Skill Exchange Event Aug 2022 - AEM Web Track - Getting Started with AEM Assets

Transcript

Hi everyone, I’m Brooke Koutret and I’m a Customer Success Manager here at Adobe. We’re excited to be here. And I’m John Cummins, I’m an architect here at Adobe. And now a little bit more about us. So I’ve been here for about two years. I specifically work on the content team with John and I’ve been in the digital media space for a number of years. And I’m an architect here in the customer success team. I’ve been doing AEM for over 10 years and I’ve been with Adobe Customer Solutions for over 15 years, helping customers get more value out of their digital experience solutions. I’m also a huge Buffalo Bills fan. Today we’re excited to cover a mock product launch for a sports team that’s excited about a new market they want to enter. We will show some basic management with AEM projects, show their collaboration on digital assets, tags and metadata, and create some custom renditions. Our image on the right side shows just a mock example of what it looks like from start to finish of creating a project using digital assets. Our team, we have Saul T. Bryan, our CMO, Serena Gerkins, our marketing manager, Dil McEnroe on creative, and Anna Gornishon, our DAM librarian. This is the team that makes up our weekend sports company, which we’re going to walk through in our mock example. Hey, Dil, as you know, our sports company is struggling a little bit. I was in the shower this morning singing along to Watermelon Sugar High, and it hit me. Pickleball’s the fastest growing market, 158% growth over the last three years and $152 million business. We need to get a piece of that. I’ve already got a genius slogan. What’s the big deal? Buy a pickleball package and find out. Can we spin up an image by the end of the week for our new pickleball line? Now Dil McEnroe’s going to go and create an AEM project to help him get started with creating this image for this new initiative. As you can see, there are some templates there in the Masters folder, and you can customize those if you’d like, but we’re going to keep it simple today and just use a simple project. The other ones you see here are other out-of-the-box project templates you have with AEM. He’s going to give it a title, a basic description, as well as filling out the start and end dates and adding the users to the project. There are some default roles for the project. Owners can basically do anything. Editors can just kind of make some content edits, and contributors can just kind of view what’s happening with the project to kind of be in the know. In addition to the data you can define here, you can also add a thumbnail to kind of give it a visual appeal on the project you’re working on, and you’ll see Dil do that here as well. In addition to the out-of-the-box project templates you have, there are some examples on Adobe Experience League with tutorials on how you can customize those project templates to meet your needs. And if you need something a little more robust from a project management perspective and would like to integrate that with AEM, we also have the option with a connector to Adobe Workfront to do some more robust project management. And if you’re already using Adobe Workfront, you can kind of integrate that with your existing infrastructure. And that’s really how easy it is to customize that image. And here we’ve got a lovely pickle. Now it’s created, and there we go. It’s successful. So now that we’ve created the project, the next thing to do is to assign a task to it. So I’m going to navigate to the project section of AEM. Here we are from the main start screen, back to projects. We see our nice image there for it. We navigate to the task panel, and we can see that we’ve got a task to work on, which is creating that first pickleball project. Dil has created that, and he’s now going to assign it to Anna Cornishon, who’s our damn librarian, and ask her to add the tagging to it and also do an initial review of that first image. As you can see here, it’s very easy to add a comment to your assets. So now that Dil has assigned his task, Anna opens her inbox in assets to see a task is assigned to her from a creative team member, asking her to add the appropriate metadata and tags. Clicking into the properties of this image, we can access metadata and tags. Metadata is the lifeblood of a digital asset management system, and AEM has extensive tools to manage metadata. This image assets properties page is really a tab list of exposed metadata included under basic, advanced, IPTC, et cetera. This is not necessarily all the metadata that’s available, just the metadata that this default metadata form shows now. These forms are easily editable. Going to basic, some metadata is editable and some are not. These keywords here are smart tags, and they’re generated from Adobe Sensei. When an asset is loaded into AEM, these smart tags are also trainable. Other tabs show different types of metadata. For example, camera data is data that is created from the camera provided to the image. Insights tab tells us how much this image has been served up, how many clicks this image may have had, and engagement metrics at the asset level. Applying this knowledge, Anna needs to add some approved metadata, a metadata keyword and a keyword set from Weekend Sports official metadata taxonomy. We can do this by typing into the tags field and find an appropriate result from any of the provided keywords. Alternatively, we can click on the folder icon and navigate to see other namespace