Review from AEM Consultant
October 13, 2017
Review from AEM Consultant
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Experience Manager
I have been associated with various consulting firms and was part of various Adobe experience manager implementations. Here are the details industry wise AEM usage & use case -
Healthcare - My current client is using AEM mainly for content authoring, publishing, multisite management. Integration with analytics, search, test & target. Adobe campaign is being explored, how it can be used with AEM. AEM is replacing current implementation for a few departments that is on Teamsite but fa ew other departments are considering Sitecore as well because they have .Net experts there.
Telecom - Used mainly for authoring and publishing. Didn't use livecopy, workflows except OOTB. Integrated AEM with commerce, search & promote, adobe analytics. Didn't use translation through AEM but it was outsourced to another translation company, they used to translate site on daily basis and host on a different domain.
Banking - Used almost all the features provided by the AEM for example multisite, livecopy, workflows, reports. integration with translation engine, analytics and test & target. It was a content heavy site having big DAM asset collection. Daily jobs used to run to keep all the content and DAM in sync with another system.
Healthcare - My current client is using AEM mainly for content authoring, publishing, multisite management. Integration with analytics, search, test & target. Adobe campaign is being explored, how it can be used with AEM. AEM is replacing current implementation for a few departments that is on Teamsite but fa ew other departments are considering Sitecore as well because they have .Net experts there.
Telecom - Used mainly for authoring and publishing. Didn't use livecopy, workflows except OOTB. Integrated AEM with commerce, search & promote, adobe analytics. Didn't use translation through AEM but it was outsourced to another translation company, they used to translate site on daily basis and host on a different domain.
Banking - Used almost all the features provided by the AEM for example multisite, livecopy, workflows, reports. integration with translation engine, analytics and test & target. It was a content heavy site having big DAM asset collection. Daily jobs used to run to keep all the content and DAM in sync with another system.
Pros
- Easy content authoring by using drag-n-drop components.
- Strong workflows support. You can quickly implement review-approve workflows. DAM Workflows can create different renditions of uploaded images by default.. For example create thumbnail image, small image, large image, adding text on image.. all these feature are out of the box
- OOTB Social integration feature. You can quickly integrate with facebook, pinterest and share your content there.
- Easy to launch multiple site from source site using live copy feature. You can launch child site from parent site with content subset. For example... for different region of same language you want to launch the site with minimal content.
- Content fragment, Experience fragment making authors life easy..They can create content in advance that can be used on multiple pages.
- OOTB integration feature provided for Adobe analytics, Adobe target. Obviously, you need separate license for analytics and target
- OSGi support. Project can be divided into multiple sub-projects and can be deployed/un-deployed without affecting other deployed projects. Using runmodes, you can impose different configurations for different environments.
- Easy User management and permission control.
- Adobe provides OOTB caching plug-in for webserver that can be used to clear cache automatically on content change. You can specify the rule what you want to cache or not.
- Reporting made easy... DAM asset reports, page reports, click reports are available OOTB..
Cons
- Components were introduced to reduce the development & authoring time by reusing them. With some clients, it worked very well because they had page structure and content like that. But if you have UI requirements that can not support component re-usability then your life will be difficult. You will end up creating more and more components in the hope that they will be utilized one day some where on some page... Although you can achieve re-usability by creating smaller customizable component but then again it will increase your development time. In a Nutshell, you will not save development time.
- Osgi was a great concept. AEM Developer used to write the most of business logic in them but due to adaptation of micro-services, now everybody wants to implement business logic in there instead of AEM internal OSGi. If your architecture had micro services then power of Osgi is useless for you, you will just use 10-20% of it which will bring no big value.
- License of AEM is super costly, not every organization can afford it. Once you have implemented AEM, it will be hard to get rid of it. Getting rid will mean another investment.
- Like other products, AEM also releases new versions. Upgrades to new versions never happens smoothly. Means organization needs to spend more money to upgrade the servers.
- You need a big infrastructure to deploy AEM server setup. Each setup needs at least 3 machines, one for author, one for publisher and one for dispatcher. This means spending more money on maintenance.
- TouchUI is confusing sometimes for everyone i.e business, authors, developers.
- A few clients see no ROI but few are heavily dependent and align on it.. Mixed reviews from clients
Developer
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