Everything you need to know about Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) CMS

In the modern industrial setup, nothing matters more than a business’s online presence. From revenue generation and maintaining relationships with vendors and partners to attracting new customers- a thriving online website acts as a catalyst for your business. For accomplishing all your business goals and to beat competition, your website needs a content management system (CMS).

And this is where Adobe Experience Manager- an enterprise web content management system can help. Adobe Experience Manager combines the potential for digital asset management with the power of a content management system, providing seamless, consistent, optimized, and customer-centric experiences across all digital channels, including web, email, social, and mobile.

What is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a content management system that empowers extended teams to establish full control over web content and offer best tailored user experiences throughout. With Adobe Experience Manager CMS you can create, manage and distribute context-driven messages scalable across countries, products, services, and enterprises.

As per Adobe, AEM CMS empower teams to deliver brand and country sites experiences 66% faster with 23% higher productivity. In an experience-driven ecosystem, Adobe Experience Manager CMS allows you to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time and across the right channel.

The best part, the Adobe content management system, although it isn't limited to only being that.

• For designers, it is a powerful, feature-rich, and user-friendly tool great for building front-end applications.
• For marketers, it is perfect for content management and optimization without any external dependencies.
• For developers, it is a vital tool to create access and reuse content elements across other projects and customer interfaces.

As Adobe AEM allows non-tech marketers to take complete charge of the site content, it leads to faster releases and easy publishing of new content without spending days on it. It is why AEM CMS is one of the fastest-growing web platforms today, used by big corporations like Nike, National Geographic, AT&T, Nvidia, Chipotle, The Wonderful Company, etc.

The six modules of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) CMS

AEM or Adobe Experience Manager consists of five modules: AEM Sites, assets, mobile, AEM Forms, and communities. These Adobe AEM modules form a comprehensive content management solution to build websites and mobile apps and manage site content.

So, what do these Adobe AEM modules actually do? Here's a brief description of it:

#1: Adobe AEM Sites:

Also known as Experience Manager Sites, this module allows you to create, manage, optimize, and publish site content experiences across multi-location websites, mobile sites, and other channels. You can tailor your site content look and feel as per the available functionalities and personalize digital experiences to make them more targeted and relevant to your business. Other capabilities include:

• Build and manage responsive designs and mobile sites from one platform.
• Optimize shopping carts to deliver a unified virtual experience across several devices.
• Manage and control multiple sites across several geographies and languages from one centralized location.
• Manage and launch marketing campaigns from one place.
• Store and organize assets to make them easily accessible for all marketing campaigns.

#2: Digital Asset Management (AEM DAM)

Assets can be anything you employ to create site experiences for users. It consists of files, collections, shared links, templates, and jobs. You store all your images, videos, GIFs and associated custom variations in this module. Adobe AEM DAM helps you create, manage, and deliver images, videos, and content across devices, channels, and screens. Its workflow capabilities allows you to organize and store all your assets in a way that they can be easily accessed based on the path they follow. Other capabilities include:

• Employ workflow capability to store, organize, customize, and access assets from one location.
• Integrate assets to Creative Cloud to reduce the gap between creative and marketing workflows.
• Assign metadata and tags automatically to your assets.
• Deliver personalized and targeted experiences to boost customer engagement.

#3: Adobe AEM Mobile

Adobe Experience Manager is highly specific on its mobile experiences, which is why it has a separate module to assist with mobile app development for all devices, easily integrated with your overall strategy. Other capabilities include:

• Build mobile apps for multiple platforms using a single codebase.
• Update content and review analytics on a single dashboard.
• Analyze the performance of the mobile apps using Adobe Mobile App Analytics.
• Update apps with drag-and-drop blocks and review change instantaneously.
• Integrate mobile app strategy with asset management to provide a consistent browsing experience.
• Send creative push notifications to draw back your users.

#4: Adobe AEM Forms

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Forms is an end-to-end digital document management system that makes it easy for you to create responsive and manageable forms and share them with your customers to easily complete and e-sign, making the entire process paperless, automated, and efficient. Other capabilities include:

• Simplify complex digital transactions on any device.
• Offer an incredible form experience to customers based on their location, profile, and device type.
• Create interactive forms accessible from anywhere.
• Ensure security and tracking of Adobe Forms.
• Merge form data and documents with your existing systems.
• Measure effectiveness using insights from Adobe Analytics, Target, and Campaign.

