Item: Adobe Experience Manager
Rating: 10
Author: hemacharan thathireddy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In my current organization it plays a key role. Most of our customer-facing web applications are deployed on Adobe Experience Manager. So it's our go-to platform for all our external-facing websites. The healthcare industry includes several key web-facing features like finding a doctor and our patients and other audiences come to our sites and book their appointments for care. And we also have to host kidhealth.org. So that is the number one kid health-related, pediatric-related health content site in the US. That's hosted on Adobe Experience Manager and that's a big success story with Adobe as well. We are moving to the cloud, and that's an ongoing project now. So we are completely going to cloud very live soon.

Pros and Cons

I've been involved with this product right from the days as a developer myself. I worked with other content management systems before started working on Adobe Experience Manager. I think the key advantage of using AEM is really how well it integrates with the ecosystem of the marketing stack. I don't think there's any other product out there in the industry that can beat that. It truly becomes that core pillar around that marketing stack in the industry. It's easy to deploy sites, the total cost of ownership that I think definitely was resolved by going to cloud. You can definitely say that. You can really do a lot of cool things there. There's absolutely nothing you can't do on AEM, I can say that.
It's a well-engineered product, so it's supported and powered by open-source stack like Apache Sling, OS G, and all that stuff. That definitely gives it the edge on the performance side.

I think some of the key things that can be done better is today we have more point solutions for different things like personalization. We have Adobe Target and for email marketing, we have Adobe Campaign Marketer and all that kind of stuff. But truly I have worked both as an implementation partner for Adobe as well as now I'm a client of Adobe. Being in both those shoes, I can say that we can do a lot better in terms of beefing up the capabilities of AEM, bringing personalization and search and content search experience closer together. It would definitely put Adobe Experience Manager in a different league if we can bring all those personalization capabilities together. I think initially the content management systems, the market was mostly meant to serve static sites. It never matured into that full-scale content personalization being married together. I think that's one area where if those integrations rather than being point solutions, if those capabilities can be made more native to AEM, I think it would definitely be a big sell for a lot of customers.

Return on Investment

It definitely plays a key role for my organization because nowadays everything is online, right? People have to find care, they have to go to our website, based on different conditions they have, they have to find the right doctor or provider to get their healthcare support for their children. So I think we have great integration between AEM and our search platform. It really provides the best experience for our patients and to get their health support.

Usability

Adobe launched the Touch UI experience a few years back, I think it's been four to five years now. I didn't see much improvements in terms of usability. So there's definitely there's room for improvement there, especially around our authoring team. They really struggle when it comes to finding things in them or navigating easily to pages. It's always a struggle for them. I think the overall authoring user experience, the way authoring UI, the way it is set up, can be optimized. I think in its current state, I don't think it's that well set up. It can definitely be redesigned for sure.

Favorite Features

Core components definitely made things much better when it comes to approaching our component development principles.
I like how well Adobe Experience Manager is integrated with the DAM. It definitely is a very powerful feature. All of the workflows that you can build around them on your content governance process, even when it comes to publishing the pages, that's definitely a big plus.
Multi-Site Management is a key thing. How easily you can roll out for different language sites, right? All that stuff is definitely great.
I like the architecture of AEM, mostly speaking the underneath architecture like Apache Sling and OJ and all that stuff that's been its strength all along. So I can say that if I had to integrate with any of our enterprise platforms it's definitely easily doable with AEM. We don't need to really struggle with integrating AEM with other platforms. So that's really been its strength.

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

I think it's definitely well-suited for any large-scale website deployments. If you're really deploying multi-region sites spread across the world, it all comes out of the box, you don't need to worry about latency or anything of that sort. I think it definitely works well for any of the large-scale deployments.

Where it may not suit is if you really have more transactional sites I think things of your AEM are more like a stateless in nature, so it may not suit well for those use cases, right? You can't build a banking application on AEM, right? But you can always build the customer experience pages on AEM, even for banking. When it comes to having to log into the bank portal, it has to take you away from the whole banking application to move away from there. So, that's where I think it may not be suitable.

Adobe Experience Manager Review

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Experience Manager