Set your team up for a successful Adobe Experience Manager deployment.

You’ve chosen a great product. You’ve got the right people on your team. Now you just need to give them a process to follow.

Everyone likes a well-designed process, especially when it’s communicated clearly.

When people resist a new initiative, it’s often because they don’t like the process. You can avoid that problem by using proven methods and having consistent, two-way communication with stakeholders at all levels — starting with the team members who will play key roles in your Adobe Experience Manager implementation.

This guide will walk you through best practices — based on thousands of companies that have been through this process — for deploying AEM Sites and AEM Assets. The more closely you follow the steps outlined, the more likely you’ll be to stay on schedule and achieve your desired business outcomes.

Plan your AEM Sites deployment:

AEM SITES: DISCOVERY

Adobe Experience Manager Sites: Phase 1 — Discovery

The Discovery phase is designed to align your AEM Sites deployment with your business goals and objectives. The purpose is to ensure everyone on the implementation team is operating with the same expectations and foundational knowledge.

Your team should be preparing for the following key milestones:

Internal Kick-off:
Before you begin working with the Adobe team, your team will need to get ready to present the initial vision for the project.

Team and governance — Do you have the suggested team members?
- Availability — Are your team members available?
- Alignment — Does the entire team have a common understanding of the overall business objectives?
- Roles and responsibilities — Use a RACI matrix to identify people who will be responsible for driving specific tasks, as well as approvers, contributors, and those who need be informed.
Technology and tools — Hit the ground running by providing the Adobe team with access to:
- Your collaboration and issue-tracking tool (such as JIRA or Confluence)
- Your corporate network
- Hardware (if required)
Initial experience design requirements:
- Clear use cases
- Detailed functional requirements
- Design proposal
- Target metrics
- Hardware — network speed, computational speed, I/O performance, memory

Project Kick-off:
The purpose of this meeting is to make sure your internal team and your implementation partner team have a shared understanding of your business goals and objectives. Your team will work with an implementation partner to create the project roadmap, set ROI expectations, and develop a communication plan.

Project Scope:
Once you and your implementation partner have agreed on a budget, a timeline, and the work each side will perform, it’s often helpful to define a method for managing scope change. If some pieces of the project take longer than expected, you can either increase the budget and extend the timeline or reduce the scope of activities to keep the project on schedule. If a timely launch is a high priority, everyone should understand that from the beginning.

Value Drivers:
AEM Sites drives business value along several dimensions, including cost efficiency, employee satisfaction and productivity, and customer metrics like engagement, conversion, and retention. At the outset, it’s helpful if everyone on your team understands the value drivers that will be most important in measuring the project’s success.

Ensure your value driver discussions include the following topics:

What are the ROI Expectations?
- Examples: 1.7x higher customer retention rates, 1.6x customer lifetime value, 1.4x revenue growth.
Define and prioritize project success criteria.
- Examples: Launched MVP by (date), added new capabilities, improved operational efficiencies, increased content velocity, acquired a 360 view of the customer, built a solid digital foundation, mastered content across channels, made enrollment paperless and painless, elevated digital shopping experiences, made it easier to orchestrate campaigns across channels, made every customer experience personal, reduced the cost of attracting high-value customers, increased the number of “very satisfied” employees on annual survey
Establish benchmarks to measure project success after launch.
- In the list of success criteria you defined above, pick a few that are most important and attach a number to each of them.
- Make sure some of your benchmarks demonstrate ROI by showing how much money you’re saving through operational efficiencies or how much incremental revenue or profit you’re generating.

AEM SITES: DESIGN WORKSHOPS

Adobe Experience Manager Sites: Phase 2 — Design Workshops

You’ve just kicked off the project, and now the work begins! These workshops use our methodology, the project scope you’ve defined, and your unique goals to design the workflows for a successful AEM Sites deployment.

Governance:
In AEM Sites, you can manage team workflows in a shared environment, monitor them with automatic notifications, and track projects and approvals within workflows. Make sure your team has clear agreement on who the end users will be, what their needs are, and how the different teams using the system will work together.

