Folder Structure and Search - Adobe Experience Manager Asset Series

Transcript

I’m pleased to introduce our presenters for today. Bridget Roman, Senior Product Marketing Manager, AEM Assets, and Sharon Bull, AEM Consultant Architect Dance Strategist. Bridget, you now have the floor. Great, thank you so much Anu, and welcome everyone. We’re really excited to be here today. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. We’re glad we’ve got such a big crowd in our room today. So we’re going to give you the full presentation, of course, on folder structure and search. Before diving in, I just wanted to do a quick review of our full AEM Assets Skill Builder webinar series. So these have been going extremely well. We’ve actually been at this for about a year. We run this series every quarter for AEM assets. And the goal here is to take all of you through kind of the five key areas of the product. So whether you’re new to AEM assets, or maybe you’ve been working within it for quite a while, you will definitely learn something new at each one of these sessions. You can see here the five that we focus on today, of course, folder structure and search. Next week, you’ll definitely want to attend our metadata discussion with Elise Han. These two topics kind of go hand in hand, so be sure that you’re registered for that one. And then we move into Brand Portal, which is an out of the box capability that comes with AEM assets. And we’ll take you through what that’s all about if your company isn’t using Brand Portal yet. It is essentially a very easy way to share finished assets with partners, agencies, and even internal constituents. So great conversation around Brand Portal. The following week with Joe Pearl, on March 2nd, we’re going to dive into dynamic media, which is our rich media solution for AEM assets. And then the very last topic, our internal expert on Adobe Asset Link, Greg Clevis, will talk us through our native connection to Creative Cloud. So this is a really great conversation, and I would highly recommend sending the invitation to the creatives within your organization, because it’s a great story about how Adobe Asset Link can help marketers and creatives work more closely and be much more efficient and really drive content velocity with all of your assets. So that is our lineup, and be sure, again, to sign up if you’re not registered for all of these sessions. You will be receiving a recording of these sessions as long as you’re registered, even if you don’t attend. You’ll get through email within roughly 24 hours. You’ll get a recording. You will also get all of the kind of the material that we share at the end, and you’ll also get a PDF of the deck that we walk you through. So everybody always likes to ask that question, so there will definitely be a recording shared out. And then as we go through with Q&A, please, if you’ve got questions, please put them in the Q&A pod. We will most likely save those to the end, and Sharon, especially if there are highly technical questions about folder structure, Sharon will be taking those at the end when we wrap up. All right, so the key topics we’ll cover today, of course, folder structure best practices. We’re going to talk a bit about metadata, as I mentioned, and then next week is really the deep dive into metadata. We’ll talk about new search features, filters, custom filters, and dynamic search facets, asset collections, and then the last topic is a really interesting one, which is renovating your dam structure. So if you’re here and you’ve already set your folder structure up, and maybe it’s not working for you as well as you would like it to, we actually will share with you a tool that’s available that will help you reformat your folder structure. So stay tuned for that. I think that tool gets a lot of use. So with that, let me dive in and talk a little bit about why today’s topic is so important. Why are we here talking about this topic? Why is it the first thing that we want to cover with you? Basically your folder structure is the foundation of your asset browsing strategy. So it’s the human visualization of your content repository, and it really allows for consumption of the entire repository without having to memorize every metadata field, which is probably impossible.