#5: Adobe AEM Community

Adobe AEM Communities helps you to create a community specific to your brand and customers to promote knowledge sharing and facilitate seamless discussions. A community can include forums, learning forums, user groups, and so on based on your business. Other capabilities include:

• Encourage interaction via forums, ratings, blogs, and more.
• Create and customize web communities using user-friendly wizards and interfaces.
• Enable learning and social knowledge sharing within the consumer group.
• Employ community content analytics to optimize engagement.

#6: Adobe AEM Cloud service

With Adobe Experience Manager, you build a scalable and secure foundation for your website. Adobe Experience Manager architecture, your team gains anywhere-and-anytime access to your experience management systems. As cloud service comes pre-configured and tested to meet your enterprise needs, you can optimize it easily to ensure peak performance at all times. The AEM Adobe tool is also safe against  outages, which means you can create, innovate, and publish content and assets for websites and apps at scale. Other capabilities include:

• Instantly accessible by teams to let you focus on content planning rather than version upgrades.
• Adobe AEM Cloud services is modular, scalable, & global, designed to auto-scale within seconds
• Follows all industry standards to ensure complete protection and privacy of your data and content
• Built-in redundancy and proactive monitoring protects against any outages during peak traffic times
• Flexible and scalable in a way that your CMS grows with your business

How Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) matches against popular CMS characteristics

The below table shows how Adobe AEM stands against the popular and most asked for AEM content management system features by business users:

Is Adobe Experience Manager CMS the right CMS tool for my business?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) CMS is a versatile solution for businesses across verticals- digital commerce, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and so on. AEM capabilities are not limited to publishing content but creating compelling product pages that form the very foundation on online shopping. Adobe AEM centralizes asset and data storage and management, simplifies workflows, and offers personalized experiences at scale. 

As non-technical marketers can easily and efficiently navigate the CMS tool without indulging in tedious coding to build superior experiences, Adobe AEM becomes the tool of choice for startups, SMBs, and large enterprises.

If you’re still wondering if Adobe CMS makes sense for your business, here are some challenges that the tool solves for you.

• If you’re suffering from a lagging time-to-market and complex workflows that make it difficult to optimize and update content experiences for your users, Adobe AEM is for you.
• If you’re leveraging a legacy technology stack that lacks the speed, flexibility, and scalability demanded today and want to improve your site performances and experiences, Adobe AEM is for you.
• If you are unable to collect customer behavior data and details around your customer’s digital journey that results in unsatisfactory or blind experiences, Adobe Experience Manager CMS is for you.
• If you wish to establish a direct-to-customer channel that captures data, engages with them and offers tailored customer experiences across channels, CMS in AEM is for you.

What are the benefits of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)?

By now, we’ve established that Adobe Experience Manager CMS platform makes it simple for digital professionals to create, manage, and distribute content and resources and deliver them to the right person at the right time. Well, its biggest perk is that it simplifies the delivery and management of website content and its assets, reducing the complexity and struggle associated with delivering online experiences to the right customer. Every Adobe AEM component plays an integral role in deciphering the success of your marketing efforts across channels-web, social, mobile, email, and so on.

Coupled with the power of Adobe Marketing Cloud, it erects a formidable path for digital marketing professionals that results in more qualified leads and relevant site experiences for users. The following are some portions that stand out as a competitive edge to AEM.

Let’s discuss the features and capabilities of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) CMS:

#1: Simplified managed of assets with Adobe AEM DAM

AEM’s built-in digital asset management functionality allows you to store content and visual assets on the cloud so that your employees can access a project file from anywhere, anytime. It introduces the concept of centralized storage, thus adding greater efficiency to the business processes. This means your marketers don’t have to go around looking for a certain asset and can easily access it by following the workflow path. This way, Adobe AEM digital asset management empowers editors to work on a comprehensive set of information per asset, making editing and publishing content a smooth affair.

