Adobe is trying to drive down time-to-value and total cost of ownership for the AEM. As a result, Adobe, has launched new implementation initiative – Digital Foundation Blueprint. The goal is to save its customer on initial investments.

What is Adobe Digital Foundation Blueprint?

Digital Foundation Blueprint is a set of open source tools, best practices documentation, and automation. Wether the implementation is completed by Adobe or their partners, the goal is to have an AEM site up and running with analytics and personalization for under 90 days.

Open Source Tools

The open source tools maintained by Adobe are:

• Archetype – standard project template to start site development with 3 editable templates.
• Core Components – at this time Adobe offers 28 production ready components.
• Data Layer – a standard (also customizable) data object provided to reduce the effort to instrument AEM and other sites to expose and access any kind of data for any script.

Automation

• Code initialization – Adobe states that there are a range of important AEM features that come provision, such as standardized Style System, Base Templates, leveraging Responsive Grid, content skeleton, URL, mapping, Workflows, user and group, dispatcher, AEM Sites best practice and security configuration.
• Analytics Report Suite – created with best practices configuration
• Launch environment & property creation – configured with your Analytics & Target accounts
• Target and Analytics integration

Guidance & Documentation

• UX style guide templates and samples 
• Guides and runbooks for executing each phase (Discovery, Implementation, & Optimization) 
• Optimization, Analytics reporting, and Target testing templates 

Getting started the right foot with AEM, Analytics, and Target!

We have explored AEM and what it takes to succeed with implementations. Read 7 Secrets for Adobe AEM Implementation Success. The Adobe Digital Foundation Blueprint is another set of tools, automation, and best practices to follow when planning for your baseline Adobe AEM Sites, Analytics, and Target implementations. This is important, because if your focus on do this right in the initial phase, it will save you additional efforts of fixing problems later.

Should You Jump on the Cloud or Not?

This is a vast topic to discuss. I would just like to touch on it just in the lights of the cost-benefit. Is Adobe Digital Foundation Blueprint applicable for the implementations on the cloud only?

Adobe has introduced AEM on the cloud few years ago with Adobe Managed Services and have been improving it in many aspects to accommodate all sorts of customers’ industries. The main goal was to reduce customer efforts on infrastructure support and improve sites scalability. At the beginning of this year, Adobe announced a native implementation of AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS). Read more here.

If you are new to AEM, it makes sense to explore all the options you have to implement AEM – (1) on premises (in your data center), (2) on Adobe’s Managed Services cloud, or (3) on Adobe’s native cloud. Thoughts on AEM as a Cloud Service article has a good comparison of the above three services. I believe that the Adobe Digital Foundation Blueprint is applicable to all. Just ask your implementation partner for it and listen what they will tell you.

90 days – working AEM site with Adobe’s Core components plus Analytics and Target base configuration – it is possible!

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KBWEB Consult specializes in customizing and integrating the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Platform. Contact us for a free consultation.