Supercharge your Print Production Using AEM

Transcript

All right. So a quick introduction about me. I am a vice president and lead software engineer. As I said earlier, I have worked on many, many implementation projects involving a vote on many different Adobe tools such as AMA, AM, Science and Farms, which is lifecycle for traditionally Adobe Flex, Adobe Campaign and many others. I am also and I know be a jumping for you are going to 23. I have my QR code up so if you want to connect with me or have questions about this presentation, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions. All right. So let’s talk about today’s agenda. So we want to talk about supercharging and production. But before we can go there, we want to sort of review some of the legacy methods of producing PDF outputs. We’ll talk about two of those methods in this in this presentation that we use at the price that maybe others but will just limited to for now. Then we also want to add insights and assets into the mix and what benefit it can provide to your overall print production process. Next, we want to talk about some of the implementation options that you can have. They talk about two options. Both of them we have implemented at low price and we’ll talk about all the benefits and benefits that it brought to deal price. May also discuss some things to consider as more of these solutions are customizations on top of amp. So there are some things that you need to consider before you think about implementing them. We’ll talk about some immediate next steps that you can take. If you like any of these options and if you want to implement these and of course, at the end we’ll have Q&A. So keep your questions ready. I’d be more than happy to answer those. Okay, so let’s start by reviewing legacy methods of producing PDF output. Two two main methods that I want to talk about. So let’s get down to it. The first method is about generating PDF output using templates and so a PDF that looks something like this on the right side of your screen. It has some content and it has some placeholders for where you could put some data. So this is a typical scenario for documents like, you know, bank statements, for example, or letters that, you know, your organization might be sending out to your customers. Some of the attributes of these kind of documents is that these documents are heavy on our on on the data itself. Right. The often have fixed layout. The content, of course, is there, but content does not change in terms of layout quite a lot. And your typical scenarios include one template which will produce thousands of PDF outputs. As I said, bank statements, for example, I if you’re using AM forms that some of the organization might be using some other tools to generate templated PDF, but if you are using AM forms, you would typically have and be a template and then you have a payload which is often in either Jason or similar format, you use an output service of that provided by E and forms to merge the XD template with the data and it produces the output. So folks who are using, you know, Adobe Lifecycle is, is very much familiar with this method of producing PDF. All right. So let’s move on to the next impact. All right. So the second method is, is more for creative side. So many organizations, including mine, have a need to produce creative outputs. So things like posters and postcards, you know, these these documents are heavy on content that they do. They may have some data on it, but they have to rely on two things content and styling of the content. The intention here is obviously not to save paper, it’s just to make your brand look awesome. I so as I said, these documents are often produced by creatives using tools such as Photoshop and InDesign. They’re often used for marketing purpose that they’re heavy on, on, on content. The layout side dynamic and although you may reuse some of the layout and template, but one typical template does not produce thousands of output, they often produce fewer outputs. So let’s let’s look at the same thing that I talked about, but in a different view here. Right. So over here in the first floor, we’re talking about templated output, that there is a business partner who now reaches out to a manager was like a technical manager who then works with a developer to produce, to be adapted. You always have a data source which will send you a XML payload. You use output surveys and produce PDF. Output might sound familiar? The flow number two is business. Now working with a creative manager who then works with designers who then use Photoshop in design and such tools to produce PDF output. So far it’s pretty straightforward. So let’s now review some of the limitations of this traditional metrics or legacy metrics. All right, let’s start on the right side of the screen. So let’s say if you are a business person or a marketer, you and you want let’s say you want to produce a PDF output doesn’t matter which method you choose, whether it’s it’s using the, you know, InDesign or the Creative Cloud or the template for trial train, you’re going to you will probably have to raise a request and you have to get on people’s backlogs and they prioritize your request. Then they analyze your request, then they implement or design your PDF document or the template descended. Send back a draft to you, you, you edit, you don’t like it, you may like it, and then if you don’t like it, you obviously going back and fixing the effects and whatnot. And then at the end of it you do a production deployment or you get fine output from creative. And that’s a vicious circle. And I often call it, you know, that square is like the moment business now has to work with managers and analysts and developers. It kills content velocity because now business, who knows what they want, have to be dependent on, you know, different people, different prioritization, etc… So let’s review that one more time in a different format. So the what the main limitations of legacy implementation are is that there are too many handoff. Business. Who knows the requirement? Who knows what the change that they need cannot make the change themselves, but they have to rely on either designers or developers to make that change. There’s no self-service side and often detrimental because of too many hands off and because there is no self-service. This is perhaps the slowest to be to deliver content to market. So in the next sections we want to talk about how