#2: Easy-to-navigate and creative Adobe AEM dashboard

Adobe AEM CMS creates a central environment for your content and assets, enabling editors to manage projects through a custom project dashboard. Each project is represented as a tile in the dashboard where users can add information like external links, project information, team details, etc.

#3: Integration with other Adobe Marketing Cloud and Experience Cloud tools

A business’s marketing efforts aren’t limited to customer experience; it also includes analytics, creating campaigns, and expanding the customer base. As Adobe Experience Manager is a part of Adobe Experience Cloud, it easily integrates with Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Commerce, and Adobe Marketo Engage.

Once you integrate Adobe Experience Experience to other Experience Cloud and Marketing Cloud solutions, you secure your marketing efforts, simplify workflows, and deliver high-quality content that syncs with your goals. You can integrate Adobe AEM with other third-party tools and add robustness and extensibility to your marketing strategies.

#4: Enhance SEO and user experiences

Whenever you’re uploading assets, you’d be asked for metadata and tags required for SEO purposes. However, if you’re uploading hundreds of assets every day, it’s going to be too much of a task for you. It is where Adobe AEM can help you. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) can detect the critical information associated with the content and then automatically fill in metadata and tags. You can edit the tags if you feel they’re not relatable. The best part, you don’t have to repeat this task in case of a multi-location website and instead optimize SEO of your site content in a few clicks.

#5: Easy and quick content updating and editing

Content is the backbone of any content management software. There are all types of content available in the Adobe AEM digital asset management – images, videos, and documents. The Adobe AEM DAM structure permits editors to visualize how their project will look after designing. Along with this, you can use the building blocks to create additional site content for web pages.

#6: Access the out-of-the-box (OTB) components in Adobe Experience Manager

Designers can visualize certain content in web pages using pre-installed out-of-the-box components. The most significant advantage of using OTB components is faster deployment and lowered development costs. It means that the developer doesn’t have to code content blocks. Since it is an Adobe product, regular updates, including standard layout, forms creations, and workflows to collect, store, and manage data, are a given.

#7: Media conversion and video management in Adobe AEM

AEM can convert your files into different formats to engage audiences across several online channels. Using AEM, you can showcase products via multiple videos, hence driving engagement, garnering customer attention, and forging brand loyalty. Using analytics and insights, you can study visitor behavior and distribute content accordingly.

#8: Content personalization at scale

Every second, millions of digital content pieces are added online. But not every content appeals to customers the same way. So, it is crucial to refine the content as per users’ interests to garner high traffic and better leads.

When users navigate the web pages, Adobe AEM stores their information like location, relationship, search history, etc. Using such details, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) CMS delivers personalized content to every user who lands on the webpage, resulting in better relevancy and improved search performance.

Moreover, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) CMS integrates easily with other third-party systems- CMS, POS, CRM, it aggregates data from all these platforms to offer a unified holistic customer view. Adobe AEM uses Adobe Sensei features like expert scoring, visual search, smart crop, smart tags, and automatic text summarization to manage and reuse content and build targeted experiences for various audiences and delivery formats.

#9: Headless CMS capabilities

You can utilize various technologies to provide content across all channels with the help of Adobe AEM’s headless CMS features. You can control how the content is displayed across various platforms, including desktop, mobile, IoT, and PIM systems. Moreover, this provides you the flexibility and capacity to deliver your customers a true omnichannel experience.

#10: Accelerate speed-to-market

No longer do marketers need to spend days and weeks creating, managing and distributing content on different channels. With Adobe AEM CMS, they can design new engaging webpages from scratch in just a few clicks. Moreover, marketers can employ the in-built Adobe AEM tools when editing content, preview in real-time what their web pages would look like on desktop, IoT devices, mobile screens, tablets and other devices. They can clone webpages and leverage marketing-friendly templates to offer consistent experiences with AEM platform.

Why integrate Adobe AEM with other Adobe Cloud tools?