So we’re here today to really get you thinking about your plan. You have to be strategic about how you think about the way you set up your folders in order to kind of reap these longer term benefits. Folders govern your permissions, and all permissions are folder-based. So if you don’t want certain teams to see those assets that you have, you can set that at the folder level. Folders also power your workflow. So you have the option to run a workflow at the folder level, review and approve your workflow at the folder level as well. You can smart tag every asset at the folder level. Folders help you power your metadata. You can bulk apply metadata at the folder level as well. And it’s just simply critical for performance. If your folders get too unwieldy, performance will be hindered. So they will really help you organize everything that you’re doing. And Sharon’s gonna get into a lot of specifics on that. One of the big reasons this is so important is because you have to be able to scale all your asset creation and find your assets within the dam. So this slide is really just illustrating kind of the level of intensity that marketing teams are facing given the very high expectations of customers for these, of course, always on, always fresh, always relevant experiences at every touch point. So what we’re seeing here is just an illustration of an existing Adobe customer. This is a manufacturing customer using AEM assets. And this company basically has 45 products. This will probably ring true for a lot of you. So they have 45 SKUs and they’ve created 25 assets per product. So you can see that 45 products quickly jumps to over 1100 assets if each of those products needs 25 assets. And then you layer on the number of languages and the localization that you need to do. And then suddenly, just extremely quickly, your dam has 17,000 assets in it. And this is not even accounting for things like personalization and that sort of thing. So very quickly, your dam can balloon into thousands and thousands of assets. So as an organization, you have to create, manage and deliver all of these assets every year to support however many products you might have. You have to consider renditions. As I say, there’s personalization, there’s renditions. Being able to deliver across devices, screen sizes, this number of assets continue to grow exponentially. So I think it all comes back to folder structure in the dam because if you’re struggling to find your assets, you certainly won’t be able to create the renditions, do the personalization and deliver experiences at scale without being able to actually find those assets. So we want to make sure you have all the tools at your disposal to be able to organize your content in the way that you need to. And then just lastly, before I hand over to Sharon, it’s worth noting that your investment in AEM assets is really an investment in having a single source of truth for your content at enterprise scale. So you can use this to find assets that are stored in either the dam or licensed by Adobe Stock. You can use AEM assets to easily search the repository through keywords, search within search and faceted driven exploration. And we’re gonna see what that looks like later. AEM assets is going to eliminate what we call dark assets, those assets that you just simply cannot find within the dam. And of course, delivering intuitive and responsive asset upload either in bulk or by individual assets. So that’s kind of a lot to think about, but I wanna just kind of do a preface for you. And we’re gonna hand off to Sharon. I’m so excited to co-present with her today. And she’s gonna take us through all of those great topics that I mentioned just a moment ago. All right, Sharon, over to you. Thanks. So let me just catch up on my slide here. Sorry. And I’m gonna share my screen. No. Let me know Michelle when you’re seeing. Are we seeing full destruction best practices? Okay. So welcome to full destruction best practices. My name is Sharon Bull and I am a dam strategist with Adobe, which means I spend pretty much 99% of my time helping customers with their folder structures, their metadata permissions, all sorts of dam related solutions to today’s problems. So let’s just jump in. So when you think of folder structures in the AEM and people who are using AEM now, you think of this nice organized folder structure, everything’s where it should be and everything makes sense. What actually happens is that dam folder structures go wild, whether they were implemented without planning for the future or they were implemented and there was no governance employed on this. So that what happens is you start to see folders with duplicate assets. You have old assets that are used everywhere throughout the folder. If people don’t understand, your users don’t understand the folder structure, they’re gonna start creating their own folders, they’re gonna start putting things in folders that don’t make sense. So you end up with many product image folders scattered throughout your dam. You may end up with campaign folders that also use product images, so you have duplicate assets, you’re not leveraging the assets you have correctly, you can run into problems with compliance with release information and everything else. So if this looks familiar to you, you’re not alone. When you’re planning, let’s start from the beginning and when you’re planning a folder structure, if you have that luxury where you can start new with AEM, what you can do is brainstorm together with your team and make sure that you have all the stakeholders that will be using the dam represented in those brainstorming sessions. Often, there’ll be someone appointed to run the Adobe project, they’re not familiar with how creative people or marketing or a certain stakeholder group is using the dam and