keywords to add to the list of tags. And as an administrator, Anna can add her own keywords not managed on this list as an ad hoc edition. Editing these fields is based on permissions for the data type and user roles. So here, Anna has added more metadata value to this asset by adding the corporate keyword tags or taxonomy values and her own tags. Now these new assets will be more discoverable by her broader organization when, say, Dale looks up this image in a different time. Now that she’s done here, Anna then marks her task complete and assigns a task for Serena, her other team member, to review. Serena knows from her tasks she has to review the image for the pickleball campaign. So she goes into the image to annotate, adds an annotation, wondering if they should change up the pickleball, the color, play around. She adds a comment to collaborate with Dale. She’s looking for a new rendition size, specifically a 400 by 600, which shows up there. And then she wants to give her team member props. She’s been doing a good job on the creative team and is impressed by how this photo shot showed up. And with that, the collaboration is done. She then goes and reassigns the task to Dale. Dale’s a little surprised by these comments. You cannot be serious. Despite not loving some of these comments, Dale is going to update that image. He’s created that in Photoshop and is now viewing the existing payload so he can see kind of where those images are for the pickleball campaign. He’s uploading a new image. And now you can see with this, we’ve got the updates that Serena asked for. And we’ll make that a little bit bigger so you can see it a little bit better. That’s right. The ball is now a very large pickle. So Dale’s taking care of the first part of updating the image. Now he’s going to update the processing profile. To do that, he’s going to click on the hammer to get to the settings, jump into the assets category, and then go ahead and click on processing profiles. He’s then going to give it a name that makes sense and then add a new rendition. You could add multiple renditions to that processing profile. Today we’re just going to keep it simple. Just it’s going to be an image in that 400 by 600 pixels. And I’m showing you here where you can also do it filtered by extension or MIME type and even excluding MIME types if you wanted to. So there’s a lot of flexibility with creating a processing profile. All right. With that, we’ve created the profile. Now we’re going to select it and we’re going to apply it to a folder. So now we’re going to navigate to the project folder for the pickleball project and then click apply. And that’s how easy it is to customize the renditions for a project. All right. Let’s recap. In review, we showed a team collaborating on a project via image upload tasks and various collaboration tools. The team members on weekend sports applied smart tags and metadata to make the image easily searchable in the future. And they showed how they could work together to get one image to its final state to be posted on their website. We took a simple use case with renditions of just creating an image in a different pixel size. But you could actually expand upon this and have different video sizes, video formats, things to support all your different channels and devices that you need to support. This is a nice way where you can standardize all those formats across your different channels. Instead of having to do it manually, you can just configure that processing profile once and apply that not just for that one project, but across other projects as well, where you have similar device types you need to support, similar branding guidelines, style guidelines. So this really saves you a lot of time when you need to do something custom to support all your different end user devices. Now I’d like to talk to you about some best practices. Today we focus on AEM cloud service. That’s the newest version of AEM. It is a multi-tenant cloud service solution. Other customers that have been with us for the last 10 or so years, they might be on the on-premise AEM version. So that’s something that you would host yourselves. A lot of the capabilities are similar. The UI is similar, but there are some differences in the things that we looked at today. For example, processing profiles in cloud service work a little differently than in AEM on-premise. On AEM on-premise, you have something called the dam update asset workflow, and that’s where all those different renditions and sizes are created. And if you wanted to have a different set of renditions or to remove some of those renditions, you would need to change that workflow or copy it and modify it and assign that to the different project folders. For AEM cloud service, we’ve kind of changed the architecture a little bit to help with performance. So with processing profiles, it’s offloading that work of creating the different images and video formats. Instead of those having to run on your infrastructure, it runs in the Adobe cloud on some other services, basically making that run much faster and freeing up capacity for your AEM environment to support other use cases, other parts of the business. So it really helps with performance. Another option to consider is the dynamic media add-on. This is a way for you to offload some of those image and video file processing tasks to a service hosted by Adobe, which can help you dynamically create those different renditions. Sometimes you don’t know ahead of time what format you need that to be in, and you want to