Adobe Experience Manager is a combined web content management system and digital asset management system. The combined applications of Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Experience Manager Assets is offered by the vendor as an end-to-end solution for managing and delivering marketing content.
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SharePoint Designer (discontinued)
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Microsoft's SharePoint Designer was a tool for developing SharePoint applications that has been discontinued.
So one of the primary focuses in the company has been SEO, and it does not seem well suited to SEO. For instance, how we set up the alt image tags. It's pretty tricky and there are multiple steps to do that. So I would like to see an Adobe Experience Manager that is more focused on out-of-the-box solutions for SEO, schema coding, alt image tags, and other sorts of SEO functionality to have that more built into the vanilla version of the product. Well suited? It's very good at scalability. And because we're managing such a large number of hotel properties, it works well for an enterprise.
SharePoint does not provide, out of the box, a tool to create / update workflows from web. You have to use SharePoint Designer in order to create them. If you need to implement custom workflows for specific business processes, then SharePoint Designer is well suited. SharePoint Designer allows you to create workflows with task approval, email notifications, assign variables and update SharePoint Lists / Documents properties. In our company, we have created specific workflows for : - Purchase order - RH forms validation like annual employee review - Dematerialized existing forms and validation
It is able to support our incoming volume. We're one of the largest in what we do in the country, and we've not had any issues in terms of how it performs, or how it scales our customers coming in. It's a fairly stable platform. It is also a very intuitive platform in us being able to give our business users the ability to come make changes and request additions without going through a huge lift in getting those requests implemented. It has also been a very developer-friendly platform for my team to be able to develop, adapt, and build. We're also expanding on being able to use AEM both as a pure content management solution and also as a headless content solution. So that way we are trying to build a unified content platform that would allow us to create, publish, and manage content across channels from one place. So it's fairly intuitive that way. It's fairly scalable. Obviously, the modern tooling helps, but overall I think it's been a good experience.
2013 Workflows - Loops: You can build loops to work while a value (not) equals something, or N number of times. You can insert Parallel Blocks to do multiple things at once, or to watch for multiple things, and when 1 thing finishes, cancels the others and moves to the next step or stage.
2013 Workflows - Stages: Previously all we had were steps, which worked sequentially. With the Concept of Stages, we can create blocks of steps and based on the data collected during those functions, we can tell the workflow to go to a different Stage in the workflow based on a set of 1, or multiple, Conditionals in a transition area after each Stage. Giving you the power to develop multiple entire processes and skipping to the correct part of the workflow, rather than going through 20 conditionals to find out you needed to do action 31.
2013 Workflows - REST API: the "Call HTTP Web Service" is a very powerful tool, but hard to understand if you have never seen it done, or have a guideline. It works very similar to the requirements in PowerShell to connect and get and post data to SharePoint using the Rest API. You can also use this to manage permissions on List Items, Lists, Sites, and Site Collections. Best part is when developed correctly, it is SUPER FAST!
Intentionally Building Infinite Loops: I have built multiple review process from Managing Certifications to Updating Published Documentation, that monitors when an Item, based on provided approved metadata, when the "Author" needs to review the document within the given amount of time. They will get e-mails with links asking if changes are needed. If not, it is routed to the Approving Executive, and the Workflow Automatically updates the Metadata to push out the review dates to the next date, based on metadata provided on how how often the document should be reviews. By using conditionals in the transition of stages, it basically starts over, and goes into a parallel block to allow the monitoring of multiple values of metadata to move to the next stage. Very Powerful when you want to automate these types of process. It truly is a "Set It and Forget It" process.
I think some of the key things that can be done better is today we have more point solutions for different things like personalization. We have Adobe Target and for email marketing, we have Adobe Campaign Marketer and all that kind of stuff. But truly I have worked both as an implementation partner for Adobe as well as now I'm a client of Adobe. Being in both those shoes, I can say that we can do a lot better in terms of beefing up the capabilities of AEM, bringing personalization and search and content search experience closer together. It would definitely put Adobe Experience Manager in a different league if we can bring all those personalization capabilities together. I think initially the content management systems, the market was mostly meant to serve static sites. It never matured into that full-scale content personalization being married together. I think that's one area where if those integrations rather than being point solutions, if those capabilities can be made more native to AEM, I think it would definitely be a big sell for a lot of customers.
In the newest version of SharePoint Designer, they have gotten rid of the Design view which makes what used to be quick and easy changes much more code-intensive. This makes it harder for non-IT users and is more risker for all SharePoint Designer users.
SharePoint Designer workflows have a lot of functionality, but there are also some crucial limitations, such as not being able to put lookup fields in email subjects or using parenthesis to separate/group logical conditions.