things get missed and there’s many ways, you can have very detailed diagrams, you can do flow charting, whiteboard, stickers, whatever it is because there’s gonna be a lot of give and take while you’re planning that and that’s a session we do run with the enterprise projects. So why do you need folder structures? Permission ingestion, processing and performance, my Ps. These are the reasons that folders are so important in AEM. So as far as permission goes, like we touched on earlier, you can grant people permission to certain folders. You know, if you have a distributed authoring group, you know, you have people in different languages and you only want them to be able to edit their languages, you can have multi-tenant groups where different business groups have access to different folders. They may be able to see your entire dam but they can only edit or manage assets in their particular folder. That’s the setup I see most often where direct mail can see everything in global, creative studio, internal communications but they can only add and edit things in the direct mail folder. That gives internal communications and creative studio the confidence that no one’s gonna come in and mess up their stuff but yet you can still leverage it because direct mail can come and say, hey, I want that logo from creative studio and they can bring it over into their area and use it or use it directly from creative studio. And then accessing by groups. Again, you know, brand, marketing, enterprise will probably want their own permissions. Typically we see brand managing the brand assets such as logos or templates or things like that. So they own that, they can manage it and create it and all the other groups can access those but they can’t tamper with the originals that are being shared. Processing, folders are super important to processing. So I don’t know how many of you have, you started the workflow journeys or any automation within AEM but you definitely wanna think of that because it’s a superpower of AEM. We can use folders to apply metadata. So everything that gets put into internal communications can have certain metadata tags applied to it because of the folder it’s put in. It automates some of those rudge work really that authors would have to do. So applying language tags, applying even disclaimers to certain content because it’s in a certain folder. Renditions, definitely. So if you have social content or in internal communications, you have certain sizes of images you use to supply your internal intranet or for newsletters or whatever, we can have AEM automatically create those renditions based on the folder it’s put in. So it doesn’t get applied to the whole dam, just the assets in that folder. Workflows are amazing to automate the steps in the asset lifecycle as well as do some processing in the background. You know, different sizes of the image, turn it to black and white in certain folders, move it, you know, if you update the metadata to say this has music in it, we can move it into a workflow that checks for a release, talent releases and music releases. Live copies is another AEM assets concept that, you know, it’s not used in every situation, but there is the opportunity to have a global blueprint of all your content and syndicate it out to different areas. Typically it’s languages, but it could be regions and you can syndicate that content out so they all get the master copy in their area and then they’re responsible for those authors are responsible for localization or translation of that content. That can be done to the synchronized content, but it will preserve any relationships to talent releases. It’ll preserve the metadata that was applied at a global level. So it can be somewhat managed from that global level, but localized and translated at a regional level. And then the last, but very important item for asset folder structures is performance. So AEM does have some thresholds for how many assets can be in a folder. There’s no magic number of what, you know, it’s 1500 assets. It actually has to do with the size of those assets, what processes are being applied to those assets and how those assets are being used by authors. So if I was to have, let’s just say 45,000 assets in project A, when I go towards project A as a user and search those assets, there’s gonna be a lag in the performance. There may be a lag in the performance if those assets are running through rendition workflows when they’re ingested and that’s gonna slow things down. If the system has to traverse a large number of files to perform any checking or compliance or workflows, that’s when the system sees degradation in performance. So what we do when we work with clients and you could do on your own is make sure that your folders are balanced and that we’re not having one giant folder called logos. You would create levels underneath logos. So maybe you have internal logos, partner logos, vendor logos, event logos, you can split them up. So if by splitting up the very large files into subfolders, you can solve for the performance issues. So let’s go into some best practices. Naming folders. So this can go for folders and profiles, by the way. The folder title can be humanly friendly. So I can write health and beauty products and that can be my folder title. But the folder name, which is used as the URL in the folder path, that can be whatever you need it to be. So if this is an internal numbering system for health and beauty products, you can have both of these items represented in the folder. So that way, if I was to do a search on health and beauty products or a search on the HB number, that folder would be returned in the folder results. That way you don’t have to put metadata into the folder to have this HB number show up. I know everyone wants to get to the stake.

