Integration
AEM Tags, project linked folders, and folder metadata
- Applies to:
- Experience Manager as a Cloud Service
- Topics:
- Asset Management
CREATED FOR:
- Beginner
- Admin
- Developer
AEM Assets as a Cloud Service, AEM Assets 6.5
Learn how to drive AEM Tags use on assets via Workfront data, setup and use project linked folders, and Workfront data to AEM asset folder metadata schemas.
So just quickly to recap from last training session, we talked about metadata management really as a whole between custom form fields and work front, as well as the metadata schemas, the different data types, how those fields are mapped, some of the common gotchas and things to be aware of the different features around that. So the last loose end I want to tie up here is to talk about AEM tagging, because this is something that with a lot of our customers, we experience or we’re often trying to map back specific AEM tags in a work front custom form back to AEM when an asset’s pushed. So the challenge that this often presents is a bit of administrative overhead to manage tags and new tags, excuse me, as they’re being added. So if you’re not familiar with AEM tags and how they’re structured, they are in the back end in the JCR of AEM. They are stored just like a string. So it’s just a string, but it’s formatted in a very particular way. So for example, I’ll use the WeRetail tags. If I come in here and look at footwear, you’ll see up in the URL here, how this is structured. We have a CQ tags property, and then it says slash WeRetail slash apparel. That’s actually the value that gets stored. So I’ll also show that in another format here as well. So if I come into one of my assets in AEM, so let’s come in here to this asset. Let’s do a picture. Let’s open the asset properties, and then I’m going to apply one of those tags. So if I go and apply one of those tags, let’s say that same one, apparel footwear, and I save it, it has this nice, pretty formatted front end value that it applies. But that’s not actually the value that gets stored in the back end, which means we have to be cautious when we’re passing metadata values, tag metadata values from a Workfront custom form field to AEM. So they do create a bit of overhead. So I have some of what I try to encourage my customers to do rather than use these tags. But if they already have a really big tag taxonomy build out in their AEM environment, there is a path to map all of those. It’s just going to require a bit of overhead. So if I save that tag that I just added here, and then if I were to open up this asset, I’m going to just show you quickly. This is, again, this feature is not necessarily available in cloud service environments, but just to show you how the value gets stored on the back end, I’m going to use that tidy.infinity.json trick. Again, this is not something I expect anybody to do, but just to show the challenge with tags. Oops, spelled that wrong. So if I search for this property CQ tags, I’ll make my screen bigger. You’ll see here that we have this value that gets stored in a string array. So the tags is a multi… CQ tags is an out of the box field type in AEM, and it’s always stored as a multi-value string. So you’ll see the brackets around it, and then if there was multiple tags, it would be comma separated. And then it has that really specific format. So even though we’re just applying this footwear tag in AEM, we really have to map this entire structure over when we’re making a mapping and work front. So what that means is if I came to a custom form field here on the left side of my screen, let’s go back to that document details one we used in the previous demonstration. So here, if I were to say we want to map a tag, so let’s make an equivalent field. Let’s say that this is a dropdown field, or better yet, let’s do a checkbox. We’ll add a checkbox to this form. We’ll call this AEM tags. Then we have a couple choices here. What I actually have to map in the name, I can give it a fancy name, right? So you’ve seen this in work front where you have show values. So I can give it a nice pretty name and call this one footwear. And then what I actually need to push though as a part of that mapping is this value that gets stored on the back end for that particular tag. So I have that value as we retail apparel footwear. And I could again do the same thing with glasses, right? So we come in here and we take that and add a we retail apparel. And didn’t select the right one. Glasses.
