance by just having those major versions with check-in comments available for the AEM site. So really best practices around editing, important to remember that those assets are stored in your Creative Cloud Sync Storage by default or a hard drive. It’s configurable in AssetLink so you don’t have to use Creative Cloud Sync Storage. But if you do, if it’s enabled, it allows you to work on those assets and collaborate and update them on different devices, anything that Creative Cloud would allow you to do, the rich collaboration capabilities. For this kind of deep work in progress collaboration that might not yet require an update to marketing. The asset for governance purposes, it’s marked as locked for editing so others will avoid changing that. For work in progress, frequent changes or frequent saves, they do not go back to AEM automatically but you check them in, you choose the moment when you were ready with this update, let’s get it over and we’ll leave a comment and the local asset is automatically removed. Now there are some downstream things that you can configure in AEM that go well beyond this webinar that you can configure notifications or you can configure workflows to be started automatically when assets get uploaded or updated.

And you have different views that help you identify which assets are sort of checked out in Assetlink. And also on the AEM site, you can use the powerful search facets to really get what the state of your system is right from the power user perspective. So it really allows you to use all the power and Assetlink just allows this creative to do retouching easily.

All right, and we’re getting to the power of Adobe Sensei.

So how can you leverage the power of artificial intelligence machine learning that AEM provides in Adobe Assetlink? The short answer is it’s just there for you, right? So whatever is configured and works on the server side would also surface in Assetlink. As an example, if I search for tulips in Assetlink, I’m getting pictures of tulips. But the question is how did the system know that those are tulips? It’s not clear from the metadata that those are actually tagged as tulips. So let’s see what’s actually happening on the server side with the same search term, just to illustrate how certain things just happen on the client side as well. So we have the same three results. Let’s have a look at one. Let’s just have a look at the properties. And indeed, there are no manually added properties that would say tulips for this image, but we run what we call smart tagging service for all the assets that enter the system, which automatically recognizes those more generic scenes and add some metadata so that those assets become searchable. And it’s really powerful because you can just make sure that assets are available to you as a creative, even though not all would be done. It also supports things like finding similar assets by just visual similarity, something you would know from stock and things like that. We need to move forward. But the main point here is, and that’s best practice, right? You need to have those features in AM. They depend on sort of smart tagging service as a basis, which in AM as a cloud service is actually turned on by default and available to you just out of the box. So creatives can also benefit from those features without thinking too much. And searches, visual searches are basically a visual search facets in asset link, and they just show you similar assets. Now, the thing here is you need sufficient number of similar assets for visual search to be really powerful, right? But if you work on certain things that have a lot of assets that are visually similar, you would get to that point that this search will give you nice results.

And visual search is of course also available in the AM web UI, so you can use it on both sides, right? As with anything powerful, artificial intelligence based features that help you get more, you know, without spending all the manual work on tagging those assets although, you know, let’s be very clear, right? Smart tagging and visual search can get you far, but you still need to have some governance around assets and you need still to ensure that they are properly managed and tagged. And we have a nice process of being able to review the quality of tagging for your specific assets types in the AM UI, and you can, you know, promote certain tags to have more influence on search results, right? It’s not gonna solve all your problems, but it’s gonna help with limit the number of manual steps that you have to do across the board to get your assets in order. All right, so we talked a lot about, you know, Photoshop InDesign, Illustrator, and those assets. What if you work with other assets types, other apps, or you just wanna upload the large folder with subfolders into the system? Here’s where a little tool that’s kinda similar to AssetLink but running standalone on your desktop comes into play called AM Desktop App, okay? And let’s start with an upload of a larger folder of a mixed type asset. So we have, you know, InDesign files and PDFs and whatnot. What I can do is I can open my Adobe Experience Manager desktop app, navigate to the folder I wanna upload them to, and just drag and drop the full folder from my local disk to the system, right? It’s not supported by all the browsers with folder, subfolder upload, but desktop app supports it. So it starts uploading those assets. And as it does, right, the new folder appears here and all the subfolders are already here. And we can see them as well here.

It supports searches as well. But now it also supports kind of an editing or opening flow or checkout. And the way it does it, it uses a natively configured application for the file type. In my case, I used the operating system preview.

So PDF would open in a preview. So I can quickly add something to it, sort of edit it. As you can see in AssetLink, the file is marked as being edited with a lock icon. When I refresh, the app will know it was edited locally. So now it allows me to upload the changes or basically something like check it in.

It gets it over to AM. And if I go to this folder now in AM, it’s still processing generating renditions. But when it’s done, what I can do then is refresh the view.

Now the asset is fully processed and now it has this edit in it. So really desktop app is for working with files that are non-creative or do not get processed in Photoshop InDesign or Illustrator that way. So best practice is really when to use.

It would typically be a different type of user, not necessarily creative that would use a desktop app, but someone who’d really need to get assets into the system.

