Skill Exchange Event Aug 2023 - AEM Web Track - Connected Ecosystem: Leveraging a Collaborative DAM

Transcript

Hi, my name is Joseph van Buskirk and I’m with the Integrated Architecture team at Adobe. And today I’m going to be talking with everyone about the connected ecosystem, how to drive content velocity in your organization. A few things just about myself. I have over 15 years of experience in the software and digital marketing domain. And I spent almost 10 years in with Adobe specifically. I’ve seen a lot on the ground with our customers and different organizations. And so a lot of what I’m going to be talking about today is not only the strategic direction Adobe is going to be going into, but also comes from what I’ve seen with other customers and organizations. So look forward to talking to the folks on the call about this today. So we can start with the question, right? What is an ecosystem, right? I mean, at a very high level, an ecosystem is a complex network, right? Of different processes and people all interacting to accomplish something in particular. When we talk about content, that’s what this is. I’m building content in the modern era is a complex task. It is not just the way it was, let’s say, you know, 100 years ago, 50 years ago in the modern era, creating content, especially in the digital sphere. You’re talking about a lot of people, a lot of different processes and a lot of different things that have to work efficiently with the creative team, with the web operations team and with different sectors of your organization to work synchronously. And also the thing about content creation is that it is hard. It is hard to do. And one thing we’re going to be talking about today is how we can make content creation specifically to the design and to the execution better and more efficient for all the parties involved. So the question we might ask right from a damn perspective is why collaborate? What’s the point of it? Why do you need a collaborative dam? And this is again, I want to go back to something I’ve talked about with other clients and other folks, which is that there’s a lot of different reasons why a dam should be used, not just as a repository of final assets, but a significant repository to be used by the creative and design team as well. Then there’s a lot of different reasons. First, it’s just a lot quicker, right? Instead of using multiple systems, instead of using multiple local drives to store assets, you can have it in one single dam, one single repository. Also for tracking usage, being able to track who’s doing what and where. And this is where you can drive velocity. Also to facilitate reuse across channels. This is a huge, huge element in terms of digital marketing, what modern creatives and producers want to do, which is be able to have assets, to have a content creation process and be able to reuse that and recycle that across the organization. So your designers and creators aren’t re you aren’t using and creating new assets. If you’re, if you have a collaborative dam that sinks both the design and creation, as well as the final assets, you can enable transparency in that cycle from beginning to end. So why do organizations struggle with this? A large reason is that you have these two archetypes, right? Have that have been around, you know, probably since the beginning of digital asset management. You have the production team and what is the production team involved in? This is mainly web operations. And what they want is they want to be able to take an asset, whether that be web content, whether that be an asset that it’s going to be, that’s going to be going to a third party. What they want to do is take that asset, have metadata on it, drive it down into the, you know, the production process, and then to distribute that across to different channels. And so the real theme of what a producer wants, right, is efficiency, transparency, and to be able to have a fine tuned process. And that’s what a lot of web producers and a lot of those in web operations are looking to. They want to drive efficiency when the production process begins. From a designer perspective, what do designers want? What do they need to do? They need to spontaneously create experiences. And so they want to be able to take what are some ideas that the marketing team has come up with and be able to create that, ideate that, and spontaneously create and design these concepts, turn them into web assets, and then we’ll put them into a framework that can be turned into a web asset as quick as possible with really tight deadlines. So you see, you know, one, one archetype lives from a web operations perspective, lives in process, efficiency, exact tasks, needs a system in place. And from a design and creative standpoint, you need a framework that’s more spontaneous. And so to look at this in a little bit different, in a little bit in a different light. So if you look at a creator, what are they doing? They need a structure that’s organic, that works in the way that their team actually works in day to day. They need approval processes that don’t go, that aren’t convoluted, that can be done fairly and also they want to spontaneously iterate. From a production standpoint, you need, just as I said before, you’re looking at efficiency and metadata, you’re looking at processes and you’re looking mainly at a structure that is systematic, that is able to go from beginning to end and be able to take those handoffs in a systematic manner, process those into web content. If you’re a web author, if you’re in assets and you’re in web operations, put the right metadata on. So what we want to do is really align and bring these two pieces together in what is a collaborative dam.