I’ve added an extra. So you’ll notice it’s actually a little, can be a little tricky and you have to be careful that those are correct. Because if I pass this value over to AEM, so when this is embedded on a document custom form and somebody has selected the footwear value or they’ve selected the glasses value, it’s actually going to push, or glasses label, it’s actually going to push this value to AEM. So if you’re going to format it the exact same way that these tags are formatted in AEM, that mapping is not going to work. So you won’t be able to pass over those AEM tags. So this can present, as you would imagine, quite a bit of overhead. Because there’s no sinking if I were to come in here and create a new tag under apparel. I come over here and I create a tag called boots. There’s nothing that’s passing over the new tag creation here in AEM to my custom form field. All of that has to be manually managed. So if a new tag gets added to AEM, somebody’s going to have to come into the custom form and work front, add a new choice, call it boots, make sure that it’s configured the way that AEM can actually read it. And then now we have this new option boots that could be selected and passed over. So as you can imagine, this just does create a bit of overhead in terms of the customer being able to manage AEM tags and custom form fields. So if possible, if the customer isn’t necessarily really married to a large tagging taxonomy in AEM, I always advise that you can do keyword fields because you still have the same advantages in terms of I can govern the value that’s being pushed from work front AEM using just standard text fields. So I could just say boots, glasses, footwear, and that’s going to give us the same value at the end of the day in terms of searching because I’m passing a value footwear, but rather than storing it in a tag in AEM. So if I go back to this asset, instead of storing a tag, I would just store it in an open text field, like a keywords field, for example. So I could come in here and I may have an area where I can just add different keywords. I think there’s one under this example. I may not have one. I could add keywords here instead, and this just passes strings, standard strings. So again, the upside to this approach is less overhead and management between the AEM tags and the work for custom form fields. The downside is that if this customer uses AEM assets in conjunction with AEM sites, for example, or other tools, then you may lose out on some of the enhanced capabilities that AEM can provide. So there are things, and not to get too into the weeds here, but there are things in AEM sites known as core components, and you can build lists and different models using AEM tags. There are some things that you may give up if the customer is using the integrated AEM solutions when it comes to mapping those. So again, I just wanted to point that out because it is something that is very common. I’d say with 60% or more of our customers, we have this conversation around tags and how to manage tags if that’s something they choose to use. There are times where they choose to just do keywords instead and then manage tags separately. From here, I’m going to shift gears to an advanced feature of the enhanced connector that we refer to as project linked folders. So I’m going to just bear with me while I reset my screen here. So again, I’m going to stick to this Workfront tools portfolio in this demo. And over here on AEM, I’m going to start this conversation with the actual configuration. And then we’ll actually walk through and I’m going to demonstrate how a project link folder gets created. And I’ll tie it back to a real life example and use cases of our clients that are leveraging this tool today. So if I’m in my AEM environment over here on my right, and again, I come up to the experience manager menu, I select the tools icon. And if I come down to cloud services, we have that Workfront for experience manager configuration. I’m going to select the configuration that we’ve set up and view the properties. So here in the Workfront for experience manager configuration screen, we have this tab here called project link folders. This project link folders tab will rely on the event subscription service. So before I dive into this, I do want to just mention that you cannot create a project link or even configure the project link folder setup until you have configured your event subscription service. So for those unfamiliar with this event subscriptions is a Workfront API. It’s hosted on a series of servers. Those can be found on the one dot Workfront, you can find the list of event subscription servers. In the prerequisites for installing the connector, you’ll see that we asked to add any of those IP addresses in that range to an allow list. If there is a firewall setup in your AM environment, that’s not always the case. But if it is, we need to be able to communicate with those IP addresses. So we need to add those to an allow list. But the event subscription service allows us to subscribe to specific events in the Workfront environment, and then am can perform specific actions based on one of those events, you know, listening for one of those events. So when I’ve created the custom integration, you’ll see a list of all the custom integrations in my Workfront environment. And most cases, this may only be two or three, a customer may have a dev stage and production that equal their AM environments. So once you’ve selected the one that we’re integrating with, then this button here would say enable Workfront event subscriptions. And at that point, it allows us to begin listening for different event subscriptions on the Workfront event subscription server. So an example of that would be project event subscriptions. Is there an update to a project event? And the one we’ll talk about today is a change in project status in Workfront. Comment syncing. So if we want to be able to listen to comments and update AM accordingly, we need to rely on the event subscription service, listening to changes and document custom forms in Workfront. If a Workfront user goes into a custom form, edits some field, can we listen to that so the AM can update its corresponding metadata during that time? So that’s really what this screen is here for, is enabling that event subscription service. We do consider this sort of optional. However, I would say that the majority of our customers use it. So you still can pass assets to and from, you can map metadata, that all relies on the Webhooks API that Workfront has. But when it comes to listening for changes and being able to perform