#1: Adobe AEM integration with Adobe Commerce to drive revenue & conversions

Magento and Adobe Commerce Cloud are incredibly compatible with Adobe Experience Manager. You can easily integrate the Adobe CMS (AEM) and the eCommerce arm (Adobe Commerce) to give merchants a smoothly integrated experience. AEM and Adobe Commerce are both a part of Adobe's Experience Cloud offering. In a headless commerce model, eCommerce brands using or choosing Adobe Commerce can use AEM as their front-end and Adobe Commerce as their back-end operations. In other words, AEM and Adobe Commerce work best together to give any eCommerce brand the best possible experience in terms of marketing, content, and commerce.

The business value of Adobe Commerce and Adobe AEM integration

• The Magento and AEM integration enables the marketer to bring the brand to life with a built-in page builder, Product Carousel, Product Teaser, etc.
• With this integration, you can integrate your marketing capabilities into your eCommerce platform.
• The AEM and Magento integration provides a seamless omnichannel experience, which helps marketers extend the eCommerce brand’s reach.
• Managing the brand and the commerce experience with a single tool is faster and more agile with Magento and AEM integration.
• The integration of Magento and AEM aims to make every moment shoppable by providing the brand the capability to sell and merchandise the product.

#2: Adobe AEM and Adobe Analytics integration for omnichannel marketing

Adobe AEM integration with Adobe Analytics allows marketers to combine their content and data to centralize customer insights under one dashboard, implement them to the strategies, and deliver seamless omnichannel marketing campaigns. With evolving customer behaviors, Adobe AEM and Adobe Analytics integration allows marketers to update content across channels and offer tailored solutions.

#3: Adobe AEM integration with Adobe Sensei to deliver customized solutions at scale

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) with Adobe Sensei integration invokes the latters power of machine learning & artificial intelligence to create real-time user profiles, tailor experiences for different audiences, and amplify results at scale. With Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) digital asset management (DAM) helps you save time in organizing your assets and workflows so you can focus on creating experiences for different audiences and channels.

Adobe Experience Manager developer role

It is the responsibility of AEM developers to design, build, and test software that is based on the Adobe Experience Manager. After an initial examination and data analysis, the developer assists with integrating AEM with the existing setup in accordance with the needs of the enterprise. They focus on the AEM system but are just as accountable as software developer responsibilities.

You’ll conduct tests as an AEM Developer to evaluate software builds for problems like performance and troubleshooting and work to enhance existing systems. Agile methods, responsive frameworks, and front-end development techniques are also used in a fast-paced development environment to meet deadlines.

Is coding required for Adobe Experience Manager?

Digital asset management, content translation/localization, and maintenance on the AEM cloud are a few components that are truly low-code. Reporting, workflows, and integration with marketing products can also be low-code if the requirements are not very complex. But developers will almost always be required to write proprietary code when developing web components. It is difficult for a powerful enterprise content platform like AEM to be totally low-code/no-code because it offers a high level of customization. AEM is still the CMS of choice for marketers and IT experts because of its immense power for enterprises, even though some require coding.

Cost of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) platform

The pricing for Adobe Experience Manager depends on the different AEM modules you want to leverage to improve your website experience amongst the available ones of AEM Sites, AEM Assets, and AEM Forms. As for how much AEM Adobe Experience Manager costs, their plans start from $100,000 per license. There is no free version or trial version available as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise-grade platform. However, the pricing for various modules vary based on the following aspects/attributes. Let’s discuss them:

Is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) easy to use?

AEM, a powerful and easy-to-use CMS, allows your marketing team to manage online and mobile content from a single platform. It has a modern interface incorporating inline editing with drag-and-drop features to make it easy to develop, publish, track, and report your digital assets in minutes. Whatever your goal, from website personalization to email marketing, Adobe Experience Manager helps you connect with customers at every touchpoint seamlessly.