to improve that. What can we do? So if you’re using a standard, a uniform solution in the old one, the legacy one bad, your your developers are creating steep fires. Your business is before away from from making changes. For example, you have an STB file and let’s say there was a grammatical error or there was a comma missing. Business cannot make that change. They have to reach out to a developer to make that change. So how do we solve that problem? So let’s talk about that. So let’s now add a m sites and a asset into this mix. In legacy meant that we were using only and fonts to produce PDF or just creative tools to produce PDF IM sites and assets are designed to be self-service. So they have a lot of power and they give a lot of power to business to manage their own content. So let’s talk about what benefits a m sites and AM assets bring to the table and bring cell service into the picture. Now imagine you are in nice. You know, the web pages were created by developers. There was no CMS and eventually CMS such as M was built so that now business have better control over managing their own content. Now they applied this logic, obviously initially just for web pages, and that’s why now you have M which can be which you can use to create websites like on the fly, you create new pages. You can in fact build new website without needing developers. Once you had that initial setup. So there’s a lot of self-service. A m also gives you ability to only use content. Now with a m, six, five and a m on the cloud, you have constructs like content fragments, experience fragments, and they let you create content and reuse it across different channels or different pages. Once you update this in a usable content, now, it automatically flows to all these individual pages. So there’s a lot of not a follow and lot of capability here. And all that leads us into a very high speed to market. And that’s your whole think if you own a m sites and e M assets, you probably already know all of these things. So what am I saying new here, Right. Like, how do we then add a size and asset combining with a m forms so that now business has more control over how these documents are generated or what goes into these documents? So let’s review that. All right. So let’s talk about our first option. In this option, we’re saying let’s use content, fragment and assets. All right. So let’s let’s go to the next slide. And there are some diagrams that I want to review. All right. So in this option, we are saying every space, but you have some content instead of hard coding that content in the SDB file, use content fragments. So if you look at the diagram on the right side, what we are really talking about is building an x DB template which has place holders for your content, right? So you’re not really putting the content right into the DB, but now the content will also come as part of your SML builder. So you’re going to have to write some additional process of my client. So that’s the one that I have highlighted in green color here. So what you’ll do in the process is essentially you get data from your source system, which could be in Jason or a similar format, and then you have content fragments which are stored in a in the process. So you would merge your content fragments with the JSON payload, produce an similar output, which will then plug into your DB template using the output service. That’s a very, very easy solution, right? So, you know, obviously there are many benefits to it because content fragments are self-manage saved. If there was any content, Jane, that was needed, you know, business can now just make it themselves without really need needing a developer. I can give you an example. Many, many organizations need to update, let’s say, a copy statement on on that belief at the end of every year, for example. Right. So you might have to know if in the legacy method you might have to go out. A developer and developer will now update that text. Right. Whereas now in this new solution, you could use it content fragments to host or to author the the copyright statement, which will then automatically feed into your PDF. And so like every year you don’t have to now reach out to your business will not have to reach out to your developers to update these. Right. This is a very, very, very small example. But but you can scale it out as as you as you feel. Considerations on this matter, of course, is we are only only adding but basically content fragment where there was a static text in the XD behind the design and the layout is still locked. So the process. So as you sort of change your design or as you add more sort of static text for your files, you have to keep updating this process and keep it alive. Right? I guess. So again, this works. This is obviously better than the, the legacy method and this is like a very cheaper way of sort of giving some control to your business side, but use it only when you have fixed layout and you you think that there are content changes, but they are not from any layout changes. So in this example, I’m actually describing the exact same thing. We are looking at the same screenshot that I shared earlier. All the boxes in green represent content that is coming from all the data that is coming from source system. Everything that is read can be a content fragment. The images can now come from dam assets instead of just hard coding them on the HTP. So that’s that’s all that is possible with this solution. And so as you can see, like you can still do both these documents, but still give control to your business. So like, for example, for the document in the right side, if they’re trying to produce a postcard like this, they don’t need to reach out to their design team for every new postcard they can now just update these assets themselves. And these content fragments themselves, and then they can produce their own PDF. So again, speed to market is is good here as long as you can. You can sort of keep the layout same. So let’s talk about the option to now this one is a crazy one because this talks about sort of using the full potential of a name. Right. And building a whole new document offerings solution. All right. So let’s go to the next slide and I’ll show you what I mean. So in this option, what we want to do is let’s see if we are trying to produce a PDF document. We want to build that document as an AMP page first. So which means that you need like a template, you need a component. And these components