So this is what you generally want your content ecosystem to look like. You want the people to be working in the systems that they actually, to be living in the systems they do work in. You don’t want people to be system hopping, right? And this is especially for the design team as well. What designers and creators want to do most of all is they want to work in one place. They want to work in one place. They want to get the job done. They don’t want to deal with these processes. And producers, the same thing. They want to be able to work in a place and not have to go back and forth. So this is what we want to see, a place where people are working in one area and the solutions are working and orbiting, as you can see, along with the actual work that they do. Unfortunately, this is the way it often looks like. The designers are working in different servers because the designers are working in different servers. The producers have to know through tribal knowledge, all the different servers, all the different areas and tools that different folks are working on. There’s a lot of chaos, right? From a design perspective, the designer is looking at all these areas. They’re searching for assets here and there in different systems. And the producer has to basically be frustrated because you have these different convoluted processes all working to create what is like a web asset. Right. So where’s the dam in this whole thing? Right. And that’s what we want to talk about is how we can build the creative integration into this collaborative approach. And so the solution to this really is utilizing AAM, the Creative Cloud and really asset linked together in a cohesive manner to put a lot of these work, to put these assets, which were in different systems and utilizing the dam as a work in progress area for creative storage. And you do that through you having the Creative Cloud and then you have asset link as that bridge and then you have the dam. Right. And then the dam can operate as that repository of creative storage. And therefore everyone will be able to get what they want. The creator is able to work in one place and those in the production and management team can have one area that has all the assets that you can track metadata and you can track the entirety of the asset lifecycle into the dam. So what does this mean? So from a producer standpoint, from a web operation standpoint, which are going to be the majority of the folks in this audience, you have less maintenance databases, so you have cost savings from a management level. You also have richer metadata. Metadata is the fuel and it’s the blood that drives content. Right. And that drives reusability and that drives a dam to have incredible value add for the organization because that drives reuse, that drives ROI and that drives velocity, drives speed. And then once you get velocity, once you get speed, once you get reuse, what do you get? You get cooler campaigns, you get personalization and then you get revenue. So all those things are linked together. You also have from an efficiency standpoint, if you have creative storage and AM in the dam, you also have that visibility, as I talked about earlier, that data traceability. So what does the designer get? What does the creator get out of this thing? So from the first thing is that instead of going from local storage, local drives and having to maintain all these local databases, what they can do is they can go in and they can they actually have one area, one stop shop. They have a collaborative dam that they can check in and check out assets directly from their local server. Also, another really important point besides his approval. Is that asset reusability. Right now, when I talk to designers all the time and I talk to creatives all the time in different parts of the organization.

One of the biggest struggles that a lot of designers and creatives have is they want to build something out and they don’t know if it’s been done before. Because there’s no metadata. It’s all based off tribal knowledge. It’s all based off, oh, this server here has some assets. Oh, do you hear this guy? Then you have a friend who’s the person next to you, a coworker who says, oh, well, this this asset, this design, this UX design happens to be here, maybe somewhere in like a Figma file somewhere. Who knows? And so what you can do if you have a collaborative dam, the designer can just go in an asset link and they can just go in in the creative cloud and search for it. It’s an incredibly useful solution, and if integrating that in your practice is going to make the designer happy, it’s going to make the producer happy. So what does this look like? What this looks like is essentially this kind of take it step by step. And this is abstract. Clearly, there’s going to be a lot of caveats when you start putting this together.

First is, you know, you would have a marketing, you could have a photo shoot. At that point, you can either one, if you’re using Workfront, you can you can be able to populate like a work in progress folder structure to aim immediately when that task or that campaign begins. Or you could just have a damn librarian go in and just automatically build the folder structure. And there’s some really cool aim tools that can be used and we can talk about that later on for this. And then what happens is the designer go in.