UX Considerations:
Be sure that your UX designers are leveraging core component functionality as much as possible. Core components accelerate development time and are supported by Adobe core components. Your team will be able to switch between predefined styles instantly with responsive content, layouts, and page elements.

Backlog Development:
Your team will develop epics — big chunks of work — that relate to your quarterly and annual implementation objectives. Epics are features or business requirements. They are actionable, and can underlay template, component, taxonomy, workflow criteria, and more.

Workflow Optimization:
Streamline your authoring and personalization workflow through a native integration between Experience Manager and Adobe Target, which allows your site to display different experiences to different target audiences. An experience fragment authored in the familiar Experience Manager interface can be easily pushed to Target as an offer, allowing it to be used in an A/B test or personalization activity.

Tagging:
Tags quickly classify content within a site. Your authors will be able to organize content and tags, maintain deep tags, control tag permissions, conduct more efficient searches, enable improved SEO, and more.

Multisite Management:
Control all your global mobile and web properties from a streamlined interface. This feature promotes content consistency and ease of language translation. Experience Manager has connections that are compatible with many language translation services, including these.

Templates:
Accelerate content velocity by giving your authors greater control over how your content is presented. With editable templates, super users can build templates within Experience Manager without depending on development resources. Your authors should be properly trained to use editable templates. Adobe Learning Services offers a variety of helpful online courses.

Development Preparation:
Before the Development phase begins, the team must align on the following:

Content architecture
System architecture
Application architecture
System integration
Test concept
Support setup

AEM SITES: DEVELOPMENT

Adobe Experience Manager Sites: Phase 3 — Development

During the Development phase, Adobe works with your team to set up AEM Sites based on the goals and objectives that were finalized in the Design phase. You’ll need to ensure your team is tracking toward those goals with measurable deliverables and reporting.

As a leader, attend the demos. You should be hearing discussions about the following:

OSGi Development: Fundamental to the Experience Manager technology stack, OSGi is used to control the composite bundles of Experience Manager and their configuration.
LDAP Configuration: LDAP authentication is required to authenticate users stored in a central LDAP directory, which reduces the effort required to manage user accounts.
Dispatcher Configuration: Dispatcher is Adobe’s caching and load balancing tool. Using Dispatcher protects your Experience Manager server from attack.
OAK Indexing: Apache Jackrabbit Oak will help your team implement a scalable and reliable hierarchical content repository to serve as the foundation of your website.
Single Sign On (SSO): SSO allows a user to access multiple systems after providing authentication credentials once. A separate system performs the authentication and provides Experience Manager with the user credentials. Experience Manager checks and enforces the access permissions for the user.
Customizing Core Components: Core components are designed to be flexible and extensible.

AEM SITES: LAUNCH

Adobe Experience Manager Sites: Phase 4 — Testing & Launch

TESTING
Now it’s time for your team to validate whether AEM Sites works as intended and meets your business objectives. This phase includes functional testing, automated testing, and load testing.

User Acceptance Testing:
Acceptance tests prove that AEM Sites fulfills your team’s requirements and that users are accepting it in terms of functionality, design, and performance.

Performance Testing:
Performance and load tests validate that the system meets the required performance levels at both average and peak loads.

LAUNCH
We’re ready for launch! In this phase, your team will be trained in admin and authoring activities within Experience Manager. In addition, security tests will confirm that the platform is stable.

Training:
Members of your team who have been designated as Experience Manager admins or Experience Manager authors must be trained to perform their assigned tasks. Adobe’s Digital Learning Services portal offers online courses tailored to those two groups, as well as a variety of other courses related to AEM Sites.

Plan your AEM Assets deployment:

AEM ASSETS: DISCOVERY

Adobe Experience Manager Assets: Phase 1 — Discovery

The Discovery phase is designed to align your AEM Assets deployment with your business goals and objectives. The purpose is to ensure everyone on the implementation team is operating with the same expectations and foundational knowledge.

Your team should be preparing for the following key milestones:

Internal Kick-off:
Before you begin working with the Adobe team, your team will need to get ready to present the initial vision for the project.

