Item: Adobe Experience Manager
Rating: 10
Author: Richard Beaulieu

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Experience Manager

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to build our main websites for lead generation, and that's deployed globally in I think 26 countries. We use it for our main website and the problem it addresses is consumer education and lead generation.

Pros and Cons

Pros

One of the things that it does very well is it templates the creation of websites so that we can actually deploy and incorporate regional teams to manage their own country sites. Because our industry is highly regulated, they have to know the product and be able to manage their sites to comply with legal and regulatory requirements for their specific country. So it allows us to build a branded website, deploy it globally, and then train local people who are not necessarily web developers or web users in managing the site.

Cons

I've been so impressed with the product for so many years. It's kind of hard to pinpoint a specific thing. I would say in general I'd like to see licensing for the product be more scalable. So one of the challenges that we have at our company is that we're a very small brand that's part of a larger organization. So the larger organization typically buys the licensing and so we have to go through them. And if we can't justify purchasing a license for something that would be specific to our niche because we're mainly B2C and the rest of the organization is B2B, it kind of hinders us from being able to grow because we just don't have the budget to buy the license ourselves. So we have to make a business case to our parent organization and if they don't have use for it, we don't get it. So it would be nice if we could have different tiers of licenses so that smaller organizations could maybe use partial product or based on the size of that organization or that sort of thing.

Return on Investment

Probably the biggest thing would be agility. Because we're moving from on-prem to cloud, we're going to be able to take advantage of a lot more functionality than we had before. And it's also enabled us to manage a global organization of websites. And when you look at the translation efforts or the translations for all of the different countries, it comes up to about 36 countries, sites that we're managing and we're doing it with a team of four. So internally, and then there's regional people who manage a smaller degree, but still a team of four has been able to manage both the migration and the maintenance of the site for the last 10 years. So it really is a productivity boost for sure.

Usability

Very high. There's a little bit of a learning curve for people who've never done web before, but it's very WYSIWYG. I think once people start using it, they really can ramp up very quickly and start actually being productive very quickly. So yeah, very high.

Favorite Features

Actually since moving to the cloud, we've really embraced, this is not really a product, but it's more of a feature. We've really embraced content fragments and experience fragments, and we've managed to centralize specific parts of our website so that reusable content like addresses, sales reps, pieces that kind of appear in multiple location forms, things like that. And it's kind of revolutionized the way we manage sites now because it's less about ensuring that all 40 places that a form shows up in are maintained and more about the actual content of the page. So it allows us to focus more on content delivery and the customer journey, then maintaining and changing administrative tasks. It's really been a game changer, I think, in our department.

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'll answer the second one because I mean, the first one I don't have an issue with. The second scenario is we oftentimes have the need to spin off very small campaign style sites or sites that generate leads but are unbranded and that sort of thing. So that's hard to do in AEM because you have to then create another organization within AEM to do that. And we're talking about sites that are maybe five to 10 pages in size. So we've been investigating Edge, but then that's a different workflow, so we'd have to train people on that. So it would be nice if there was something within the AEM structure that could allow you to do something very similar to Edge, where you make some small micro sites that are not necessarily branded, that you could still host within the platform and not have to retrain everybody on a completely different platform.

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Adobe Experience Manager Review