And, you know, the designer will be creating, they’ll be going and they’ll be managing, they’ll be managing their assets in the creative cloud, and then they’ll also be storing and they can use bridge, which is another tool that we have to be able to be able to add and apply metadata. And then what we could do is we can is you could store those assets in the folder structure and aim and you check in and you check out through asset link. Then once that is done, you could have an aim workflow. Normally that’s just an out of the box workflow. Or if you want to put some custom metadata at it, you can do that. And you have this bifurcation, right? You have the work in progress assets, right, that the designer is creating. They’re checking in, they’re storing into the work in progress in this work in progress, creative storage area in the dam, which is highlighted in blue. And then what happens is though you have an aim workflow, populates those to those into that final area, which has the production ready assets. And then from there you have PAM and then you can go in and apply and do the retouching process and then get those assets ready for production. And I want to make it clear here. This can be used both if you have an aim sites, right? Because there’s an aim sites if you’re used creating web content, because we’re really talking about the creative process, which is, you know, can be used for any asset type, whether you’re talking about web assets, whether you’re talking about assets that are just any kind of binary file, any kind that you use, you can utilize creative integration into this. And also one thing you also get as well is you no longer have to utilize with asset link. And it’s really important in the old process. The creator was using all these different areas for local storage. What you’re doing now is you’re removing these areas, you’re removing this local storage and you’re putting these local servers that were used. You’re putting those into these work in progress, this work in progress, creative storage area in AEM. And again, that’s cost savings, it’s efficiency, it’s reusability, it’s speed in the end because you’re gaining this virtuous cycle over time. That’s one of the cool things about about this is that you get gains immediate.

If you do the proper setup work and a lot of that is simply configuration and business alignment, but especially over time, you start seeing a lot of gains and efficiencies. And and then that goes right into, again, personalization to scale and being able to have your creative team design better and cooler experiences. So what are the tools that are that are used for this? So when it comes to actually managing the creative storage, it can be used, you can use really AEM projects or an AEM folder structure. One of the things that I think is really important and it goes into one of these decision points here is that, you know, when you’re talking about creative storage and a dam, remember that although the benefits are the organization, the business logic and the structure has to be driven by the creative team because they’re going to be the ones using this. And so it’s really important that the designers align on a single structure. A lot of times that can be a really one day. I’ve had one day conversations where the art director, the designers get into a room and they just decide this is the structure that we want. Sometimes there’s a lot of different voices that need to be listened to to be able to be able to come to that position. Remember, this is where people are working and they want to know and they want to know and they want to have an area in the dam that instinctively works for them.

Secondly, from a tool perspective, folder based meta schema, it’s underutilized. I love folder based meta schema. There’s a lot of documentation on that in experience league. Use that in your work in progress asset, your work in progress folder. You can get free metadata that way. Really, it’s, you know, every time the designer goes in and checks in and checks out asset, that’s metadata that can be pulled into that asset and move into a finalized production asset. So you’re talking about metadata that can be used, it’s applied and it can be searched for. So use metadata based off the folder. It’s a really effective means to capture that. Automated folder creation, going back here, there’s a number of different ways that you can go in and populate that folder structure right when a marketing or photo shoot begins. The first is you have a dam librarian goes in and we have an automated folder creation is a tool that you can use in AM.

