Are you underutilizing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)?

If there is one word that is often associated with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), that word is powerful. I used that word myself in advance of my pre-Adobe Summit workshop, and it was frequently used during the Adobe Summit itself.

But what good is the power of AEM if you are not utilizing its features to their fullest?

This article highlights three ways in which you may be underutilizing Adobe Experience Manager, and how to fully utilize critical AEM features for your organization’s benefit.

Three AEM Features You May Be Underutilizing

Adobe is introducing new features constantly. Are you using all the AEM features listed below?

Underutilizing AEM Generative AI Features

The generative AI features in all the Adobe products are too numerous to list here. My posts in the KBWEB Consult blog and LinkedIn page often touch upon generative AI.

Suffice it so say that if you are laboriously creating and modifying assets manually, you’re missing the true power of AEM. If you need assets that specifically address dozens of markets in dozens of countries for millions of customers, AEM can automatically generate these assets for you with minimal human interaction. Have you upgraded your product pricing, colors, or availability? Consider the change done.

Of course, a full implementation of AEM’s generative AI features may require a system upgrade, interface updates, and changes to your configurations.

Underutilizing Adaptive Forms Core Components

But are you underutilizing Adobe Experience Manager features other than generative AI?

Your prospects and customers are accessing your content through many channels. When they are responding to your questions, are you giving them a stellar user experience?

If you are using Adobe’s Adaptive Forms, then your content displays properly regardless of whether your prospect or customer is on a wide-screen desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

To assist you in creating these Adaptive Forms, Adobe has launched 30 Adaptive Forms Core Components. The components include text boxes, buttons, check boxes, reCAPTCHAs, images, attachments, terms and conditions, and many more. Additionally, your forms appear properly for all your prospects and customers, providing the quality user experience they expect from you.

But Adaptive Forms Core Components are not available to every AEM user. For example, the Terms and Conditions component requires AEM as a Cloud release 2.0.62 or later, and on-premise users require AEM 6.5.16.0 Forms or later.

Underutilizing Content Credentials

I’ve previously discussed how you can use AEM to manage asset metadata, such as asset expiration dates. But there is a newer way to manage your content: by the use of content credentials.

Adobe is one of the Steering Committee members of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authority, along with Amazon, the BBC, Google, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Publicis Groupe, Sony, and Truepic. Are you underutilizing AEM C2PA capabilities?
Coalition for Content Provenance and Authority Steering Committee Membership.

Adobe is one of several founding members of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authority (C2PA), dedicated to “providing publishers, creators, and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media.” Naturally, Adobe is implementing C2PA-compliant content credentials in AEM. These can tell you the facts about an asset (in C2PA terms, the “provenance“): whether the image of a product from a particular manufacturer was created by that manufacturer, whether a voice recording of Anil Chakravarthy was created by Anil Chakravarthy, or whether an image of a peaceful meadow was actually generated by artificial intelligence (such as Adobe Firefly).

This lets AEM managers intelligently govern their assets. But are you underutilizing AEM in this regard?

Five Steps to Fully Utilize Critical AEM Features

Once you identify an AEM feature you may be underutilizing, what steps do you need to take to fully use it?

In some cases, you need to make changes to your AEM implementation to support these new functions. This is where KBWEB Consult can help you with its AEM Resurgence offering.

Even if your AEM upgrade is stalled, we can help. As previously discussed, AEM Resurgence includes the following five phases:

  • Phase 1: Diagnose Project Status or Stalemate. We analyze your upgrade needs and perform an implementation health check on your current system.
  • Phase 2: Define Completion Roadmap. We create a project plan with goals, milestones, resource allocations, and risk mitigations.
  • Phase 3: Execute and Optimize Implementation. We upgrade necessary applications and interfaces, configure the software, implement new desired features, optimize the software, perform initial testing, and re-execute the implementation health check.
  • Phase 4: Validate and Launch. We perform comprehensive testing and validation and perform a controlled cutover to the new system.
  • Phase 5: Provide Dedicated Outsourced Support. We assign a dedicated outsourced AEM practitioner upon completion of a support agreement.

This last phase is so important that I plan to dedicate a future article just to this phase alone.

But for now, if you need advice on implementing particular features, or ensuring that your AEM implementation is state-of-the-art, feel free to contact me to book a free 30 minute consultation.