give the end user the chance to customize that. You often see this in retail examples where someone wants to zoom in very close to something they’re looking to buy, do 360-degree views, that type of thing. It’d be very hard to calculate all of those different formats ahead of time. Adobe Dynamic Media lets you offload that, and it will do it at call time so that whenever the user says, hey, I want to zoom in here, it will dynamically render that in the correct format and size to support their device type. This also can save you on storage costs because you don’t need to host all of these different file sizes and formats on your own infrastructure. Adobe hosts that for you. And this, a lot of times, is much cheaper and a much smaller footprint for you. This is another thing you should consider if you have a lot of those kind of dynamic use cases around different rendition types. Another best practice is to use workflows. We saw something very simple today with AM projects and using tasks. You also can use workflows to publish pages and assets into your production environment. And this is something that a lot of customers don’t realize they have the access to or just have not spent the time to set up the process to have a review and approval process related to their assets. The goal here is really to make it so that the business users are able to do that review, do that quality assurance check, and publish things into the live environment without requiring the IT team to make a change and do something. This is really one of the big advantages of using AEM. And amazingly, with some of the customers we work with, some of them don’t realize that this option, this feature is there or they don’t take advantage of it. And this is one of the biggest things that adds a ton of value for customers, saves them a lot of time, and just makes the life of the everyday user much easier. You know, and John, what I always like to see is Workfront is now integrated as well. So taking really that approval process one step further, which really has helped a lot of my clients. So it’s nice that we do have that better together of using another project management tool. And it really just depends on your needs as a client and how you’re also looking at governance. So with that, a little bit about governance, and how we see that fit in with our clients. So as John was mentioning, this was just a very basic mock example. So you might have, you know, rather than 14 members, 10, 200 depends the size of your company. But really, we just wanted to show an example of the importance of having dedicated roles and responsibilities. And some structure around naming conventions, files, when an image is out of date, do you sunset it? These are just some little things to think about as you build out your process in your company. And that wraps us up. Thanks for spending the time with us today. And we hope you found this helpful. We hope you had as much fun as we did. And now you realize that AEM Assets is really a big deal. Great. Now we’re joined live with Brooke and John. And thank you so much for your presentation. Let’s see what all questions you have. So first one is by Elisa. And she’s asking if we currently use Workfront as a project workflow which is used by creating it in AEM, or can it be migrated to Workfront? Great question, Elisa. I think, you know, this is the great Adobe is better together narrative where we have several options. There’s workflows built into AEM, which allows for better collaboration. But there’s always that next step further that you can take with Workfront as well. So it’s really going to depend on the maturity and the use cases of what your team needs to you if you’re one step further than workflows. But I think really the important story here is to have a strategy around how you want to collaborate together. John and I showed what could be a typical case of approvals and collaborating together. And what made it easier is that we build it off of that workflow framework. But that can be also done through Workfront or a separate project management tool that you already have existing as well. But just to kind of build out that strategy around collaboration is what’s most important. You can get those assets and sites, those assets approved and those sites up and running a lot sooner. If I could add, there’s a connector between Workfront and AEM. And there’s a lot of information on Experience League that shows kind of how to configure that, what the integration looks like with some short videos. So I recommend you take a look at that to get a better sense of how AEM and Workfront can work together. Great. Thank you for those insights, John and Brooke. And this next one is around metadata. So maybe John, you can take a look at that. Question is, if we have an expired field, what’s the difference between that field and the off-time field? Yes, so that’s a little bit tricky. So the off-time field is if you are scheduling an asset to be published live for a specific period of time. And the expired field is maybe you have a license for an asset and it’s only good for, say, one year. And that expiration date would be in the expired time. So that’s kind of the difference there. Great. Thank you. That was super insightful. We have another one from Suvendu. And Suvendu asks that, I just want to know if there’s any feasibility to make the content authoring part automatic by using that UiPath automation. I’ll take that one. Yeah, that’s a little of an advanced use case. I think as part of our frequent releases