Mastering Adobe Experience Manager Integrations: Best Practices and Tips

Mastering Adobe Experience Manager integrations helps e-commerce and other customer-facing businesses to make money. It’s true.

And it’s essential to integrate Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) with the rest of your website. No website is a silo. All incorporate software from numerous sources, and all that software must work together.

This article describes just some of the available AEM integrations. It also offers best practices and tips on creating a customer-attracting website that generates revenue.

Available Adobe Experience Manager integrations

Let’s review the available integrations, starting with an obvious integration that many of us overlook.

AEM integrates with…itself

If you’ve immersed yourself in the AEM ecosystem, you can sometimes forget that AEM provides a number of complementary services. Most of its competitors provide only part of the solution.

Let’s start with content management system (CMS) applications and digital asset management (DAM) applications. While you could conceivably only use one or the other, your business benefits best if you implement both.

• If you already have a CMS, then you need to find a DAM. Many CMS applications that compete with AEM Sites offer integrations to DAM systems from other vendors.

• Similarly, if you already have a DAM that competes with AEM Assets, your vendor may offer an integrator to another vendor’s CMS.

But why procure the two most critical components of your website from two different vendors?

If you purchase from Adobe, you can implement a CMS (AEM Sites) and a DAM (AEM Assets) from the same vendor. Both AEM Sites and AEM Assets are designed at their core to work together.

And that’s not all that AEM provides:

• Adobe Experience Manager Forms lets your end users securely complete and e-sign forms. As I said over four years ago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, AEM Forms is an essential tool to interact with distant clients.

• Adobe Learning Manager is a learning management system (LMS) that engages end users and partners, teaching them about your offerings.

• Adobe Experience Manager Guides lets you manage and scale documentation and other components.

So just by selecting the AEM ecosystem, you are already obtaining many critical pieces of your solution from one vendor. This eliminates finger-pointing between multiple vendors.

But we’re just getting started…

AEM integrates with other Adobe enterprise products

Adobe Experience Manager itself is just one part of Adobe Experience Cloud.

Adobe Experience Cloud provides you with significant additional functionality, all from a single vendor.

Previous posts have already addressed Adobe Workfront, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Real-Time CDP, Adobe Target, Adobe Journey Optimizer, and other components of Adobe Experience Cloud.

AEM and Adobe Experience Cloud provide you with most if not all the building blocks for your e-commerce or customer-facing website.

But while AEM and Adobe Experience Cloud can create some of the collateral, you need other applications.

AEM integrates with Adobe creative products

For many creators, Adobe is synonymous with three industry-leading creative tools: InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, all part of the Adobe Creative Cloud.

Through Adobe Firefly and Adobe Asset Link, creatives who use these tools can work together with marketers on Adobe Experience Cloud, and each of them can remain in their preferred applications without having to learn a different software package.

The result? Creatives remain in Adobe Creative Cloud, marketers and developers remain in Adobe Experience Cloud, and everyone works together to deliver a stellar website for your prospects.

AEM integrates with third-party services

AEM also integrates with other services provided by third parties, including packages from vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and many others. These integrations allow you to satisfy any unique needs your firm has.

As a result, you can integrate AEM with its own components, the rest of Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud, or nearly any other business application of importance. This lets you attract customers to your website and generate revenue.

Best Practices and Tips for Adobe Experience Manager Integrations

But how do you integrate these components together?

As we have seen, AEM can integrate with other Adobe and non-Adobe products to deliver comprehensive websites to your end users. When you combine the power of AEM with your other services, you can deliver the right information to your prospects quickly.

But it doesn’t just magically happen.

To deliver a successful integrated system you have to perform the following three steps.

• Step 1: Ensure the right stakeholders are in the room.
• Step 2: Follow a structured implementation process.
• Step 3: Know your components.

Step 1: Ensure the right stakeholders are in the room

For a successful AEM implementation, you need all key stakeholders to participate. The key person that you exclude from your implementation can derail it. Likewise, making an effort to include all key stakeholders helps to ensure success.

Among the key project team roles are the product owner, the scrum master (or equivalent) to manage the work, the creatives, the marketers, the developers, and others that I named in this article. If the necessary roles are represented, the AEM project team will have the knowledge to deliver the best possible website for you and your end users.

Step 2: Follow a structured implementation process

Integration projects are complex, and you don’t want to lose tasks along the way. Therefore, you need to manage the project with a well-tested structure.

KBWEB Consult uses a six-stage implementation process with its clients, including the following:

1. Discovery Phase.
2. UX Conceptualization.
3. Graphic Design.
4. Code.
5. Solution Evaluation.
6. Launch.

In each of these stages we pay attention to your integration needs. For example, during the UX Conceptualization phase we endeavor to thoroughly understand the necessary information architecture, and ensure that the proposed packages support the necessary core features and functionalities.

Step 3: Know your components

I’ve already talked about how you need to “know your visitor.” In the same way, when you launch an integration project you need to “know your components.”

The implementation team needs to understand all the packages that it is integrating, including any Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud, and other components. If the implementation team doesn’t know these components, the results can be disastrous.

KBWEB Consult can fulfill the knowledge expert role on your team. We understand AEM and other technologies both from a technical standpoint and from a business standpoint. KBWEB Consult is an Adobe Certified Partner with 8 Adobe credentials. And as a boutique technology consulting firm, we can personally devote our expertise to you, rather than tossing you into a bureaucracy maze at larger consulting firms.

Schedule a meeting with me to learn how KBWEB Consult can apply its experience to craft your integrated solution.