Team and governance — Do you have the suggested team members?
- Availability — Are your team members available?
- Alignment — Does the entire team have a common understanding of the overall business objectives?
- Roles and responsibilities — Use a RACI matrix to identify people who will be responsible for driving specific tasks, as well as approvers, contributors, and those who need be informed.
Technology and tools — Hit the ground running by providing the Adobe team with access to:
- Your collaboration and issue tracking tool (such as JIRA or Confluence)
- Your corporate network
- Hardware (if required)
Initial experience design requirements:
- Clear use cases
- Detailed functional requirements
- Design proposal
- Target metrics
- Hardware — network speed, computational speed, I/O performance, memory

Project Kick-off: The purpose of this meeting is to make sure your internal team and your implementation partner team have a shared understanding of your business goals and objectives. Your team will work with the implementation partner to create the project roadmap, set ROI expectations, and develop a communication plan.

Project Scope: Once you and your implementation partner have agreed on a budget, a timeline, and the work each side will perform, it’s often helpful to define a method for managing scope change. If some pieces of the project take longer than expected, you can either increase the budget and extend the timeline or reduce the scope of activities to keep the project on schedule. If a timely launch is a high priority, everyone should understand that from the beginning.

Value Drivers: AEM Assets drives business value along several dimensions, including cost efficiency, employee satisfaction and productivity, and customer metrics like engagement, conversion, and retention. At the outset, it’s helpful if everyone on your team understands the value drivers that will be most important in measuring the project’s success.

Ensure your value driver discussions include the following topics:

What are the ROI expectations?
- Examples: 1.7x higher customer retention rates, 1.6x customer lifetime value, 1.4x revenue growth
Define and prioritize project success criteria.
- Examples: Launched MVP by (date), added new capabilities, improved operational efficiencies, increased content velocity, acquired a 360 view of the customer, built a solid digital foundation, mastered content across channels, made enrollment paperless and painless, elevated digital shopping experiences, made it easier to orchestrate campaigns across channels, made every customer experience personal, reduced the cost of attracting high-value customers, increased the number of “very satisfied” employees on annual survey
Establish benchmarks to measure project success after launch.
- In the list of success criteria you defined above, pick a few that are most important and attach a number to each of them.
- Make sure some of your benchmarks demonstrate ROI by showing how much money you’re saving through operational efficiencies or how much incremental revenue or profit you’re generating.

AEM ASSETS: DESIGN WORKSHOPS

Adobe Experience Manager Assets: Phase 2 — Design Workshops

Folder Structure:
The folder structure in AEM Assets instills governance, enables efficient processes, and supports on-demand asset retrieval. Finding an asset no longer depends on knowing where the asset lives but on knowing about the asset itself. AEM Assets provides automated, intuitive search options that streamline the ability to create, edit, and share assets among users.

Metadata Schema:
Adobe’s enterprise-grade metadata lets your team define cascading metadata fields faster and more accurately. The more metadata you have on an asset, the more valuable the asset is. Attaching more metadata to your assets also:

Increases findability.
Empowers personalization.
Supports asset governance and control.
Provides greater visibility into asset performance.
Helps reduces duplication.
Enables efficient reuse.

Governance:
AEM Assets helps you maintain control over your assets through each stage of the asset lifecycle — from creation to archive. This includes workflow approval during the creation phase, digital rights management (DRM) permissions during the consumption phase, performance reporting during the publication phase, and asset expiration and workflow closure during the archiving phase.

Automation:
Think about the things your team does in a repetitive fashion, like cropping photos, generating renditions, and perhaps inputting metadata. AEM Assets uses AI and machine learning to automate these tedious tasks so your creatives, marketers, and developers can focus on more impactful activities.