actions based on a change in a project or an update to some custom form fields, that’s where we need the event subscription service. So although it is optional, most of the advanced features we’re going to start talking about today and in our next training session rely on event subscriptions. So quickly, I’ll just talk about the two tables that you see here on my screen. These local event subscriptions to this AM instance, this shows you all the active event subscriptions. So I have a ton here because when I created this, a lot of these update events are corresponding to a specific project. So I created a new project in my Workfront instance, and now it’s waiting for a change in status or something like that. And it needs to listen to those changes. I have some delete event subscriptions. That’s if I were to have deleted a comment or things like that. But these are all the ones that correspond to this AM instance and this Workfront instance. What you see down in the bottom table, this other event subscriptions, these are any other event subscriptions that you have with the Workfront instance, but using another AM environment. So I mentioned earlier that most of our customers use a develop stage and production pipeline in their AM environments. So cloud service, right? For AM as a cloud service, most all customers when they spin up the new cloud manager program and begin enabling AM environments, they’ll have a dev stage and a production instance. When we configure this, we want to configure it in all of those environments. So this may be, you’ll see an event subscription down here. It’s an event subscription to the same Workfront environment, but maybe it’s to the dev AM environment or the stage AM environment or some other AM environment that’s communicating with your Workfront instance. The important thing to know about this, the reason we show this here is that there are times in which an event subscription can get crossed or wires can get crossed. So if I ever see an event subscription with the same AM host domain, so in this example, if this were this domain right here, if I ever see that down in my bottom table, which sometimes I’ll just do a control find, and so it looks like all of these are in the right table, I don’t see any down in this bottom table, but if there was an AM host that was up here and the same AM host was down here, we’re likely going to have issues. That doesn’t happen often, but it is something that we’ve come across that’s caused issues with this project link folder feature that I’m going to show shortly. So just be aware of that. It’s one of those common gotchas that we’ll just check if there are issues with the project link folders. We’ll look to see if there are any other AM hosts that shouldn’t be down in this table. And then I’m going to skip comment syncing because we’ll talk about that later, but it’s very simple. It’s a one-click button that allows you to listen for comments at the project or document level and then sync those back to the asset in AM. All right, before I jump over to what really I wanted to spend most of the time today is project link folders, are there any questions on event subscriptions? Ian said, how do we rectify the cross scenario with event subs? Yeah, great question. Sorry, I didn’t answer that. So you’ll see these delete buttons on the side. So if you do come across one here, if you do like a control find in your browser and you find one down here, you can just delete it. So if I were to do this right now, Mario often uses this environment for training. If I were to delete this, I’m actually deleting Mario’s as well. So just be careful that when you do use this delete button, you’re not inadvertently deleting something you shouldn’t. So the only time I would ever delete in this table is if it’s the same AM host I see in the top table down in my bottom table. Perfect. Well, now let’s jump into the fun stuff. So project link folders. This is a feature that I think has been leveraged by almost every customer of ours. There’s maybe one or two that don’t use it, but I think it’s one of the core features that allows us to do a whole lot more than anybody really imagined they can do with the connector. And I’ll talk about some of the business value add to using project link folders as we go through this. There’s features like Adobe Asset Link. If you’re not familiar with that, that’s AM’s ability to connect to Creative Cloud. If you use project link folders, there’s a nice flow to be able to tie in Adobe Asset Link in this whole integrated solution. So from here, if I were to have started fresh, there’s an option down here that says add a new set of linked folders. So this button that you’re seeing down at the bottom of the screen, that would have shown up at the top, and then I can begin adding all of these values here. So I’m going to start by walking through what I’ve configured prior to the call and what we’ll see here in my AM environment. So the first option here is the linked folder parent path. And what that means is where do you want to create all of these project folders in your AM environment? So what’s the parent location? So in this example, oops. In this example, I had selected this work front folder. And what that means is any project folder is going to begin, this is the parent directory where that’s going to exist. So if I jump back here, this is this folder in AM. So all of my folders are going to get created under here. In fact, let’s just delete this so I can actually show you this all the way through. I’m going to delete this folder. I refresh. I now have a blank work front folder with no folders inside of it. The next field here is the link folder structure. So this is the structure of folders, how we’d like to create those folders in AM. So I’m going to start with the very simple folder structure. And that’s this portfolio comma separated program and name. What that really means, the syntax here is which portfolio does the project belong under? In this case, it’s my work front tools demo. What program? I have client here. Sorry, I’ve changed some of the terminology. So I don’t want to confuse anybody, but in work front, you can change some of the key terminology to better fit your use case. I have my portfolio labeled as client, but this client Adobe demos, what refer to in work front as a program. And then the name is the name of the project that I create under that program. So if I’m underneath this program, so I’m under the program Adobe demo, and I create a new project. Again, let’s use a… Oops. We’re going to attach the corporate marketing project template, quickly add this.