So again, this is the human readable title and there are some screens within AEM that cut off the title name after so many characters. So it’s a really good practice just to have short folder names. It’s also just human readability to have short folder names. And then the name itself, this is in your URL. So you want to keep it short and you want to keep it so as you would want it represented in a URL. And then whatever you do, be consistent. So if you have the long name here and then a number here, make sure that all your folders, as much as you can, follow that pattern so that people aren’t guessing what the pattern is. So once you have your folder names and you’ve set up your, you know, you’ve drafted it on the whiteboard or you’ve put together an Excel spreadsheet with your folders, something that’s super useful is to test your folder practice. You don’t have to have it set up in AEM. If I’m on site with you all, usually I’d use flashcards of assets that you have. And what we do is we pull up an asset and we say, which folder would you put this in? And it’s a speed round. So the stakeholders in the room need to identify, oh, that would go into restaurant food or that would go into steak, beef, and they identify the folder it would go into with your proposed structure. If there’s discussion around where that asset should belong, then you know you have some confusion around your full structures and you need to take another look. The reason I have a steak here is because this is not the actual image, by the way, but during one of these folder test sessions, the customer had a number of hospitality sites worldwide.

And I threw up this steak image and said, where would this go? Thinking it would be so simple that it would belong in the restaurant structure and it would go under food or entrees. What actually happened was the plate had, the plate in the original image had some markings on it that made it very specific to a specific restaurant, which I wouldn’t have caught in the folder structure exercises, that because that plate had the markings of a certain restaurant, it needed to be put in a totally new structure. We also identified some new metadata that would need to be applied to our assets in order to manage these things. So testing your structure is great for folder structuring, you know, to make sure you have a comfortable structure for all of your stakeholders to use, but it’s also good for uncovering use cases that you may not have considered. And if you get your stakeholder buy-in on the folder structure early, then they’re less apt to come in and just start placing items where they want to, because they don’t understand how the structure works. So when you’re building it out, another thing to consider, I get asked a lot, is should it be a folder or should we do that as metadata on the assets? And there’s some differences between the two. Assets can only live in one folder. You can’t, well, you can, but best practice is to have an asset only live in one folder and be reused from that source folder. If something comes up, like for instance, that state plate, if that came up and the stakeholder start discussing, you know, well, it needs to live in the restaurant folder and it needs to live in an entree folder and it needs to live in food folder too, then I start to wonder and consider if those bits of information would be better served as metadata rather than folders. So there are some differences. You can see them here. Processes can be run on assets in a folder. If you’re grouping them by a folder, you know, all the videos are in one folder, so we can process them the same. So there’s reasons you would use the folders, such as permissions can be applied by folder, and folders can be used to narrow down processes of filters, and you can search on folder attributes. Metadata on the other hand, you can move assets from one folder to another based on metadata. Permissions cannot be applied based on metadata, and that’s super important, and that’s usually the gotcha when you’re planning these things out. You’re like, hey, I’ll use that as metadata, and now we just have to make it so that only managers can see files tagged with this. That’s not possible in AEM. Metadata is used to include or add items from across folders, so you can create dynamic collections. So the big difference is folders narrow down assets, and metadata is something you can use to include assets in larger than their folder processes, and you can search on metadata just like folders. So let’s talk about a little example here.

Excuse me. In this example, we’re working with a Creative Studio folder. Now, the Creative Studio is, they’re working with the life cycle of assets, so they’re going to ingest new assets either from their own teams or from vendors and agencies. They’re gonna work on those assets and make changes and make sure that they’re embedded in the right places, and then they’re gonna review the assets. Often we’ll create something similar to these three folders where there’s an ingestion folder, a WIP folder, and a review folder. In that way, we can permission the users appropriately. So the example is if I’m with vendor one and I’m working on project B, I would be permissioned to see these two folders, and that would hold true for like Adobe AssetLink where I’m working in Photoshop and I wanna reach into the dam, or if I’m working with desktop app and the UI, the desktop UI. I can reach into just the folders that I can see. So if I was this vendor person, I would actually not even see these other folders because I would have no reason to. When I look at ingestion, I would see my folder. When I look at WIP, I would see only the projects I’m permissioned to work on, which helps because you don’t really need to see all that other clutter. And I know some companies are very cautious of sharing vendor one’s work with vendor two. So the permissions are folder-based and it’s very important to align them with your processes. So you can get very granular. So not only am I vendor one and project B, but in my vendor folder, I have all the permissions. I can create, I can modify, I can delete files, I can do whatever I want in there. In project B, I can only view and download. So I can go into project B and I can download the assets I need to work on, I can download logos, I can download whatever I need from project B, but I cannot edit or manage any of the files that exist there. That protects everyone else’s work from vendor one, but still allows vendor one to access what they need.