Although this goes along with the Design view, there really isn't a good user interface anymore for adding conditional formatting and styles in views/pages.
We had and still have a fantastic experience using Adobe CQ. Lots of flexibility, great integration with other Adobe products we already use and a powerful technology make it a great fit for our corporate environment. Also as the community grows, it makes it easier to network with other developers and users to get new ideas on how to continue to get the best out of the software.
From our learning curve until we got better. I'd say as we're moving forward and we're making more customizations and we're getting used to it, I'd say it's about a seven or an eight. But as more innovations and more information comes out from Adobe as they make more changes and they make improvements, I'd say they're getting probably about an eight right now.
Being part of Adobe Suite means you are already notified when the tool has any outages. However, I have never faced unplanned outages. Whenever you face any issue with the site, it is clearly stated if there were any planned outages and how quickly you will be back to normal. So, I will say that even the outages are planned and managed in a great way like their other services.
With respect to performance, Adobe experience manager is one of the best in the CMS space. We didn't observe frequent slowness on platform, however the systems which are accessing experience manager should be of good specifications without which slowness would be observed. Adobe experience manager works well in integration with other solutions, unless the destination application is designed to trigger frequent calls to AEM.
Adobe Experience Manager, in all its capacity, is a great alternative to any other CMS you are using. It helps in rapid development and makes life easier for maintaining the website for multi-language sites. Technical know-how is eliminated at content authoring. Better documentation in terms of live examples with videos would be appreciated.
Support is good from Microsoft. They are quite responsive when we raise a ticket but SP Designer support will be ended by Microsoft in the near future as they have got new techs like PowerApps and Flow to achieve the same functionality SP Designer does and even more than that.
Depending on your individual needs, It is really quite simple to create an authoring experience for a website that looks really good. I have been part of many implementations and many teams and have seen many projects that were super successful and others that were not implemented well. AEM has room for a lot of flexibility in the implementation process compared to other CMS like SharePoint
At Canadian Tire Financial, in the time I've been there, we've always used AEM, but in past places I've used WordPress, I've used Squarespace. Things that are more general user-friendly where you're like building your own blog or you're creating a small business website where it's basically just text, you're not intaking information or something like that. I think the customization options in AEM are huge. My experiences with WordPress were pretty straightforward. Again, it was like, I don't know, like college newspaper website or something like that where you're just like putting content up for people to look at. You're not necessarily taking in any other information. Maybe you might allow people to log in or something and save articles or something pretty straightforward, but then even then I remember that stuff taking me forever to do, to figure out and scroll through tons and tons and tons of documentation. It's just not fun. No one enjoys doing that and then even then you might not have the answer available to you. And that's so frustrating. Hey, it's super user-friendly, figuring out the content editor is pretty straightforward. You're not clicking around and being, "what the heck am I looking at?" Or you're not looking at a bazillion menus to be like, "maybe the thing I want is in here." I can't stand that. I want to be able to look at a page, see what I'm going to be getting in production, and then publish it. I don't want to look around in menus to figure out how to add something to a page.
I haven't used anything else like this. I use different products for workflows and forms, but they aren't listed in the listings for this page. Instead of using it for workflows or forms (deprecated 2 years ago), I use Nintex. For everything else, I have what I need in the Modern version of SharePoint online
Instead of being directly involved in the tool purchase, I am involved in analysis or what we can use to maximize the tool. Small organizations may find it expensive. However, if the team or organization focuses more on your ROI or the features you will get, then it will definitely be worth it. Pricing is based on a number of factors, including team size or the use of the tool. The user can select the pricing option that best fits their needs based on the number of form submissions they make or the number of pages they wish to publish on their global/multisite sites.
The professional services team within adobe is one of the best in terms of technical and solutioning knowledge. However, considering the billing charges of adobe professional services team, it is always recommended to involve them during platform initial setup or when a complex solution is to be built with platform customizations.
This actually has been great for our websites. In the time that I've been with the company, we've seen at least the profitability of our websites because we are measuring that through analytics. We've seen it double since using it. We were using it when I first started with the company, but we've gotten better at how we're using it and really optimizing the use as well as the design. I think that that's made a huge difference. We've seen a huge jump in the performance of our websites with maintaining users and the e-commerce side of it.
For my needs, I have not found SharePoint Designer useful for my day to day maintenance of SharePoint. It is useful for viewing all the objects that make up the SharePoint site.
It is not as intuitive in regard to setting up Workflows. I have yet to use it to set up workflows in SharePoint. Maybe if I needed more complex workflows, it would be beneficial.
I like to use SharePoint Designer for moving around files within SharePoint sites.
