Item: Adobe Experience Manager
Rating: 9
Author: Chris Ferbend

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I'm the product owner for Adobe Experience Manager Sites for our organization. I work with a team of developers to implement new features, custom implementations for our needs, bug fixes, etc. - to make the product more aligned with the needs of the business, stakeholders, and users. We use Adobe Experience Manager sites to power all of our websites with both out of the box and custom code/uses. Our use case includes some content that is mostly static and many more dynamic uses for areas of the business that are constantly changing and updating (IE, hospitality products like shows and restaurants).

Pros and Cons

Ability to customize the platform for business and stakeholder needs
Easily handles lots of content
Upload, storage, organization, and serving of image and videos via the DAM
Manage multiple sites and styles of sites with a single application

Site speed and performance can be impacted when using GraphQL for headless applications
Adobe Experience Manager is difficult to learn for new users, and is often a burden to train users when authoring is delegated to property teams with high turnover
Updating content is more difficult when using content fragments, as content needs to be updated in multiple areas

Return on Investment

Cost savings via centralized and seamless integration of other Adobe platforms (IE - Adobe Experience Manager, AEP, Target, Workfront, etc.)
Solutions to boost site and accessibility scores
Cost savings via ability to customize Adobe Experience Manager for our needs across various sites vs. needing to use other products that may not integrate as senselessly
Analytics and testing ability on all sites to continuously improve the user experience and conversion rates

Usability

The tool can be difficult to learn and keep users up to date on how to use it when turnover is higher for certain areas of the business.

Favorite Features

Multi-site management, keeps things simple and centralized
Analytics, ensures we are prioritizing the most important new features and updates
Testing/Target, to run unique tests on any page to ensure we are constantly improving

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Target, Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Workfront

I haven't evaluated competitor products similar to Adobe Experience Manager at this point.

Key Insights

Do you think Adobe Experience Manager delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Adobe Experience Manager's feature set?

Yes

Did Adobe Experience Manager live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Adobe Experience Manager go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Adobe Experience Manager again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Adobe Target, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Workfront

Likelihood to Recommend

Overall, Adobe Experience Manager is great and continues to power our sites as we look to scale the platform to various other areas and platforms, see previous notes. The biggest struggle is keeping our non-centralized teams up to date on how to use the tool for their very specific and minor authoring needs, the tool could be much more user-friendly and less complicated, but luckily Adobe is working on a few different solutions to this that we are exploring.

Adobe Experience Manager is pretty great + constantly getting better and better

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Experience Manager