That’s really it. So on this one, again, with this ingestion WIP and review model, you can apply metadata. So everything that comes into this ingestion folder, I can tag with vendor one as the source of that information. I can tag with items specific to vendor one, maybe their billing code, maybe their users are the people that get tagged on those things. There’s an infinite amount of number. Their design brief information can be included automatically with applying metadata at the folder level. So it comes in and then based on, I put it in, you can either have the vendor push it to project B or whoever’s the manager of project B can say, yes, promote this to the project level. And that would be done through a metadata field where I can say this is accepted by my company. And then through workflow, it gets pushed to project B to be incorporated in the project. After it’s in project B, once everything is worked on and everyone likes the way everything is looking, it can get pushed into that review folder. So ready for approval. And from that folder, reviewers can come in and just see this ready for review folder and that may be split by project or other permissions. They can make a decision using workflow. Does it need rework? And that would go back to the project or the vendor directly, send an email to the vendor saying this needs rework. It didn’t pass. Or I can accept it, which would push it to ready to publish. That would be a finals folder. From that finals folder, you can then push things to dynamic media or run processes within AEM to create the renditions that you need. And all of this, all of these green things are managed through workflow, but they’re keyed off of folders. So we need the folders in place to support the workflow. So I mentioned folder metadata a few times and everyone thinks of metadata as being the tags that are applied to the asset, including smart tags, which are shown here. Why is that important? Because as the metadata combined with folders increase your findability, reduce your risk if you’re getting into compliance and talent releases. And it provides brand consistency because you can, like I said, auto tag things with brand names based on folders. You can tag them with divisions, groups, things like that, where you can complete really easily complete the audits on those items and financial savings, because if you can find the assets using tags, you don’t need to recreate them, which saves you money. There’s all types of metadata we deal with. These are the four big buckets, but you have descriptive, administrative, process, and technical that all need to be considered. Often when I jumped into a company, you’ll see that they went really heavy on the descriptive metadata, but they didn’t really consider the items that need to be captured as metadata to run those workflows. So when you’re planning out your metadata, you just want to make sure you hit all four of these and make sure it aligns with your folders. So folders have their own metadata on top of assets having metadata. So the folder metadata is also a schema that you can design. I just did this for a demo, but you can design what attributes you want to capture with the folder itself. And this can help support those workflows. This can help support auto tagging. So there are reasons that you would want to have custom metadata properties on folders, perhaps to call out business groups or owners, things like that. And what I really want to impress upon everyone I speak to about folders and metadata is that it’s not just AEM. You really need to consider the source of your assets. Are you working with it in JIRA or with any of the systems outside of AEM that could provide that metadata to AEM even on and then govern it by the folders. So all creative assets can pull in metadata from all these things into AEM. And it doesn’t have to be, you know, damn wide. It can be on a siloed basis by the folders. But we always try to think big of upstream and downstream from metadata and folders. And I’m not going to go any deeper into metadata because as mentioned before, if Elise Han’s going to do her metadata presentation and deep dive on February 16th, and I highly, highly recommend her session on that. Great, so now we’re going to jump into some search features.

So we have Adobe Sensei, which I touched on, that allows you to do the smart tags, but also similar search, I’ll be showing you that, and smart translate search. So smart translate search, I didn’t fire that up on my local because it requires you to install a bunch of language files. So what I’m going to do is just show it to you here. So in AEM, if you were to look for, you know, use the Spanish word for running, and I was to look for files that had the word running, it wouldn’t show up. So this is going to show you how to actually configure it. I don’t think you want to see that during this demo, but this video is out and available on the Experience Lead website. So let’s go back to here. So if I was to type in Coriendo, I would not get any files about running because I didn’t tag them with any AEM tags that said Coriendo on the running images. What the language pack does is it actually does that matching for you so that as an author, I don’t have to do anything. And then when I type in Coriendo, it’s going to bring up the files that have running in them in English. And this is very helpful because, yeah, smart tags are only in English right now, but this does the translation between smart tags and the language terms that you would use. So it’s just going to run through some examples of how you’re searching for things in another language. And that keyword doesn’t exist anywhere on these assets. It’s not in the metadata. It’s not in the title. It’s actually doing a language translation into the English word and then searching on that. That can be set up. There’s language packs that you can download and set up. So let’s talk about, before I go into there, let’s go to AEM. So in AEM, I just want to show you how that similar search works. So first of all, the thing I want to push here is if you do have Adobe Stock, make sure that you enable that within your AEM because you can search for, nothing, nice, you can search for Adobe Stock right inside AEM. Search here, I just want to get to an image. So as I’m going through here, I can see that there’s images in my thing. I can click on the ellipsis and say find similar images. And that’s why it’s broken because I don’t have smart tags enabled. But if I did, it would bring up similar images. Let me see if I can get it working on something else. Actually, let me do one thing behind the scenes here while we’re talking. Gonna actually put something else. Okay, so it would pull up similar images to the one I had. And that uses the smart tags as you saw in order to understand, you know, backpacks are very similar or everything is blue. The other thing I want to show you is facets. So facets are a way to search in AEM. We have out of the box facets that come with that asset search. And you can make your own custom asset searches or search facets in AEM. So if I go to filter, you can see that we have some custom filters here like business, CC status. Remember the folders I had set up? So if you want to see all the files that were in the new folder or all the files that were in the WIP folder, you could set that up. You can also search the vendors. So all your vendors could be here or this could be a tag. So you can set up these to be able to filter your results by these very custom filters. First thing you need to do is actually apply that metadata onto the assets. But let’s say I did a search on all the blue assets. So I find all the blue things. I could also apply other statuses had I actually tagged them. And then what you’d want to do is change this to files and you can create that dynamic collection. I’m going to save a smart collection here and I’m going to call it my blue things. Blue is a very light example of this. But say you had assets and you wanted to create everything from vendor one and project A, you could check those things off. I can make this collection public and that collection would be available in here in this dropdown. I can go to my blue things whenever I go to the filter. And also if I went to, just going to back up here, it was my fault. That wasn’t the system. If I went to AEM and I was logging into assets, you’ll see that we have a collections booth here. That collection would show my blue things. So I can always come here. Some examples for these dynamic collections and the reason they’re dynamic is if someone was to upload a new asset that was blue, it would be added to this collection automatically. And some people use this to show all the new assets from a vendor or a creative and they can come in and see what’s new or what’s been added in the last 24 hours because you do have, whoops, you do have the filters available to show you by time. So you can create workable collections from here that are outside your folders. The assets are still living in their folders, but I’m able to curate or dynamically curate a group of assets based on, I can look at everything that I modified in the last day. So you can see that all these things are added in the last day. So I may have a use to look at all the new assets to make sure that they all have talent releases before I check them and say these are compliant and they can move on to their next step in the workflow. Let’s go back to, sorry, here. So that’s facets.