with AEM as a cloud service, we’re always looking to make the authoring experience easier and simpler. And I think that’s one of the things that the engineering team is definitely looking into. And so I think as you kind of track the progress of AEM over time, you’ll see more of those improvements. This specific feature I’m not as familiar with. So I don’t know if you could do that today. But I do know there are multiple usability improvements on the roadmap for AEM as a cloud service, including there’s a new assets interface that has been released just recently to kind of make the assets experience a little easier for authors for their most common tasks. So in that vein, I think this type of feature is one of the things that the engineering team is looking to build into the assets interface. Great. Thank you, John. There is a next question by David and it has multiple parts. It’s around all tags in AEM. So David’s asking which field in AEM determines what’s an image all tag and how can we edit an image all tag? Yeah, I’ll take that one as well. So that’s kind of in a lot of cases related to accessibility. And I think it depends a little bit on the type of asset. I’m not an accessibility expert, but I think that is covered in the authoring guide for assets. So I would check there in experience league or maybe look for making images or websites accessible in AEM. And I’m pretty sure those steps are defined for what you need to edit to make that all tags show up correctly. Thank you so much, John. This next one is from Michael and Brooke, this might be under you. So his question is, will Adobe Sensei capture the full text form from image and then apply them as a tag or potentially text extraction field to enable advanced searching? Yeah, I’m not as familiar with Adobe Sensei. Experience league is definitely a good resource there. John, I don’t know if you have anything to add specifically. Yeah, so I know that we’re always looking to innovate and add capabilities, especially around generative AI. And this use case kind of falls into that bucket. We’ve got some integration with Adobe Express that is coming out here in August, like later this month. And that’s one of those things that is very cutting edge for Adobe right now. And so the capabilities there, and I think that what’s asked in that question, I believe that is something that is on the roadmap to be possible with AEM. And I think I’m just not sure the timing of which release it’s going to be there, but that’s definitely coming certainly later this year and I think in the near future. So I would say there are some examples of Adobe Firefly, which is kind of our generative AI technology, part of that Sensei family. And that is, I think where I would kind of look to see about that extracting the text from the image, those types of things will be probably part of the Firefly piece of Adobe Sensei. That was great, John. Thank you. There’s another one around documentation and the ask is if there’s any documentation outlining how workflows can take into account IT considerations without needing that team to weigh in. Yeah, absolutely. I think the best place is checking out Experience League. I know there’s a theme here that John and I keep referencing, but there’s a whole wide of resources there. And I believe in workflows specifically, there’s some sections after it goes through the basic of what you’d use workflows for to cover that. Yeah, if I could add, so as part of the workflow engine in AEM, you have something called a workflow step. So that’s kind of each step in the workflow as something is getting processed. And there is an interface that you can implement and create your own custom workflow steps. So if the IT department has specific things they want to validate or ensure that certain standards are met before content goes out or cross-reference against another system, that type of thing, you can implement that interface and have that custom logic be inside that workflow step. And so when that, say, asset is being updated or as part of the approval process for that asset or for a web page, it can go and be tied to that workflow, hit that workflow step that has the IT considerations, and then it will do whatever the logic is in that workflow step. The nice thing about that is when you are then assembling your workflow and dragging those workflow steps onto the workflow editor, it’s very similar to dragging an asset or if you’re also a sites customer, dragging components onto your page, you kind of have that drag and drop capability. You drag that custom workflow step and then you can have some configuration settings that someone can do without having to write some code. And that’s all kind of based on how the interface has been implemented by your development team. And there’s a lot of tutorials and examples of how to do that on Experience League. Great. Thank you, John. That was super insightful. Renee is asking a question around data governance and how Adobe plans to incorporate that, like the items like GDPR or CPRA as an add-on feature into AEM. Yeah, I mean, I think these are common things that come up amongst our clients. So as our product team is developing the next steps, all those are taken into consideration. Specifically in terms of GDPR, it’s been a constant with updating and as regulations change. But specifically if there’s any other thing that you would want to add, John, I mean, we’re both not privacy experts, but if there’s anything else there, feel free. Yeah, I do know a little bit about GDPR. So from Adobe