can use, you know, experience fragments or content fragments or like any, any feature that a site has available or the assets have have available. And then your process are really instead of just sort of substituting, you know, the static part of the XD with the content fragment. Now your process that is really generating the files dynamically. So essentially what process that is doing is converting and amp page to a next DB file, which can then be fed to an output service to produce a PDF output, believe it or not. But we have done this at database and our business folks just love this. They, they love it so much that they build these components and they spin up new documents and new templates by themselves. And it’s completely 100% self-service. So again, talking about benefits, business has full control over content and design this time because these are amp pages, you can sort of creatively lay out different components and then at that point, you know, you’re not really restricted to one specific layout. Your, your business has all the creative freedom, of course, within the bounds of what is supported by the AMP components, but they have that creative freedom to just compose their own documents. And this one is obviously once built is the fastest speed to market considerations wise, it is heavy in terms of cost in the initial setup, right? So you still have to make sure that you have a consistent design system that you’re following so that you can build a site and related components, right, to create those AMP pages. And so that you can also be pre the processor to make sure that each component gets converted to its equivalent version. You know, consistently fine. And of course, the process logic is more complicated. So it does take a while to speed up this solution. But once it’s up and running it, it does magic and to use. So use it when you have dynamic layout but consistent styling. Right? And I said a design system is a very important piece of this puzzle. And of course cost and resources are available for you to stand up this whole AMP site and and related components. So again, in this example here, we’re saying that you can build these components, you can break down these documents into different components. So, for example, the top section can be a header, a component which lets you know your business can figure out what lowboy images to use or maybe have an additional title next to it. The second one could be a teaser component, for example, which lets them select what kind of title, what kind of image that they want to use and what kind of layout that they may want to use and so on. Again, I’m not going to talk through each and every component here, but you get the idea. All right. So let’s talk about how did it benefit your price, believe it or not. We have implemented both option one and option two, depending on the type of documents we are trying to generate. There are times where the documents are very tired. They only need very few changes to content. And at that point, you know, option one makes total sense. And there are times where, you know, our business was spending too much time. But with create. And at that point, you know, we just decided to do option two. All right. So let’s talk about the overall benefits. So, again, the very first benefit is 100% self-service. Once we have built this a m sites related components, B, the business never reaches out to us. They have hundreds. They’ve created hundreds and hundreds of different document templates and produce like hundreds and thousands of documents using it. And they have not reached out to us. We have also been able to reuse content because we heavily use content fragments, experience fragments. So there’s a heavy, heavy use. So things that took weeks and sometimes months, now 6 minutes. And I want to drill down on this, this particular benefit because being a financial service industry, we often have to sort of legally review our content before we can send it out to to our consumers, to our customers. So if you imagine some of these documents that were created and let’s say if things were going to legal, so let’s assume this marketing documents in that you the documents are generated using InDesign, for example, and the business is working with designers to produce these documents. The designers are sending them a draft version which are then going back to legal for review. They come back with comments. Business is now going back to the designers to make the update. And this this whole process took like weeks, if not months. Now, if now they don’t even go to the designers, they they sell author their document and and then any any sort of changes that legal you know needs ask them to make they make it themselves and it just takes a minute. So a lot of a lot of a lot of benefits we saw here. And again, as I said, this is like a very super fast solution. So, yeah, a lot of a lot of lot of good benefits that, you know, we got, you know, at theto price in the solution things to consider. Of course I, I would say if you if you are producing in a document just for let’s say something like bank statement which does not change often in terms of content or layout and this solution might be an overkill for you implement this solution when you have design, which is dynamic or content, which is dynamic and the content is updated very frequently, do not implement any of this. If you have very few design variations or your content is not updated frequently enough, sometimes it might just make sense. Like, I mean, the example that I gave you about copyright, it’s it’s probably okay. If that’s the only part that’s changing in your document, it’s probably okay to just reach out to developers or designer to update that. And again, as a documents have to be, you know, content heavy for the solution to work because that’s that’s where the power of M lies and of course that is enough budget. You know if you don’t have budget, you know you probably cannot build this even if you wanted to. All right. So moving on to the next steps. My recommendation would be start with something simple. You know, go you look for different kind of document that you generating talk to your business about, you know, in in one scenario what kind of solution would make sense. You know starting simple would be best because you know just doing option one, maybe because that would mean that it doesn’t take considerable effort. It’s a smaller effort, but business can now