Custom facets are organization specific search terms. So you may have solution partners, strategic partners, corporate zones, things like that that are in your metadata that you can use in this filtering area. Collections we just covered, searching the blue things. And then the difference between collections and smart collections or dynamic collections. This collection would be a static reference list of assets folders. This is something like you would curate in your lightbox. You would put all the assets you’re working on that day into a lightbox so they’re in one place. They wouldn’t change, they wouldn’t get updated. It would just be a collection of assets you want to work on. A smart collection is based on filters and it’s dynamically updated. And you can create personal quick clicks to check on those assets. And we did a demo of that. So now we’re down to renovating your folders. So AEM has a companion tool set in ACS AEM Commons.

And I’m not sure if who’s used that yet. Let me get you to there. Let me go to ACS Commons, which is the easiest way to find this. This is an open source set of tools built by Adobe developers. They’re not covered in your support program with AEM. So I am gonna caution you on that. But there’s a number of tools that have been requested by projects, you know, something we wanted to have the, sorry, something we wanted AEM to do, but it didn’t do at the time. So custom code was written to enable that process. Sometimes these bits of code get incorporated into the product. But until they do, they live here. The one we’re gonna talk about is Renovator. And Renovator is a tool that allows you to move your folders around. So let’s go back to AEM. Once you can go to that ACS Commons place, if you have admin rights for your AEM instance, or you may want to work with your IT department, and then you can go to Tools, and ACS AEM Commons will be here, Manage Control Processes. And this is a group of processes. This is my favorite tool, by the way, because you can create folders. You can upload bulk folders. It’s just a spreadsheet of all the folders you need to create. You can also upload tags this way. And in this case, we’re gonna do Renovator. So the Renovator lets you, sorry, look at that again. Okay, the Renovator lets you take a source folder. So say I wanted to go to Assets, and I wanted to pull everything from, let’s pull everything from this Dynamic Media folder. I’m gonna pull everything from this Dynamic Media folder, and I’m gonna reorganize it into a folder under Skill Builder. That’s Skill Builder. And I’m gonna put it under my Asia folder in Creative Studio with Inasia under Project Team One. Asia Creative with Project Team One. So I’m gonna make that change. This is me moving all the assets in a folder to another folder. And you can do a dry run, and just like run the process and see if there’s any errors first. We’re not gonna do that. You can, and the nice part about this, why don’t I just use the Move command? Because the Move command doesn’t handle large amounts of assets. I don’t know if you ever tried it. And also, the nice part about this is it maintains the publish status of your assets. So if you’re moving a large variety of assets in a folder, some are published, some are not, it will maintain which ones were published and make sure that they’re published at the end of this so you don’t have to go back in and republish them after a move. You can create inversions. You can update the status of these to publish, not published. And you can do ACL checks just to make sure you have rights to do all that. Because this is a demo, I’m just gonna push the button. I’m just gonna do the completion of this, and then we’re gonna go look at it. And then I’ll show you how to change the name. So we just did that. So let’s go back into AEM, go to my files. This is a tricky part. I have to remember where I put them.