And then we’ll give this project a name. Let’s call this December 15th demo project. So what I’d expect is when the linked folders get created, the first folder in my hierarchy here will be the name of the portfolio. So it’ll be a folder called work front tools demo. The second folder that will be created underneath that portfolio will be the program folder. So in this case, Adobe demo, and then the final folder that gets created. Well, the project folder that gets created will be December 15th demo project. So I’ll have a work front, a portfolio folder. Here I’ll have a program folder, then I’ll have a project folder in this next tree. So that’s what’s configured here. We then have this checkbox called build link folder title and work front using the folder structure names. This is not a commonly used feature. It used to be more common initially, but we’ve seen less of our customers using it. What it really does is it just takes the entire string. So and I’ll highlight this once the folder is created, but we’ll get a folder that gets created in AM and then synced back to this project folders area. And when it gets synced back, it’ll just be the name of the project. If I don’t check this, if I do check this box, it’s going to show the full string. So it’ll say this is the work front tools, demo, Adobe demo, and the project name December 15th demo program, all in one giant title. That way you can see the folder contains the entire path to the project. So that’s what this does. It just creates this longer title that contains the entire folder structure in the title name. I’m not going to set that up in this case, but that is an option in case you want to showcase the full title and work front you can. And then the second section here is the sub folders or third section here is the sub folders. So underneath that last project folder here in this case is name. How many sub folders do I want to create? I want to create a final file source files and a work in progress files folder. I can add as many more as I’d like. We do have some flexibility with using a JSON. So I could do a JSON that says title folder and then we could do sub sub folders and grandchild folders. So you can use a JSON format to create even deeper folder structures if needed. Again, it’s not something we commonly share just because it can become complicated. We typically would rather an implementation partner implement that feature. So if the customer comes to us and says we do have this more complex folder structure at that point, we kind of keep that in our back pocket and then we go in there and help them implement it. But for the most part, I would say 95% of our customers just use this standard. These are the sub folders. The next option down here is the condition in which a sub folder would get created. This has been valuable to a lot of our customers where if a particular custom form field has a value, so I think I have one called sub folder or am folder here. Yes, for example. So again, this custom form am folder is a custom form that you would see embedded in the project details. So it’d be a part of one of these projects here. And whatever value we set here, that is the true condition for creating the sub folders. If that value was no here in my work front project, then those sub folders would not get created. So again, just more flexibility for the customer to be able to create a sub folder structure underneath their project given some condition. This next section is really the trigger for what will create the linked folder. So I’m going to show this here in just a moment, but just note that you can point to any out of the box project status. So when I say project status, I’m talking about the project status here at Workfront. So I can change it to any of these statuses. If you have custom statuses, those will appear here as well in the list. And you can change it to any of those custom or out of the box statuses. And then that’s what’s going to signal to am create this link folder and map it back to your work front project. We have another condition statement below, and this is a condition statement for the linked folders as a whole, not just the sub folders. So again, this previous condition statement was for sub folders only. This condition statement or these two condition statements are for the entire linked folder feature. So in this example, I’ve set this to say only for projects created underneath the Workfront Tools portfolio should linked folders get created. And this is really useful