start seeing the benefits of adding and the insights, for example, and the power of content fragments and once they sort of start liking it, you can start sort of expanding that into a more sort of a fully functional authoring solution. And while with it, if business likes it and of course, you know, next steps could be if you have further questions on this solution or how it benefited us, you know, like feel free to reach out to me. I’ll be I’ll be happy to answer those questions before we end this session. I do want to talk about the session that I did in last year in the same SQL exchange event that was about the email core components and how it benefits developers to create email components that just work on on on different email clients. That’s a very good, you know, solution that was built by Adobe and Database. Price was the first one to implement a solution using using these. So all core email components. So do check out that session. And I also have a link to an article on that topic as well. So yeah, do check it out if you if you like that. All right. We are now ready for Q&A, so hope you have your questions ready. I’d be very happy to answer those. Thank you, Priyank, for that valuable and insightful session. Let’s get into Q&A. Audience If you have any questions, please add them to the chat. All right, let’s get started. Priyanka, our first question how is a m forms integrated with a in this solution? So we still use the output survey site. So technically you just create a M servlet, right? Which then points to like maybe an option to points to the page that you want to render as PDF. And then you know any, any external application can then invoke that, that servlet, which then doesn’t cause the output service to generate PDF. Awesome. Great. Moving on to the next question, what types of volumes will the support connect take in multiple templates for one output file? Or is it just one? Is this ready now or just conceptual? So this is not an out of the box Adobe solution. So this is a customization that we build on top of a within the price. And yes, this is very much in production and we’ve been using this solution for a few years now and we still enhance it as we need to. Speaking of the volumes, I mean it is a custom solution, so you can design your application the way you do. So if you want it, say many to one. So many output for one template you could do that. So the options are pretty much open because it’s a custom solution. Now I love that there’s many options. Let’s get good to now. Okay, Moving on to the next question. Any special considerations for language variants? So content for other countries as an example that was provided, but any others? So typically if you’re going by the standard a way of doing multi language, so you would typically set up a MSN site pre structure. So in let’s say an option, do for example, you are literally creating different pages. That’s one of the options where you can create different pages for different language radiations. And then when the calling application wants to generate a PDF, you kind of say, okay, I want the PDF to be generated for Spanish version or for English version and so on and so forth, but it should all be possible. Great. Thank you for answering. All right, moving on to the next question. So you mentioned the design review and approval process. Does the marketing and creative team use work front? If so, can you speak to any integrations you have set up in that process? Pre don’t use? Wealthfront, but we do have routine workflows and they are done in a third party application, which again it’s non relevant here but but the process itself is sort of disconnected at that point, right? So once the PDFs are generated, especially for the marketing materials, they do go out. So the author on AM side is able to then sort of take that PDF and go to the other application that that is responsible for legal reviews and grant reviews and so on and so forth. So yes, those are happening right now. We don’t have up front, but I have I mean, I would think that friendly integration should be possible. Awesome. Thank you for answering. Moving on to the next question. So you are showing print. Can we do this with email as well? Not quite sure if I completely understand. I mean, for email, I mean, I had a separate session last year in fact, right where we talked about the core email component is that you can sort of, you know, create your own email components, you know, email pages and you know, those can be sent, you know, to campaign and further down to the site and, and how it helps. Like there’s a whole session on that. So I mean, whoever asked that question, you know, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or any other way and I’ll be able to sort of help you with those components if needed. Awesome. Thank you, Frank. Moving on to the next question in, we share content fragments between both print and email and digital. And you can I guess email is a is a wild card because the way emails work is slightly different and there are no restrictions on how the markup can be created for an email. So you might have to sort of transform or massage that content fragment a little bit. But from a business standpoint, from the authoring standpoint, in theory, you can use the same fragment on web email as well as on. Awesome. Great. Good intel. Next question. So you say this is 100% self-service, but for a new post card, what do you still need? Design services, parentheses, Photoshop? Depends. So. So let’s say if you have a brand guideline already finalized and brand guidelines would evolve already signed, so you might have to tweak things around in this solution. Yes, but once you’ve been, let’s say, initial components that allow you to create postcard or posters. No, I mean, you can create as many posters as you like. And that is no, there’s no need for for your business, too, to come to developers. Awesome. Great. And moving on to the next question, which is a perfect segue way, do you have any tips for developers getting started for the first time? I think as with anything else, I’d start small. I guess it’s like going for option two would be like a big task and it’s usually more resourceful and more costly to begin with. The easiest thing that you can do is option one media, just pretty much substituting a static text with, you know, with content fragments. And it does give you give authors some flexibility, right? So that that would be a