So I put them under Skill Builder, Asia, Creative Studio, zip, Project Team 1. And you can see now all my airplanes are there where there was no airplanes before. So that’s really the most efficient way to move all your assets from one folder to the other. The other thing you can do with the AEM Renovator is create a spreadsheet. So I can say assets that are here, this is my path for these assets, and you can export this as a metadata report or a file report. All you have to do is go to Assets Reports and export it. And you have your source files. So all these are here. I’m gonna move them to a new folder, and then I’m gonna rename them. And I’m gonna rename them to different things. And that allows you to take very large amounts of information and rename them to whatever you need. And you can put them into new folders. You can divvy it up. So on one of the projects we worked on, they had over 21,000 assets that needed to be rearranged. So we worked with a spreadsheet that had the 21,000 assets in it. And based on their naming in folder here, we would rename and move and migrate the new folders over here. Their assets were named. They weren’t following best practices. They had spaces. They were using all capitals and underscores and everything else, and we wanted to rename them. So we used this method to rename and replace all the assets. For 21,000 assets, we were able to complete the spreadsheet and run the renovator within a week and a half. So it’s a pretty impressive tool to do that. When you’re running this, you would come in here, go to the renovator, start the process. We would go to renovator, and you would upload that spreadsheet into here. And then you would run it as you would anything else. So I’m gonna run that. The problem is those files don’t exist in here. So it’s ignoring my efforts. But that’s how easy it would be to rearrange the files once you have them. And the nice part about the renovator is that it does preserve that publish status because in the old days, if you moved assets around, you’d have to ensure to republish them so that everything didn’t break on the other end. So it’s a very strong tool for those things. And that is my folder presentation for today. And I’m gonna turn it back to you, Michelle. So Bridget, sorry. Hey, thank you so much, Sharon. That was terrific. I wanted to, before we dive into questions, and Sharon, let me tell you, there are a lot of questions. People have questions. So. That’s good.

So just briefly, before we go to the questions, I wanted to remind everybody that the Adobe Summit is coming up April 27th and 28th, and it’s free. And if you want to register, just simply go to summit.adobe.com to do so. And it’s worth mentioning that we have several sessions just for AEM assets that will probably be very interesting to you. So we’ll be looking at things like what’s new in Experience Manager assets. So we’ll talk through the top-down features. This will be the director of our product management team and our product marketing team. So it’s a great session. There is a content strategy and architecture that is designed to drive velocity sessions. Elise Han, who will be presenting to you next week, also has a session at Summit called Is Your Metadata Future Ready? So that’s another deep dive into metadata. We have a customer story around Lumen, and interesting case study there around tying value to enterprise assets. Ben and Jerry will be presenting for us. This is more a session around Adobe AssetLink and Creative Cloud. When we get to the point of hearing from Greg Klebas in a few weeks about AssetLink, I think it’ll make this Ben and Jerry session that much more relevant. You’ll really understand how the upstream creative and the downstream marketing can work together through that tool. And then we’ve got some training workshops, one on metadata and one on dynamic media. So just worth mentioning, it’s a great time to sign up for Adobe Summit. It’s free and you can pick and choose whatever session you’d like to go to. Okay, so with that, I think what we wanna do is dive in. I’m gonna read the questions off Sharon, and you can, some of these dates, back to the beginning. So in the best practices section, you gave an example where direct mail can bring over the logo to use in their folder. What do you mean by this? It sounds like permissions just are created and need to create duplicate assets. So you can bring those assets over. So if I were a creative person and I was building something in InDesign, I would have all my source files in that work in progress folder. And when I needed to pull in the logo into my InDesign file, I would reach into the dam and actually pull that logo from the logos folder. I wouldn’t duplicate it from my project folder. I would use it from the logos folder directly in my asset creation in InDesign, because you can reach in with Creative Cloud Connect. You can reach in to any folder. So I wouldn’t create a duplicate from my project folder. I would just use the master from where it lives. I hope that helps. But if you had a reason why you would have to duplicate it, you could. But typically, if you’re gonna have a vendor create something for you, you would send them the link to the master logo that they’re gonna use in their creation steps. That’s how I would use that. Okay, so our next question, again, this is back from the first few slides. So I see the archived block. Can you please suggest an effective archiving workflow? So what a standard workflow would be is when assets are, so if you have a review timing, so you know that everything has to be reviewed in a year. And then after it’s reviewed, people usually make the decision, do I archive this? Or do I renew its lease on life? Once it’s set for archive, there can be a piece of metadata that says archive this, then the workflow would kick in, and it would move that asset into an archive folder. And that archive folder may have subfolders that mirror the current folder structure, or it might be completely different. But it would move, literally move, the asset into an archive folder. The archive folder would be ignored by search processes, ignored by those filters, so that it takes that asset pretty much out of processing, and puts it in a short-term freeze.

