Adobe CQ (AEM) strongly delivers.
July 30, 2014

Adobe CQ (AEM) strongly delivers.

Fernando Galeano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

5.5

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe CQ

We are using Adobe CQ in the Merchandising department. It allows those teams to author and launch landing pages for the different sales and seasonal events we run on a regular basis. It helps them be independent of our technical teams for releasing and authoring all the pages they need, at the speed they need. At the same time, our technical team can provide customized templates, components and publishing workflows within certain boundaries that help us keep our design and development standards in check. All this while authors can publish new content any time they need without having to go through the rigorous release and deployment processes.

Our previous CMS solution was dated and it was costly for the organization to keep up with the pace of the Merchandising and Marketing teams. We were forced to plan too far in advance to give development teams time to put together new landing pages and it didn't allow for quick turn arounds like CQ does.
  • Allows non-technical staff to author and publish content by focusing on the content itself and the needs of a given campaign instead of technical implementations.
  • Content workflows allow varying degrees of complexity for content review and quality assurance before providing approvals on any piece before going live.
  • Development teams can build very robust and complex component for handling virtually all posible needs: from integrating back-end web services to UI Widgets for content authoring; from multisite suites to multi-language components, CQ can handle it all thanks to the power of Java and the flexibility of Sling and JCR.
  • Easy to scale for high-traffic sites and thanks to the Publisher/Dispatcher infrastructure, very flexible for caching and load balancing.
  • Steep learning curve for both Authors and Developers when it comes to customized components and workflows.
  • Development community is small and somewhat closed. It keeps growing with the years as CQ becomes more popular, which is a good thing.
  • Expensive, both to purchase, train and certify. This makes it harder to learn unless companies are willing to spend thousands on official training.
  • Extreme flexibility and speed to publish new pages with as little as a few hours of notice. This allowed us to be more efficient in handling landing pages for lead generation.
  • Powerful technology stack that allows for an infinite amount of customization. New ideas came up as we learned all the capabilities of CQ. It helped us innovate in the way we build and author pages.
  • Poor documentation and small community slowed our initial ramp up and development times until first release. By now this should have improved with the increased popularity.
We selected Adobe CQ mostly for the ease of page authoring in brought to our non-technical staff. Powerful and simple UI widgets made it very simple for our merchandiser to create, edit and publish new pages. It also allowed us to customize those widgets to fit their needs while keeping the same clean experience. We also saw a plus in the ability to run activation workflows based on our own organization hierarchy, which helped make sure the right pages were exposed to the right eyes before going live. Overall, it was the mixture of user-friendliness of the authoring interface with the robustness of the technology stack that convinced us to go with CQ.
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.
CQ is best suited for multi-site projects that require frequent updates or new pages spun up very quickly and with the same quality as the rest of your site. It's also a great fit if you have extensive media libraries: pictures, videos, etc. The Digital Asset Manager is very powerful and if it's coupled with a CDN, it can be itself a great solution for that particular purpose alone.

Key questions to ask would be:

- How comfortable will our authors be with this publishing platform? What are their needs and wants? Can CQ accommodate them?
- How skilled is our development team to take a project like CQ? The best of CQ comes when is customized but it will come with a price. Time and talent will be necessary to tweak it to the right fit.
- Do we have enough time and resources to allow our technical and non-technical stuff to learn? Can we afford all the oficial training levels?