Item: Adobe Experience Manager
Rating: 8
Author: Shishir Srivastava

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have worked with more than 5 AEM implementations.This includes various industries ranging from publishing, media & entertainment, manufacturing and education. In most of the cases it was a migration from a legacy CMS to AEM. Most of the implementation involves integrating a video system, email system, news system, and feed integration etc. All the sites are non logged in sites and are large websites having more than 1000 pages.

Pros and Cons

Concept of iparsys enabling inheritance
MSM support for multi site
Digital Asset management
Concept of preview
Workflow GUI

Widget customization is extremely challenging
Ability to create Custom Dashboard is missing
Portal support is inadequate

Return on Investment

AEM implementation increased employee efficiency as users can drag and drop components and do in place editing. If you have a clear use case for targeting you can achieve those effectively.

Alternatives Considered

This is one of the best java based Web CMS solutions and Adobe has done extremely well to connect all possible integrations required for digital marketing. The rest of the other vendors are still struggling for a complete solution.

Role of Reviewer

Developer

Size of Website Built with Adobe Experience Manager

More than 10,000 pages

Likelihood to Recommend

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a great tool but you need to be proficient to handle it well. It allows great control over content hierarchy but this is also a source of its biggest issue. Hence it requires expertise to drive the content hierarchy. Unfortunately most of the out of box components cannot be used directly and it requires some sort of development. So development is not as fast paced as expected from a CMS.
It is best suited for large enterprises which have a number of of sites and it requires complex inheritance or language support for Adobe. If you are not planning to buy any other marketing tool from Adobe and do not have a MSM specific requirement it's to better go with another option as cost would be difficult to justify.

Great platform for developers to build complex websites

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Experience Manager