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 3.1 out of 10
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Microsoft's SharePoint Designer was a tool for developing SharePoint applications that has been discontinued.
I'll answer the second one because I mean, the first one I don't have an issue with. The second scenario is we oftentimes have the need to spin off very small campaign style sites or sites that generate leads but are unbranded and that sort of thing. So that's hard to do in AEM because you have to then create another organization within AEM to do that. And we're talking about sites that are maybe five to 10 pages in size. So we've been investigating Edge, but then that's a different workflow, so we'd have to train people on that. So it would be nice if there was something within the AEM structure that could allow you to do something very similar to Edge, where you make some small micro sites that are not necessarily branded, that you could still host within the platform and not have to retrain everybody on a completely different platform.
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 allows us to scale so that we can make a change on a global footer. And it applies to all of the different property websites. It allows us to set up components and compartmentalize things in a way. The big thing is that it's scalable. And then it also ties into Adobe Analytics and other Adobe products. So we are a complete Adobe shop. Every Adobe product that we can use, we use. I don't think we do it for marketing so much, but for doing target testing and analytics, data scientists are using the same product and so it all speaks.
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.
Can sometimes be difficult to troubleshoot bugs/issues as they arise
Sometimes difficult to set up restrictions on how components can be designed to make sure they fit in with existing content
While the integration with Adobe target works fairly well, the process can be a bit opaque and hard to understand, making it difficult to troubleshoot when issues arise
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.
It depends if it is from an administrator point of view or from a business content author point of view. I think from business author point of view the solution is good and with the GEN AI capabilities coming it is doing better and better, however from an administration point of view there are still a lot of improvements to ease the maintenance of user access management and as well as the integration configuration aspect.
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
Overall, I prefer AEM as an enterprise site management tool. It allows levels of access control and delegation, while leaving the server management and updates to a specialized team. I do miss the flexibility of being able to search and replace that I have in a WordPress site, and I miss the ability to have one file for redirects like I had in percussion
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.
too soon to tell on increased conversion rates based on external marketing factors in play but having increased visibility into customer engagement trends will most likely lead to improvement of our conversion rates.
There have been productivity gains from the perspective of actually migrating all of our externally managed sites to the same in-house Adobe Experience Manager platform and then being able to utilize those universal components.
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.