Very simple, again, underutilized, and it’s really awesome. Or what you can do is if you have Workfront, you can essentially have you can go in and create that folder structure right from right from Workfront through the enhanced connector or through the native integration of the cloud. Also, AM workflows, everyone should be familiar with these. Move those from work in progress once it’s done. Drive that automation, move it into that finalized state. And then, of course, you have a CSV import, really useful for importing that those files into the into AM. A few things just to think about. I said really, and I always say this outside the two those two top ones are really important. And I want to pay special attention to that second bullet. Make sure the creative team is enabled an asset link and get and get the folk and and have and have enablement sessions regarding that. A lot of the work is not going to be technical. It’s going to be configuration related and it’s it’s going to be getting the team used to working in a different structure and getting that buy in. You only have to work in one place. You’re going to have a lot of reuse. Yes, there might be a little bit of a learning curve in the beginning, but the benefits are going to be outstanding. So don’t go and underestimate and utilizing asset link. Also, as you go through this transformation, there’s going to be systems you want to keep. Right. You know, we want to remove a lot of those local servers that are being used in databases that aren’t really that effective. But there are going to be certain systems, you know, whether upstream or downstream, that are going to need to be used. A lot of time what I’ve seen is maybe there’s a system because of legal reasons. Right. You want to be able to have that validation. There might just be an edge case in your organization. Try to remove those, but there might be some that need to be kept anyways. Last thing I do want to talk about is integrated content creation. And this goes into content supply chain as well. Looking at work front, I know that there is going to be a separate work front presentations on this, but this is a really effective means to alleviate a lot of the different silos when you’re looking at we’re looking at project management, looking at creative work, when you’re looking at them and be able to integrate those all in to have total transparency, not just from an asset management perspective, but to have total transparency across the duration of the content lifecycle and the entire project and the entire campaign. And that’s where you can have work front as that singular layer. So this is how a lot of teams currently, if you have all the three solutions, I know not everyone might not have all three, but if you have all three, this is how a lot of times some people intuitively work. They have the project manager and they have the approvals and work front. You have the creative team just living in the creative cloud, having a system hop, and then you have the producers and the web operations working in the dam. This is a more effective way to do this is that you could go and you can integrate this all together. Right. You could have from the creative perspective looking over here in that in the green design, we have the work front creative cloud connector. That is a very it’s a very powerful plugin. And what that enables the creative team to do is not just to check in and check out assets through asset link, which is which you can see here as well, but to go in and actually through a plugin through the creative cloud, go in and click approvals in work front directly. And so not only are you getting rid of the system hopping from the asset perspective, you’re also getting rid of system hopping from the project approval perspective as well, which then again drives velocity even more and then drives adoption. Right. Which is what everyone wants to see is that return on is that return on investment when you have work front as that layer, that orchestration layer above again, you get that transparency through the entirety of not just the asset creation process, but the entire creation lifecycle in general.

And so that is it. Happy to take questions at the end. Really excited. And it was great talking with everybody. Hey, guys, welcome back. And that was a super insightful session. Joseph is nice to see you and he’s joining here with us live. We’re just having a little bit of a technical difficulty for this Q&A. He will be on his phone, but we can go ahead and jump right in. The first question is from Robbie and Robbie’s asking, how is it to be handle migrating any historical assets from various existing servers and consolidating those assets into AEM? Yeah, I mean, I think that’s I think that’s a really good question.

I think in general, what I would do in terms of approach is start with sort of a crawl, walk, run. Normally, when we talk about going in and working with these work in progress assets, I’ve seen it work a lot better when, you know, starting with the new campaign and then folks get used to that new process, especially the creative team. When it comes to the actual you know, when it comes to the actual migration of the assets, you know, I think it really depends on the priority of the assets you’re talking about and depends on the volume. Right. I generally think that, you know, starting with the newer campaigns and then slowly bringing in the assets so you don’t do necessarily a big bang approach nor works the best. So, you know, I think, you know, when it comes to assets, that’s what I would that’s the paradigm I would look towards. Right. Start because it is such a new change for the producers and the creators when you’re talking about not going to a local server, talking about checking in your asset, the asset link instead is what, you know, starting that process of starting that that change is the best way forward. And then later on, as your team gets used to that, then begin that migration. And that can be done in a lot of ways. You know, I think not all the different assets are going to be needed to go into AM. You might want to keep some legacy that maybe they aren’t maybe the team isn’t using. You can still keep those in those kind of archival storage. But the really but the real big point is to begin with is to start kind of sooner rather than later, just getting the process started up. So. Great. Thanks, Joseph. Next question is that you mentioned that there’s asset link and some other programs that connect to these things. Do you have or can you point us to any layout or diagram that lists the names of these connections since there’s a lot of programs that are Adobe umbrella? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So there’s a lot of documentation on asset link and experience league, so I definitely recommend going there and there’s a lot of really cool workflows that you can look through as well as a lot of great enablement video when it also one thing from just it used to be and I can’t speak for this, but it used to be that one of the requirements for asset link used to be an enterprise level license. I don’t believe that’s the case anymore.

