AEM in brain, heart and soul
As Adobe Official Partner, we breathe AEM. Our brains are fully focused on the update of all our web apps to AEM 6.1. Our hearts are thinking and exploring the possibilities of AEM 6.2. Our souls dream of everything that might come with the next AEM releases…
The special connection is there. We continue to work on the relationship. As part of that relationship, some of our team attended the last Adobe Summit in London, and boy, did they enjoy their time there. They came back with some great insights.
Testing, testing
As predicted, Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign attracted our attention. Adobe Target is an awesome tool that lets authors automate content and design decisions. For example an author is in doubt about two designs with different content. Both designs share the same goal, a call to action. Which one will perform better?
Adobe Target links both designs with the call to action. It measures the success rate (customers clicking on the call to action) and based on this information, it will drive new users to the successful design. This is what is also known as A/B testing. Do you want to include more than two variables in your designs? Let’s go for multivariate testing!
Recommendations are not a secret for Adobe Target. Adobe Target allows you to attribute weight, select different browsing behaviours such as the most viewed items across the site or the recently viewed ones. As a marketer, you only need to have a clear idea of what your final goal is. Don’t worry about the success of your setup! Adobe Target will offer you a whole set of reports that you can explore to understand the success rates of the configuration, allowing you to easily profile your customers.
Getting to know your customers
At the personalisation side, we find that Adobe is integrating some machine learning algorithms like ‘random forest’. This is one of the most common supervised learning algorithms used in predictive behaviour analysis. As more data is collected, the analysis is more accurate. The algorithm will target content based on the historic behaviour of other customers.
Maybe we can explain the benefits of Adobe Target further and share our insights on Adobe Analytics and Campaign in one of the following newsletters. But at least for now we can claim that Adobe AEM offers a whole set of built-in tools for setting up your marketing campaign easily.
Connecting people
Some of our front-end and back-end developers, testers and functional analysts followed the online sessions of IMMERSE 2016. IMMERSE is an interesting conference where sessions are broadcast live, then recorded and stored.
The tool to broadcast the sessions is Adobe Connect. I’ve personally been lucky enough to use Adobe Connect to teach online or attend a student’s presentation as a jury member whenever UNIR invites me. I can say that it’s a rather awesome tool to broadcast live sessions and interact with people, despite its limitations in moderation.
Finally, we have set up a series of sessions to share knowledge and establish links with other companies within the Emakina Group active on AEM implementations.
Looking forward to the update
In the meantime, we are looking forward to seeing the results of our update to AEM 6.1. Better stability, performance, Oak 1.2, proven release with service packs and hotfixes will be the most visible outcomes at the technical level. We are anxious to start discovering the responsive templates and translation workflows. We expect a positive impact on the user experience, from the author and customer perspective.
In their spare time, our AEM junkies have started playing with AEM 6.2. What could be better, if our reference is 6.1? Improved online compaction, latest Oak 1.4, mature Touch UI, content fragments and search functionality are among the improvements that keep us thrilled.
