Introduction to AEM

Suppose three friends, Tom, Dick, and Harry decided to open a confectionary that makes muffins. They have a secret recipe for cooking muffins which makes them tastier and cheaper than the other muffin brands in the market.

Thus they have a good product and now they are ready to make money. They waited and waited and waited for the customers to come to their shop but no one came. They were perplexed and pondered upon the cause. Then they came to know that very few people know about their confectionary.

But why? Then they realised they put all of their efforts into making their product better but very little time was devoted to marketing. Thus, due to the lack of proper marketing, even a good product suffered. Proper and targeted marketing is very important in today's world.

One of the major means of marketing is the internet i.e. online presence of an organization is very important. If you ask top companies that what is more important for them than their website and online presence, the answer will most probably be - NOTHING. You do want to tell the world - who you are and what you do.

To facilitate this, Adobe Marketing Cloud (or Adobe Experience Cloud) is a good platform. Adobe's marketing suite takes care of various aspects of digital marketing. It has tools like Adobe Campaign, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).

In this article, we will dive deep into AEM only. We will discuss what it is and why do enterprises need it.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
At a very high-level AEM is a content management system that is capable of building websites along with mobile apps, forms, and online communities. It provides the maximum abstraction which allows the non-technical digital marketers to give the desired look and feel to their websites as per business needs. Along with this, all of the digital assets of an organization can be managed in one place.

AEM provides the capability of the real-time preview of the content on the website by incorporating WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) system. By storing an organization's digital assets in one place, it becomes easy to manage them. AEM can tag, catalog and organize all digital assets so they are ready to use and available as and when needed.

AEM is made up of mainly following features -
Sites

• Here websites of an organization are created.
• AEM Sites has the capacity to build responsive, personalized sites that encourage customer engagement and retention.
• Authors and developers can easily manage and build the website. It is as easy as dragging and dropping content, images, and other media.

For more information on sites, see this.

Assets

• It is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool that helps an organization to manage all their assets (images, videos, documents, etc) easily.
• We can "tag", "annotate", and "catalog" assets.
• Metadata of assets can be created/modified easily.

For more information on assets, see this.

Projects
It lets us group resources into one entity.
Resources can be assets, workflows, team information and many more.
To know more about projects, see this

Communities

• It helps an organization to bond with their users by creating blogs, forums, etc
• Members of a community can use social logins such as Facebook and Twitter

See this, to know more about the features AEM communities provide.

AEM Forms

• Document management system within the AEM which makes creating and managing forms and documents paperless, efficient and automated.
• Create interactive, personalized statements that can be accessed anytime from anywhere.
• Develop automated workflows, and merge form data and documents with your existing systems.

Also, see this for more information.

Why AEM?
After knowing, what is AEM in the above section, we will be discussing why do we need it?

Content Storage
AEM lets the organization store its content in the cloud which can be accessed by its members anywhere in the world at any time. This increases productivity and efficiency.

Tags and Metadata management
This lets the users tag their assets and modify the metadata of the assets which gives easy access.

Searching
This enables the users to search anywhere in the repository in no time. The users can search using various filters that are easily configurable.

Multi-Site Management (MSM)
This feature provides the maximum content reusability and allows the common content to be replicated in multiple sites in no time. Configuring them is quite easy.

User Management
This allows an organization to give appropriate permissions to create, read, update, delete in the AEM to different users.

Integrations
It is very easy to integrate AEM with other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions such as Campaign, Analytics, Target, etc. This allows taking full advantage of various Digital Marketing solutions and increases productivity.

These are a few features that make AEM a favorite choice for Content Management System based applications. For more reasons to use AEM, see here.

Conclusion
In this post, we discussed high-level details about the Adobe Experience Manager and why is it a buzzword in the digital marketing space. This post sets the foundation of the intent of using AEM as a CMS. In the next post, we will see the basic building blocks of AEM and more technical details.

Source: https://aem.redquark.org/2018/10/day-01-introduction-to-aem.html