Cost of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) platform 

The pricing for Adobe Experience Manager depends on the different modules you want to leverage to improve your website experience amongst the available ones of AEM Sites, AEM Assets, and AEM Forms. As for how much Adobe Experience Manager costs, their plans start from $100,000 per license. There is no free version or trial version available as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise-grade platform. However, the pricing for various modules vary based on the following aspects/attributes. Let’s discuss them:

Adobe Experience Manager Sites: The Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites pricing and packaging can be easily customized based on your requirements. Currently, the following are the features offered by AEM Sites: 

• Editable templates​
• Intuitive What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WISYWIG) interface​
• Style system​
• Multi-site manager​
• Core components​
• Style systems
• Translation workflows​
• Experience audit​
• Intuitive headless visual editor
• ​Unstructured content with layout
• Preview content
• Structured content
• GraphQL API​
• Events and webhooks
• Adobe IP-enabled code testing and deployment (CI/CD)
• SDKs and CLIs
• ​Rules-based authoring​
• Integrated with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target*​
• Automated product updates​
• Adobe-managed capacity elasticity and auto-scale​
• 24/7 monitoring, event response, and disaster recovery
• ​Default CDN optimized for Adobe Experience Manager
• Application-level SLA
• Security certifications: ISO-27001, SOC-2

There are several add-ons available with Adobe Experience Manager Sites such as Commerce Integration Framework, Adobe Learning Manager, Adobe Experience Manager Screens, Adobe Developer App Builder, Enhanced security, and Adobe Experience Manager Guides. If you want to add-on any of these AEM Adobe Experience Manager modules, then the pricing will be customized for you.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets: With Adobe Experience Manager Assets, there are two versions available: 

• The Department version with Essential DAM capabilities, native integrations, search and smart tagging, and other collaboration features. 
• The Enterprise version that takes into consideration your enterprise-wide workflows. It comes with several features such as metadata management, taxonomy, Automated and scalable content creation, Advanced rich media, integrations, Configurable and customizable media portals, and global governance tools.

Although most of the features are almost-common in both these versions, the Enterprise version offers high-end capabilities such as Customization, integration, and extensibility, Dynamic Media, content automation, brand portal and asset sharing. 

Adobe Experience Manager Forms: The pricing for AEM Forms depends on the following metrics:

• Volume: Pricing for Adobe Experience Manager Forms is based on volume of transactions, including form submissions or communications generated or delivered. 
• Managed Services: Pricing also depends on the level of uptime for your service level agreements. 
• Extensibility: As a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud suite, AEM Forms seamlessly integrates with the rest of tools for advanced security, access controls, personalization, or electronic signatures. 

For Adobe Experience Manager pricing related to other modules, get in touch with us and we will structure a customized plan for you. 

Success Story: Improving site experiences for Ranosys’ with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

By leveraging the competitive power of a leading Adobe AEM Content Management System, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), we migrated our corporate website to the platform to boost its lead generation efforts, offer consistent experiences to its visitors, and improve its website performance and scalability.

Migrating our corporate website to Adobe Experience Manager empowered our non-tech marketing team to easily and effortlessly create engaging new pages in minutes rather than weeks. Moreover, in migrating our website, we focussed on simplifying navigation and creating more consistent web pages to improve customer journeys. As these journeys catered to five different regions, we could offer localized content experiences without building web pages from scratch.

With the help of AEM’s drag-and-drop functionalities, we tutored our teams, including several non-tech marketers on Adobe Experience Manager, who can now design, create, edit, and manage content creation in a matter of a few clicks.

Today, we have not just achieved this major feat of migrating to the leading CMS, Adobe Experience Manager. We are even assisting other leading organizations in making a move. This proves that when we can do it for ourselves, we can confidently say that we can do it for our clients as well.

Read more about this success story

Leverage the competitive Adobe AEM tool for your business

AEM is known to be an enterprise-friendly web content management solution mainly because of its robustness, personalized content delivery, and easy third-party integrations. Adobe Experience Manager follows a flexible approach, perfect for meeting rapidly-changing consumer demands and improving website user experiences considerably.

About Ranosys

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a comprehensive suite that combines digital asset management and content management capabilities. It empowers enterprises to create, manage, and deliver rich-media assets on their websites. Ranosys, a leading expert in Adobe Experience Manager solutions and a 3X award-winning Adobe Partner. With 15+ years of experience in Adobe Experience Cloud suite and strategic expertise across AEM Sites, Forms, Assets, and Managed Services. AEM developers can help you navigate development challenges across the Adobe Experience Platform to provide end-to-end solutions ranging from AEM Adobe Experience Manager implementation, consulting, development, optimization, integration, migration, and critical support. You can connect with our certified Adobe Experience Manager consultants to explore more of its business-driven features.