And it’s sitting there. If you needed to have that asset come back into your universe, you could just move it back into a folder. AEM is not long-term storage. So after a while, you will want to move those long-term asset archives off of AEM into another archive.

Into another file storage system. But the effective workflow is to have your users decide whether something should be archived or not, and usually that’s permissions. You don’t have everybody with that ability. They tag it as to be archived through metadata, and that metadata drives a workflow that moves it into the other folder. Okay, great. Here’s kind of a review. Someone is asking, can you just review again how metadata can make a single asset appear across multiple folders? Okay, so the asset only lives in one folder. And what’s gonna happen is like those blue things, so those blue things I showed on my screen were from all over the dam. So by having the metadata blue, I created that collection of blue things. It pulled things across folders into that collection. And the collection becomes like a temporary folder for everything blue. And that’s how you could create, I’m gonna put air quotes around folder, but it’s actually a collection of all things blue, even though they all live in unique folders. They wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have, like if you had blue flippers and a blue sky, they could live in two different folders, but the collection can bring it together into one. It’s also metadata. If you have different documentation, say you have brochures and you have stacks and you have this, and they’re all different folders.

On the front end of your site, you can use metadata to pull the product related items from those three folders and display them on the page. So metadata allows you to include items across folders in display or in a collection. All right, great. Okay, so is a collection a folder that can be acted upon by workflow? Good question. Sometimes yes and sometimes no, it depends on what the workflow you want to have happen.

That wasn’t a very satisfying answer, I know. I can actually, if you wanna reach out to me, that’s at Adobe, I can get more granular about that, but it would help to know what workflows you would be looking to run on that. Okay, thank you.

Next one, sometimes it is inevitable to have duplicate assets in different folders. How do you make sure that the versions stay in sync? So that’s where that live copy would be helpful. You would create a live copy where one of those would be the master of the other one. And that’s a syncing process between the two. So if I had a syringe, that’s a horrible thing that just came to mind. If I had this image of the syringe in one folder, I could live copy that into another folder, and then any changes made from the master would be reflected in the synced copy, even though there’s two of them. Right, okay, so next one. Are you able to make collections available in AEM sites as a filter parameter? You wouldn’t be using collections, but in sites you would use the same filtering on the same metadata on the same attributes. So the short answer is yes, it’s just technically performed differently. So if you can filter it into a collection back here in author, you can display it by those same attributes on sites. Okay, next one. Is it possible to organize the collection, for example, build a tree navigation? Yes, and that’s relatively new, but great question. Yes, you can create foldering or an hierarchy in the collections. So you could have business groups, and then under each business group they have their own collections. Right, now we have a few questions about the asset renovator tool. So does the renovator tool break the folder length? Does the tool update URL references? And just meaning if the site is referencing assets, do those links break or do they get redirected automatically? Great questions, and I should have covered those. But yes, the folder links are preserved. That’s one of the other major things. If it is linked to other things or related, those are all preserved using the renovator.

The URL link is also preserved. So if it’s used, or what should I say, redirected, I can’t think of the right word, but if I have assets being used on sites, I use the renovator and those URLs are updated to reflect its new location automatically. And then again, published or unpublished based on the status where it was. So if you have assets, it will not break your assets in use. It’ll preserve that. If you’d wanna, I’m just gonna caution you, don’t just do that live. You just wanna do that in a staged environment and test it. But yeah, it’s meant to preserve those things. Terrific, okay, I think we’re down to our last email, or sorry, last question. So can AEM Commons be used with AEM as a cloud service? No, so that’s another good point. Yep. All right, so with that, I want to thank everyone. Please, if you’re able, we’d love to get your feedback. We’ve just got three quick questions for you to close out, to find out how we did, what you’ve learned, what we can do better next time. And if you’ve got, I think, I hate to broadcast this again, Sharon, but you offered up your email address and there’s a question. Yeah, I did. Okay. That’s fine. So let’s go ahead, I’ll go ahead and say it and then I’ll put it in the Q&A pod as well. H-ball at Adobe.