because many customers don’t use the connector across their organization. They may have IT, finance, marketing, a lot of departments utilizing Workfront, but maybe it’s only their creative team or their digital marketing teams that are actually leveraging the connector. So this is one way in which we can allow them to only create linked folders in the specific portfolios they’re working in. And we do know, I hope this is less common than it is common, but there are some workfront implementations that don’t leverage portfolios or at least don’t leverage portfolios and programs well. And that’s just the truth of the matter is that some organizations choose to just structure their work front environment in a way that they’re not really leveraging the power of portfolios and programs. So for those customers, we added an additional step where you can map it to a custom form field, just like we did with the subfolders. So again, you could select any custom form field and then add the true value that then would say, great, that value is correct. We can create the linked folder. With all of that set up, then you’ll see this option here and mine says disable, but you would see yours, if this is the first time setting it up, you would see enable automatic creation of linked folder. And when you do enable the automatic creation of linked folder, you then will see as projects get created. So at that point, this isn’t a retroactive configuring. So this is only going to create folders for any projects moving forward from the time that you selected enable. And that’s something really important to understand because we have customers that maybe they’ve been using Workfront for five years now, and now they’re using the connector. This setting won’t automatically subscribe to project updates for anything prior to enabling the automatic creation of linked folders. I do have something in today’s demonstration where we have provided a tool that can help them retroactively create linked folders. And I’ll talk about that shortly. It’s a missing project link folder report that can go and scan the entire Workfront instance and look for any projects missing a link folder and gives you the option to create them. So again, just important to note that when I enable this, it’s only going to enable this feature for any new project created after this feature has been enabled. This feature is not a feature that can be used across tasks and issues at the moment. So if you were to try to create a linked folder for a task, that’s not a feature we currently support. However, if you were to use a calculated field, for example, there’s ways that you can kind of manipulate the naming structure based on calculated fields. This is the very basic folder structure that we recommend to a lot of our customers. However, you can leverage custom form field values as well. So for folks that are familiar with building custom form fields in text mode in Workfront, I can do like the text mode syntax and let’s say like my custom form field here is channel. I could say DE channel, and then I could come over here and say DE requesting group. And let’s do the last one will be DE project initiative. And then the name of the project. So the flexibility here is that for every project that gets created, it would come in and look at the values in these fields. So in the first one, it would create a folder called email. And then the second folder in that tree would be corporate events. And then the next folder in that tree would be campaign. And then the name of the project. So you do have flexibility, which means that if I can map this to a any custom form field, I can also leverage calculated custom form fields in Workfront. And calculated custom form fields are really powerful. So in a calculated custom form field, I can do all kinds of fancy syntax and if statements and is blank statements and all kinds of different things and create, I can, I can even manipulate or do calculated fields on dates. So if I had a date here, and I only wanted to strip out the year of that date, so I don’t show December 30th, 2021, and I want to create a folder for the date of when this project was requested to be delivered, or even let’s say, for example, the actual completion date, I want to strip out the year, calculated custom form fields become really powerful because I can actually do a calculation in Workfront and then pass whatever the output of that calculation is to a custom form field and then use that in my link folder structure.