start. And one sort of business gets hang of it and they’re ready to sort of spend more money to reap more benefits. I guess that that would be the time when it would sort of go to option two and implement a more full fledged authoring solution. And I have a great follow up to that. Are there any best practice tips for a developer working with their author when getting started on this? Anything to keep in mind? Not so much for the author. I guess one of the one of the main pillars that this relies on is is the design and being a consistent design system, right? So if you have a very defined design system, then this sort of sets you up for a good success rate. But if your designs are not consistent, you cannot possibly build a, you know, sites or content fragments to support that design. And so I think more than others, I would say it’s more important to have like a design consistent and yeah, more consistent. Awesome. Great. Thank you. Moving on to the next question. So how did you manage plugging in data from a data source into content fragment. So that that’s possible? So in your OSG layer, you could do what a informs out of the box and out in the output service, right? Where you sort of do data binding and then you know it when, when you’re calling from output service, it substitute, you know, your place holders with the actual values, you can do something similar, but you might have to just implement it yourself. We did that in our case where. We call out to external data sources and we kind of built our own custom RTP plugins too, to allow our authors to sort of put those place holders in content fragments. And so once those place holders are in the back end, our logic kind of is is is going to recognize those place holders and replace them with the actual value. So it’s very much possible and we are very much doing it. Awesome. I feel like I’m learning so much today. Hopefully the audience is as well. Thank you for your next question. This is a good one and you have logic on your content fragments, meaning you can tell the tool that certain content fragments can be used for different purposes, meaning one is used in one state, but another can be used in all states. Yes. Again, again, all of this is custom. Again, I want to say this once again, that this is not out of the box and bomb slash sites slash assets feature. Right. So we did implement something like this. We kind of called it internally our Smart Content rules manager, where let’s say in option two, for example, if you drag and drop a text component and let’s say you say that text component, the content of the text component was intended, let’s say only for, I don’t know, folks that have, let’s say Roth enabled on their plan. For example, we had we had for one game plans. So so we, we built some functionality where you could tag that component and say show this component or print this component Only when wrath is allowed on your plan or pretax is allowed on you have that and so on. So right. So you could do that. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of sort of going under the hood, right? There’s a lot of g-sync that we are doing here, right where we are sort of reading the demo of the component and sort of intelligently passing it through before sort of converting that HDMI to an X deep format. Great answer. Awesome. Very insightful. Moving on to the next question, So instead of building a complicated TID service that transforms a an AMP page to X, why didn’t you just use a HTML two pdf conversion service available out of the box in a right? I completely get this like just because it does take a lot of time and effort to build this custom solution. And fonts does have an HDMI to PDF conversion, but that’s going to undermine that service in any way. But it’s more rough I guess if you need a more pixel perfect output, a PDF output. I think you have to go to the beat out if you’re using a m forms so that I can give you a couple of examples I’d like so you like if you’re using HDMI to PDF conversion, you may not be able to exactly control what sections, go with what sections or where should the page break, how should the margin be or can you made a font and so on. So there are so many features that you get with a forms based feeds innovation that you may not get with just plain simplicity and a PDF conversion. So so that’s, that’s probably why we invested so much time and effort and, and resources to build this custom solution. Yeah, thank you for sharing. And I know customizing out of the box is a meaty topic. There’s a follow up. So what has been the biggest impact you’ve seen from implementing kind of this process with Deal? Yeah, I mean we have all I guess we have all levels of automation done. So there are there are some beads that we’re doing where the content is actually in the XD. And, and, and that business theme is usually very I wouldn’t say frustrate it, but usually not very happy because for every little change to that PDF template they have to get on our board. We have to prioritize things, we have to make changes deployed to all these different environments before they can sort of start getting benefit. Now that things like copyright statements or like just adding a new paragraph or something like that, I just think the wait time is just too much. Right? So, so again, we have those kind of implementations, plus we have this fully automated, you know, fully iterable document solution as well. And that theme, as I kind of said that in the presentation as well, and then that theme doesn’t come back to us for four months because they’re able to spin up these new pages and new documents on their own. And super quick, as I mentioned in my previous in my presentation, it it took weeks or multiple weeks for a PDF document to be finalized before it could even be sent for legal reviews with. Now, with this new solution, it just it’s just not adding task and they click a button and it generates a PDF. So it kind of went from weeks to minutes. And that that that has been the biggest impact and that is the reason why the database that our business team sort of chose to invest in building this technology. Wow, that’s awesome and so great to hear that it’s you’ve seen such high impact. Well, that’s all we have time for Q&A today. Thank you so much. Frank. Loved your session. I learned a ton. It was very insightful. Thank you. Thank you. Adobe and the whole skill exchange team. Thank you for the opportunity and this was great.