But yeah, definitely there’s I would recommend just going into experience league. There’s a lot of great documentation and I will answer technical questions or configuration. One of the one of the issues that is not it’s not an issue, but something to be cognizant of. When you’re looking at asset link is there is a matter of permissioning and just to be cognizant of that and to be able to make sure that you have that right configuration set up from individuals logging in, logging out of a making sure that those permission structures are in place is going to be something to look at, especially around that creative cloud kind of AMP. But all the information should be in experience league and it’s right in there. Great, thanks for that, J.V.B. Malcolm is asking that this workflow that you mentioned your presentation, it works great for assets, but efficient is this workflow for, say, InDesign or Illustrator files and can creatives work efficiently with .indd files or .ai files with files housed within dam instead of on prem servers? You mentioned InDesign.

InDesign and Illustrator files. I can repeat the question if you want. The question is. If I. I got muted. We can hear you. Oh, can you hear me? OK, yeah, we can hear you. OK, for some reason I can. Yeah, so well, first of all, the for for InDesign files, there is there’s a few ways. There’s a lot of digital we’ve used this flow with a lot of digital print, you know, asset types. So certainly it can work for certainly it can work for InDesign and the actual and the actual plugin for asset link, one of the real use cases, right, is that digital to print piece. And actually, asset link just had an upgrade, not an upgrade, but on the roadmap, a new feature. Sounds good. Yeah.

All right, so keep talking. Yeah, so the yeah.

Yeah, so there are so the digital to print piece is certainly one of the real use cases we see for InDesign and on the roadmap, they we’ve been able to have multi linking, which is basically a feature. So I’m hearing some echoes here from my end. So it’s there. But yeah, the answer to the question is yes, you can use it for InDesign products as well. It’s around the content creation slide that we had in your presentation. The question is, are you saying that while the creative team is in the design project cycle, their work in process is already in AEM? And there’s a second part to the question, the second part is and is work from being used for review and approval of displaying the assets to approvers from AEM? OK, OK, I’m hearing a lot of echoes, so it’s a little bit difficult.

Can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you. OK, around the work in progress in in Workfront, the thing is, is that that can be done in terms of the approval, you can either use Workfront proof for that or you can utilize asset link to be able to link that to the final from the final approval. And let me get the question. One second. Yes, so basically the idea behind the work in progress file structure in AEM, the idea behind the work in progress file structure in AEM is that upon the creative brief being put in and starting that project into Workfront, let’s say, or if you don’t have Workfront upon a project being created, you basically you get a shell, which is a work in progress folder structure, which can be basically used as creative storage. And you have this sort of folder structure skeleton in AEM for the work, for that work in progress, for those work in progress assets. Right. So they’re already in AEM to begin with. And sorry, that wasn’t clear. That’s really the whole value add is that you want to get out of using these external storages that a lot of times these creators and designers are using. And instead, what you can do is you can essentially pre-create those in AEM upon a project being created. And there’s two ways if you’re using Workfront to do this. Well, first of all, there’s two ways. If you’re not using Workfront, what you can do is you can simply have a damn librarian go in and there’s feature functionality in AEM that’s that enables the an admin or a damn administrator to essentially create a programmatic folder structure relatively quickly. So that can just be kind of a really quick functional manual process upon the creation of a project. The other is if you have Workfront, you can basically create upon on the task level and the project creation level and Workfront essentially auto populate that folder structure immediately, which is why Workfront and AEM really work really well together for this use case. Right. Because because you can have that seamless integration. But here’s the thing. You don’t necessarily need that. If you can still utilize this value add outside of that as well.

Right. Thank you so much, JBB. And I once again apologize for attendees for the technical difficulties we’re having, but we are trying to power through them as much as possible. Jumping on to the next question, and it’s from Victor. Victor is asking that you spoke about having that collaborative dam with designers and management team, but how can it be collaborative at front end and back end developers? How can it be useful with with them? OK, so the real value out of this is really in the kind of two personas, right? You have the designer, the creator, and you have the producer. Right. And the producer, what I’m saying is, is this could be a person in Web operations as soon as someone who’s involved with applying metadata, organizing the dam. And that’s where you have this real kind of bifurcation right between the needs and the and the need for process and the need for reusable assets. Right. And the creators need to be able to find these reusable assets and to be able to work quickly. And that’s where you really see the kind of the beauty in this from a developer perspective.

