Item: Adobe Experience Manager
Rating: 9
Author: Samantha Somervill

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to support our websites, as right now what we're using it for is our public websites. It hosts all of our public sites, if you're looking out at like anthem.com, elancehealth.com, and carelon.com, it's our public presence, so it allows our authors to be able to author content quickly and get it out to production. It allows us to get quick speed to market for any of the changes we need it to get out there. Also, there is another part of the company that also uses it for EAP, messaging, and campaigns. We also use different parts for other branches of it like Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics. So we use it to get more information about how the product's actually being used, and how the sites are being used to make sure that we get the best information out there for the customer.

Pros and Cons

It does allow us to stand up a website relatively quickly.
It allows us to componentize different parts. When we are trying to get to production, we can segment out the development from the authorship. If we want to have development go all the way through in a dark release, we can do that separately and then have that ready for the authors, and then the authors can pick up the components and create the pages and release those at any time. So they're able to do a lot more independently without needing a lot of development support. Depending on what they're trying to put in production, it reduces their dependency on engineering, so it makes it so it's a lot easier for them to get things out into production quickly. Also, it allows the authors to be able to push their content into production anytime and then they can author it and they feel like they have a lot more power that they didn't have before. We're also creating templates and websites that they can actually get more messages out there quickly to the consumers so that we can like, let's say we wanted to create a marketing site with flexible phone numbers. They could get that out quickly, get the message, get the campaign with little to no engineering support. There might be some but it's less than it was with the other heavy lifting we've had with other content management systems.

One of the problems that we particularly have and would love to see a lot of improvements with is the we use cloud manager for deployments. Specifically with the managed services, we have a lot of issues with the fact that it is one pipe and one pipeline. So if we do a deployment, we have one thing at a time and you have to wait for one batch and one deployment to go through. So typically if you push one thing through the stage, you have to wait and then it goes to prime, and then if you have another batch that you need to send up, you usually typically have about an hour or four hours wait while everybody's doing validation and then it has to go to production. So we need to find a way to either have multi pipes or multi-stage ability to be able to get more things staged or ready to go or be able to have a better deployment mechanism to get things into production because that wait time and that it's just the cycle is just hard.

Return on Investment

Well I can't speak monetarily but I can say it's allowed us to get some sites out and messages out very quickly. We've been able to stand up some sites incredibly under very tight timeframes. Messaging, especially during the pandemic, we were able to not only get information out about COVID, we were able to get messages out to the general population about information about their insurance, about issues that were happening, how to find test sites, how to find test kits, how to find information about your insurance, how to get information about storms or anything happening. So we found it was able to get up messaging very quickly and turnaround sites pretty fast. Once we got rolling on it, we were able to do it and we found that it was just able to get that messaging and sites out very fast.

Usability

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.

Favorite Features

I think for me personally I'd like to be able to see what's going on in the system the best. To be able to go in and see what's happening with my system, I can go into the consoles and I can see at any given point where is my system, is it down, is it slow? Do I need to call somebody, is there an issue? And it's pretty much all there. I have pretty much instant feedback before I start calling and entering tickets. It allows me to dig in a little bit more. Adobe gives us tools to be able to look at some of the logging so we can start looking that way. They give you tools to be able to do what you need to do before it becomes too big of a problem.
It does come with core components and then they allow you the ability to customize from there.
Then you also have the basic authorship and the ability for them to drag and drop components onto the page. The authors love it. They love the ability that they can just take a page, drag and drop the components, move them around, and then they can make a page and go from there. And once we create the templates, they're great to go.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Adobe Experience Manager go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Adobe Experience Manager again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

It's well suited for companies that have a need to get things out to production quickly. They have a stronger marketing department or one that can be trained. Understanding that you need to get things a lot more streamlined, you need to reduce your overhead a little bit, with the engineering you get stuck in a cycle. So if you need to break the development cycle a little bit and just reduce your time to market, if they're getting stuck on being able to get innovations and items into production and give a lot more power to your marketing, it's a great product for that. And then it actually makes your site more dynamic. So if they need more dynamic content, more dynamic sites, great product for it. And also if you have smaller sites that you're trying to do, this is more flexible for you. I think it wouldn't be good for someone who is maybe a small company that doesn't have all the technical skills to do it, but it may not be, maybe a mid-size the larger company. It all depends on how they want to do it. I think it could be the right size for anyone. I'd say it'd have to depend on the use case.

Adobe Experience Manager Review

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Experience Manager