And then lastly, before I actually show it, is this ability to update. So if I do need to go in and update and change this, so in fact, let’s just, let’s just keep this structure here and I’m going to update it. Let’s see how that works. I have a campaign channel, requesting group and project initiative, and then the name. Make sure that all looks right. Okay. And then I’m going to come in and update the configuration. Now that I’ve updated it, I’ll need to copy this new project. So it’s listening for those changes that I just made. So if I come here, oops, let’s just do a copy. Clear any documents, clear any assignments. All right. So for just to go back to reiterate, the project status is what’s going to trigger the creation of this folder. So I have this status called create AM folder. So now that I’ve got this project, I’m going to flip it from a planning status to create AM folder. Then I’m going to jump over here to my AM environment. Cross our fingers. It all worked. Always a bit nervous demoing live, but here we go. So now I have that email folder. Again, email is tied to the channel corporate events that was tied to the requesting group campaign. It was tied to the project initiative and now the name of my project. So now I have all the sub folders that I wanted to create. Now those are all available. And then the best part is I jumped back to my documents tab here and I should see that folder is here with all of its sub folders. So you’ll notice it didn’t send me to email. It sent me to the project folder. So now I’ve got this really clean, fully governed project folder setup where it puts everything in the right parent folders and it’s organized in a way that makes sense. So we don’t have users just kind of at will creating folders and making a really messy repository. So the value here is that we really can govern that damn folder structure and make sure that we’re creating clean and organized folder structures in our dam that can be permissioned appropriately in the AM environment. And we know exactly where to go find our assets. So now I can come in here and drag an asset, right? I can come in here and put this in my final files folder and then I come over here and refresh my AM environment and I should see that that asset is now here and being processed in my final files folder. Perfect. Well, I’m going to talk about, so now that we’ve seen how the folders are created, all the different configuration options, I do want to call out that we also support folder metadata schemas. So last call when we talked about the asset level metadata for those not familiar with AM, AM, I think it was a version or so ago, six, four, three, maybe that they introduced folder metadata schemas. So folder metadata schemas again are another way in AM that when I’m searching assets, so if I come back to my asset repository and I wanted to do the facets or the filter, I can also search on folder metadata properties as well. So I have files, folders, files and folders. So I can look at my folders and if I wanted to search on some of the properties of those folders, I could also find those here. So again, if we come back here to tools, assets, and the folder metadata schemas, I have this custom work front folder metadata schema that I’ve been working on. In the same way, so I won’t spend too much time, it’s the same UI as far as dragging. You’ll see obviously there are less data types or field types to drag, but it still I think does a really good job at the ones that we need. So what I’ll often do if I duplicate this window and go back to the folder, see if I’ve actually applied this.
There we go. So what I’ve done here is I’ve done that same thing with the assets where I’ve mapped work front fields. So I have the overview project name field, I have the project reference number field map, the requesting group, the project ID and the project initiative. So I have mapped all those fields and when the folder got created in AM, I had assigned this folder metadata schema to that folder. So not only did it create the folder, but it also pushed over those project details fields found here. So again, project name, project ID, which can be found up here in work front, the reference number, the campaign, the corporate events. So it has all those details there and available at the folder metadata as well. So really, as you see this, what we’ve done is the folder has become a representation of the work front project itself. And that’s really what our goal with the project link folder was, is we wanted to create a representative of the work front project in folder form in AM, where all of the assets work in progress, you know, source files, the final assets can be stored. So I’m glad we’re actually getting close because I wanted to show one thing and really be sure that I’m addressing the business value add to these folders. So what I’ve shown so far, great, right? It’s a really useful tool, it becomes clear, if I’m the work front, whoever is responsible for uploading the final files, if that’s a project coordinator, project manager, maybe there’s some lead creative who’s responsible for uploading the final file after it’s been uploaded or after it’s been approved, maybe through work front proof. So the, you know, the most common use cases, there may be a standard work front folder here called final files. And then inside that final files folder, we may have some assets here. And those assets have gone through some, you know, proof. And after they’ve gone through that proofing cycle, and they’ve been approved, maybe at that point, it’s the responsibility of the project manager or some lead creative to drag those assets into the final files linked folder. And the important thing here, I believe I’ve mentioned this in previous calls, but never hurts to reiterate, we’re actually transferring the asset binary to AM at that point. So a lot of clients ask me that, well, am I duplicating my storage capacity and work front and an am? The answer is no, you are you keeping a document record and work front. So when I do this motion of Okay, great, I want to add this to the final files in am now so I drag this and drop it in the final files. At this point, the asset binary is being transferred to am there is a record of it and work front and that’s where this document ID comes in. So the ability to have this document ID and map custom form fields back to it like I did here, which we’ll talk about this in our next advanced workflow training where I automatically attached to document custom form, and then map back properties. We’ll talk about that in the in the next training. But now I have this document ID. So that’s really the only thing that we’re storing and work front is a record of this asset. But the actual asset binary. So if we were to come and let’s say, you know, download this asset, we’re really downloading it from am. So during that download motion, it’s sending a call to am and it’s it passes through am’s download servlet and it downloads the asset. If I wanted to preview the file. So if I came back here to the project, and I came into this final files folder, and I wanted to just click on and preview it, I can still preview it. But it’s really work fronts making a call to pull in the asset from am. So you’re really previewing the full res asset am at this point. And that that tends to be really important. And I think a great selling point to a lot of our customers is that we’re not actually duplicating storage capacity across the two systems.