perspective, that mostly applies to things like analytics, targets, the AP platform. And so we do have ways to be compliant with GDPR and those services are compliant with GDPR. So from AEM perspective, with your implementation, it’s kind of up to you for what information you’re tracking and to follow those guidelines. However, they might apply to AEM. I think in general, if you have a user logging into AEM, then obviously you would have some kind of end user license agreement for say a closed user group or like a forum or something like that. But for visiting your website, you would normally have whatever your standard company policies are related to GDPR to make sure you’re compliant with giving people the notice about collecting the cookies and that kind of information based on their geography. So it would kind of come down to the way that you implement those requirements as part of your AEM sites, templates or pages. And from an assets perspective, those are kind of surfaced normally inside of another webpage. So again, it would kind of normally fall onto the way that webpage is rendered to make sure that it’s compliant with things like GDPR. Great. Thanks, John. And Ann is asking, what’s the most common method that content owners ingest assets into DAM? Not DAM admins, but more regular users and saying that they’re using desktop app currently, which is very slow. So they want to know what other methods are being used by other Adobe customers. Go ahead, John. You want to take that one? Yeah, I mean, go ahead. Okay, sure. So the desktop app is certainly one of the options. There are also integrations with the Creative Cloud. And so that’s a frequent option that our customers go with if they happen to also be Creative Cloud customers. I think for that integration to work well, you need to be on the enterprise version of Creative Cloud. I’m not sure exactly how the pricing difference there is, but it gives you access to more features and then the two clouds are kind of able to talk to each other. So there’s a connector between Creative Cloud and AM that you can then configure to kind of link those accounts and browse those assets. The other way that we see customers ingest assets into AM is there’s often… There can be some kind of a upload service that can use APIs or other interfaces to ingest things into AM assets. And then it will then update the… Create all the renditions, the processing profiles, those types of things for you. That would obviously be something you would normally need IT to kind of set up. But it then could be as simple as you drag something into a folder on SharePoint or some other location, and then that service would then ingest those assets and know to create things in the right location. Otherwise you would just be… You could also just use the assets interface to upload things one by one, which is probably very similar to the applications you guys are using right now. So I think if you want to make it easier and more automated, you probably need a little bit of either IT support to create some kind of custom ingestion process or configure that integration with Creative Cloud, which can make things easier. Yeah. And I think the other thing to add that I’ve seen with some of my clients is being aware of how many you’re adding at once. I’ve seen some clients try to do it all at once, and that does shut down the system. So having a bit of a strategy around what’s important there. Sometimes there’s a cleanup needed as well before you add everything to a dam. So building out some of that strategy is important of piecemealing that ingestion process as well. Great. Thank you. Mitch is asking, what are the differences between AEM and Workforce Connector for managed services deployment versus a native connector for a cloud deployment? Yeah, I’m not as familiar with those connectors. John, have you had some experience? I know there’s some constant updates as we get that connector up and running as our own native connector, but I guess specifically, go ahead. Yeah. I actually had a customer with this question recently. So if you’re an AEM cloud service customer, there’s a newer connector that you can use to integrate with Workfront. If you are an on-premise or managed services customer, you can still use the legacy connector to configure that integration. And there’s not really a difference between having done that on-premise yourself versus doing it with Adobe Managed Services. It’s the same connector and the same kind of configuration. That is also covered on Experience.ly, how that works, what are the features, what are the capabilities you have, how can you customize the connection. So I’d recommend anyone who’s curious about that to look there. There’s videos, sample configurations. So there’s a lot of information around that. It’s been so helpful for a lot of our customers. Great. Thank you, guys. That was super insightful. That’s the all time we have. Thank you so much, Brooke and John. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Excited to spend the time with you here. And John and I are really busy. We’re about to go play a pickleball game, take a little work break. But otherwise, hopefully, you check out the rest of the content today. Thank you for your time. We really enjoyed doing the session, preparing for it with you and the great questions we got today. And we hope everyone realizes that AEM Assets, it’s a big deal. Thank you so much, guys. And we apologize if we couldn’t get to all the questions, but feel free to go to Experience League for more information.