Workflows:
Your workflows should accelerate content velocity, not slow it down. AEM Assets enables you to easily manage the planning, design, review, approval, and publishing of assets, right where the content resides. Workflows can be customized to meet your organization’s needs.
(Infographic tbd)

Dynamic Media:
The Dynamic Media feature in AEM Assets helps deliver rich, visual merchandising and marketing assets on demand, automatically scaled for consumption on web, mobile, and social sites. Using a set of master assets, Dynamic Media generates and delivers multiple variations of rich content in real time through its global, scalable, performance-optimized network. Dynamic Media also can go outside the DAM and deliver assets from a URL.
(Graphic tbd to show asset inside the DAM, and the cloud in between it. Asset being delivered to several different screens. - freeway, website, mobile app, store kiosk)

Brand Portal:
With the Brand Portal in AEM Assets, your team can easily and securely distribute assets to — and source assets from — agencies, channel partners, and external teams. Track how your assets are being used and distributed so you can manage users more efficiently and confidentially.

Asset Integration in Adobe Target:
AEM Assets can be integrated directly with Target using experience fragments. An experience fragment is made in Experience Manager and pushed to Target as an offer, which can then be used in an A/B test or personalization activity.

AEM ASSETS: CONFIGURATION

Adobe Experience Manager Assets: Phase 3 — Configuration

During the Configuration phase, Adobe works with your team to set up AEM Assets based on the goals and objectives that were finalized in the Design phase. You’ll need to ensure your team is tracking toward those goals with measurable deliverables and reporting.

Environments:
Response times reflect the distinct characteristics of the target audience and can differ between your authoring and publishing environments. While the authoring environment typically caters to a small number of users who are making a high number of performance-intensive requests, the publishing environment must support a greater number of requests and can be enhanced with content caching or load-balancing.

Users, Groups, and Permissions:
Groups are a collection of users. Assigning users to groups simplifies the allocation of permissions and privileges within AEM Assets. Groups can reflect your team’s structure, giving you a clear overview and an efficient mechanism for updates.

Single Sign On (SSO):
SSO allows a user to access multiple systems after providing authentication credentials once. A separate system performs the authentication and provides Experience Manager with the user credentials. Experience Manager checks and enforces the access permissions for the user.

Folder Structure:
Your folder structure in AEM Assets should reflect how your organization uses data. The implementation team will design the content hierarchy in a way that supports your business requirements.

Metadata Schema:
A metadata schema defines the layout of the properties page and the metadata properties displayed for assets that use the schema.

Collections:
A collection is a set of assets that can be shared among users. A collection can either collate assets based on search criteria, or it can be a static reference list of assets, folders, and other collections.

ACS Commons Manage Control Processes:
Adobe Consulting Services provides an Experience Manager development toolkit called ACS Commons. It includes the Manage Control Process, which helps your implementation team to:

Move content in bulk.
Repair thumbnails.
Import data from sheets.
Ingest tools.
Create folders.
Report on assets.
Create tags.
Prune the admin function.

Creative Cloud Integration:
One of the unique benefits of AEM Assets is its native integration with Adobe Creative Cloud. Your implementation team can set up two-way synchronization in Adobe I/O.

ImageMagick Add-On:
ImageMagick is a tool for creating, editing, composing, and converting bitmap images. You can also adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses, and curves using ImageMagick.

Dynamic Media Add-On:
AEM Assets and Dynamic Media offer a framework and a suite of components that let your creators and marketers effortlessly customize and deliver interactive multimedia viewers across all devices.

Brand Portal Add-On:
When collaborating with channel partners and internal business users, your creative and marketing teams can use Brand Portal to easily acquire, control, and securely distribute approved creative assets across devices.

AEM ASSETS: LAUNCH

Adobe Experience Manager Assets: Phase 4 — Migration, Testing, & Launch

MIGRATION
It’s time for your assets to migrate from your legacy system to AEM Assets. During this phase, your team will be disabling workflows, loading tags, ingesting assets, processing renditions, activating assets, and, finally, enabling workflows.

TESTING
Now it’s time for your team to validate whether AEM Assets works as intended and meets your business objectives. This phase includes functional testing, automated testing, and load testing.

User Acceptance Testing:
Acceptance tests prove that AEM Assets fulfills your team’s requirements and that users are accepting it in terms of functionality, design, and performance.