So the last thing I want to talk about with the few minutes that we have is the other real good value add to the linked folders that we found. And again, this was sort of, I think, probably unintentional initially, and then we started to realize, as we were building this feature, Adobe Asset Link was was becoming a more popular tool and the Adobe engineering team was investing more time into that tool. So as they were starting to sell more Adobe Asset Link products, and for those unfamiliar with Adobe Asset Link, I’m going to quickly open Photoshop in this browser. It is a plugin within the Creative Cloud suite of products, specifically, InDesign, Illustrator, XD, and Photoshop, those four, the plugins available. So not not necessarily within some of the other video applications and Lightroom and things like that. It’s a way of if you have an enterprise Creative Cloud license, and you also have a am assets environment, you can connect your Creative Cloud suite of tools to your am assets repository. And that was great. But what really what we were missing was a bridge to work from because we realized that creatives are often doing all their work management, their task management, they’re being assigned all that stuff in work front. And then they need a dam to upload this to. So that’s where this project link folder sort of creates a bridge to tie in Creative Cloud through Adobe Asset Link, am and work front all together. So now if I come in here and I open a new Photoshop file, I can come in here and I have this Adobe Asset Link panel. And because I’ve created this linked folder and work front, this link folder will also be visible in Adobe Asset Link. So I could come in here and I can search. In fact, like let’s do this first. I can show you if we know what our project number is. If we know what like, let’s look at the properties of here. So here’s the metadata that was synced over. I come to the project details. We know this project ID, right? Oops. If I come over here to asset link, can I just throw that project ID in here? It’s going to pull up the asset based on a job number. So now you see the value is that I could have some work front job number. Maybe that’s a custom form field, a calculated custom form field. And then I can easily find my assets that were related to a specific project. So now I am, I’m actually looking at the assets here in work front. They’re here and available in my creative cloud suite. And then they’re also available here in AEM. So I’ve now tied all three of these applications together. So if I were to say, check this asset out from my creative cloud application. And then let’s say I were to make some changes to this. You know, I adjust the image to a black and white. Then I save my changes. With those changes, now I could say, well, I want to, you know, upload this asset or check this back in and leave a comment. Now that asset that originated in work front, that has all that great work from metadata is now visible to the creatives in their creative cloud tool because of that link folder and the metadata passing. So it’s really both. There’s an easy folder to find it. So I could come back and search by just going through my file structure if I wanted to do it that way. And I could find there, oh, there’s my corporate events, campaign, here’s my project, here’s my final files. I can find it that way, but I can also search on any of that metadata that we pass through. So I could even come in and let’s say, drag this asset into my Photoshop file, save it. And then I could come and push this to, let’s say, my work in progress. So now I’m working on this Photoshop file and I want to go back to this project folder. I go to my work in progress folder, I upload the asset. And now if I come over here to work front, refresh my screen, go to the WIP folder. Once that loads, I should see my PSD file there as well. It’s going a little slow right now, but we’ll show it in AM while that’s loading. There it is. WIP, here it is. So really you can see the power here and there’s a lot more that I can show here, but I did want to highlight that because whenever I talk about project link folders, I want to make sure that everybody understands the value add to the business with project link folders. It’s not merely a folder where you can store your content. It really does bridge the gap to have this connector be more than just a place to store final approved published assets, but also a place in which you can enable the creative teams to work faster in the tools of their choice, save all that time in downloading to your desktop, re-uploading to a browser. You can just push and make comments and sync all of these systems into one.
Corrections
- @ 4:34 and 6:20 AEM tags syntax is incorrect. Video displays
we-retail:apparel/footwear
. The correct syntax is["we-retail:apparel/footwear"]
or more generally["namespace:tag/childtag"]
.