We’ve had Adobe Experience Manager desktop app for quite a long time on the market and version one, the previous version, which kind of is still around, but version one had a different paradigm. So it used sort of a virtual mapping of your repository folders and assets onto a network share. And then when you sort of clicked on something, it would fetch it behind the scenes. Now the live network share was a nice experience, but it would not work well for situations where network is not that fast or assets are super large, just because we could not make it work fast enough for all the situations we could not control when the app would actually need to fetch the full binary. Now with this architecture, with the version two, we actually do it the same way as Assetlink does it on the backend. So it saves your bandwidth and allows you to work with different asset types, open them in native applications on your desktop. It’s really this desktop integration technology that, I’m sorry, I clicked something.

Oops.

Excuse me, my keyboard is too close to my mouse. So again, it’s available to any customer of AEM. It’s sort of a free download if you have access to AEM. And anyone working on desktop can benefit from it, not only creative and works with any type of asset that you might have.

And now we’re finally moving to Adobe XD and Assetlink for Adobe XD. It’s a bit newer than Assetlink for InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. It was introduced a bit later, but with the growing popularity of Adobe XD, which is this creative product for your digital product designer, someone designing websites, mobile experiences and things like that, we felt that we need to provide the same value proposition for those designers who would work with assets in AEM. So it streamlines the collaboration. It fulfills the same use cases of Assetlink for Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator, save for uploading or changing assets. This is not yet supported. This is not as important for XD we felt because in XD, most of the time, you just wanna be able to discover and use assets, basically drag and drop them onto your design. We have some cool features there that support specific XD workflow.

So let’s jump into the demo real quick. What you can see here is my product design of an online experience that I have in XD. And as a product designer or online experience designer here, I also have access to Adobe Assetlink.

In XD, we have a new way of getting those plugins as they’re called here. Basically, the user can browse and discover those plugins and install them themselves. So I installed Assetlink for myself before. I connected to my AEM. And again, here, you can use search browse collections, everything else that you can use in other Assetlink versions.

So I wanna just add a few surfing images to my design. And what’s interesting and different, it’s a cool add-on in XD is that it supports multi-select and multi-drag-and-drop. So if I create something like a repeat grid to really quickly populate my design with imagery, I can do that like so. And then I can select multiple surfing files in my Assetlink panel and just drag and drop them onto the design and it automatically populates the grid for me. So it really understands the specifics of how XD works. And you have all the previews and versioning info as well here. So the only thing you can do is upload your XD file, design file into AEM or update it. So this is not supported in XD with Assetlink panel. But really the best practices, the same AEM requirements for Assetlink for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. You have easy access to Assetlink plugin as a designer. And again, you need to ensure your bandwidth is good. Use cases are similar addition of multi-select and no upload or update. There are more resources for Adobe XD and Adobe Experience Manager sites that go beyond. You can go to this tiny URL at the bottom or just search it with Google. And this concludes my series of demos and best practices. And I’d like to hand it over to you Bridget now. All right, well, I’m gonna speed through because Greg, we have so many great questions for you.

And I’ve been kind of curating them in the pod. So let me just dive in since we have a couple of minutes. Can you upload renditions to an existing asset? No, you can only upload the whole asset or update it. Renditions are not supported. Can you filter and sort by collections and custom metadata properties in Assetlink? So you can sort by the metadata that we provide.

We don’t have yet a concept of a configurable search or search or those search widgets, not yet.

Okay, is it possible to see and or search non-public collections in Assetlink? We use Assetlink and it doesn’t work with non-public collections. We only find public collections. Well, so yeah, non-public collections will work if you shared them with a specific creative, right? So if you share it with a person or a group that they belong to, they would see them as well. But if it’s a private collection and if it’s not shared with the user, right? So for governance reasons, we do not show that collection to that specific user. So again, basic access control in AEM just needs to take care of that and then they’ll be able to see shared collections as well. Great, is there a connection to AEM assets so that you can easily check and access metadata? So we don’t actually have a direct link because one of the big asks was to, hey, can I do all the work without actually having to go to AEM? But it’s a good point. We could probably just add a link to open in web. But at this point, it does not exist. Okay, we got a product idea there.

Can Assetlink adhere to a customized naming standard script? So if you think about, hey, can you enforce kind of naming of assets as you upload them? No, we don’t have anything like this. This would require some very heavy customization of the workflow, but we don’t have yet. So one way of getting there is to get your creatives to adhere to this naming. And the good thing is for the checkout workflow, they do not have impact on the file name. So they would just work with the asset that is already hopefully governed in terms of naming. But we don’t have any way of adding a script to control this at this stage. Okay, when you add an asset from AEM through Assetlink, does it keep the reference in the new asset from Creative Cloud? We wanna be able to see the references of all assets for legal rights management and use of assets in AEM. Right, so this works when you place assets in like InDesign or AI.

We typically are able to discover which assets are linked if they are both in AEM, right? Both the asset that was placed as well as the one that was placed into. And there is what we call a reference tab in AEM which shows that we didn’t have enough depth to actually go into that detail, but it would generally work like this.

Okay, and then I’m gonna give the last one. There is a big range of filters in AEM. Can I also use them in Assetlink or do I only have two filters there? So in Assetlink for the user, you only have what is available there. We do not yet have those.