Really, you know what the value add is, is one I mean, you’ll be able to hopefully you can have some insight into seeing the work in progress assets in the dam. But really, the the real value add is with that Web producer, with our Web operations and individual and as well as the creator and the designer from a developer. A lot of this process is done, you know, is done before the actual development execution. Right. Piece of it. Great, thanks, JBB. Next question is from Tansui, and she’s asking, can you share a use case where Adobe has handled sensitive regulatory review and the approval process via Workfront? If not a use case, can you have a point to at least some documentation on that? Yeah, I mean, one of yeah, that’s something that we actually get a lot I mean, a lot of times in the health care industry, this is something that, you know, comes up quite a lot because a lot of folks, you know, they maybe there might be sensitive information. And there also might be cases where you might have a design team or creative team. They just don’t want to have everyone see how the sausage is made. And that’s completely understandable.

So really, what we always recommend is to use a permission for this. And so with AAM permissions, you can create very good permission structure specifically around who has access to what and to be able to create that transparency. Also, I know that there are other kind of legal reviews that that come into place, especially, you know, again, when you look at the pharmaceutical industry and a lot of times that those legal reviews might have to come sequentially, maybe after this work in progress, maybe as kind of a separate step, right afterwards, but I think still architecting a lot of these folders within AAM permissions and permit a very solid permissioning structure can resolve a lot of these concerns, right.

So. Great. Thanks, ABB. Next question is from Gagan and it could be around the lines that maybe product team will be able to answer, but I’m going to try our luck anyway with you. So the question is related to AAM assets, sites and Franklin.

He’s asking, can we drag and drop assets from AAM assets into Google document or Word doc in the AAM Franklin author experience? If not, is this something that’s on the roadmap? I cannot, I have an instinct to say to say an answer to that because I know the use case for Franklin. I can’t, but I cannot answer whether it’s on the roadmap or not. And unfortunately, I don’t want to leave you astray, so I’m not going to. I can’t answer if you know, you know, if anyone on if Jazz, you know, because I can’t answer that. No, absolutely. But that’s on the roadmap. Certainly look it up.

Yeah, there’s one last one we can take. It’s asking what are some common struggles with adoption of work and progress assets within AAM? Yeah, so what I would say, there’s really two major kind of things to think about, right? The first goes into actually it’s kind of like three because there was a question around kind of legal review, especially in certain health care industries. And that is something that can be a struggle and figuring out where to sequentially that process needs to stand. That that can be a struggle, but that’s very industry specific, right? One of the there’s only two elements. The first element is really getting the creators and designers aligned on the forward structure that, you know, a lot of designers, a lot of creators, they are used to working in where I know they want to work. And that’s completely understandable. And it’s really just about getting everybody into a room and just deciding we’re going because you have to it has to be programmatic, right? And moving from an ad hoc process to a programmatic process is always going to be a change.

And so figuring out what is going to be a structure of a creative folder structure that is going to work for the team is really just about getting everybody in the room and aligning on that. And that’s always a bit of a struggle just because it’s a change and it’s transformation.

The second element is really about change management, which gets into what I was kind of what I was kind of alluding to. These are both kind of informed upon each other. Change in and that is, you know, getting people to just move out of their current process and treating this as a strategic workstream and not so much as something just tactical, I think is a really big leap and a really big change that we definitely advocate. That is having someone who is owning this, having a product owner who’s owning this transformation, having a steering committee meeting, having a center of excellence, and really driving this as a strategic thing that needs to change and always saying this is the new process and enforcing that process. And then once that’s done, people are going to see the benefits, you know, especially especially in terms of reusability exponentially. So those are really the two things that I would recommend that would not recommend, but the two struggles that I’ve seen folks were when it comes to this process. Great. Well, thank you so much, JB. Our time is up for this Q&A section, but I understand you’re having some tech issues. But again, thank you so much for helping us, answering all the questions and being here.

Absolutely. And thanks to everyone. Thank you.