“Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) can revolutionize your digital presence with personalized content, but implementing AEM often presents significant challenges.”
The main obstacles? A lack of understanding of the platform’s capabilities, insufficient standardization, and limited experience with headless implementation.
As a Platinum Partner with years of experience working with Adobe, we’ve mastered how to solve and, more importantly, prevent these problems. Our hope is that these insights can help you avoid repetitive mistakes and ensure your Adobe AEM implementation is a success.
Reasons Why Adobe AEM Implementations Get Off-Track
Problem: Understanding Adobe AEM Platform Capabilities
Developers often overlook the full range of Adobe AEM’s features before building a new digital experience. This oversight leads to over-customization, making upgrades and maintenance challenging in the long run. Adding new features to a finished build becomes time-consuming and difficult.
Solution: To integrate Adobe features seamlessly, we recommend shifting from a design-first approach to a design-plus-enablement approach. Investing time in understanding the nuances of the AEM platform ensures you design and implement solutions that fully leverage its capabilities.
At DEPT®, we often adopt a north-star approach to ensure seamless mapping of platform capabilities to content operations. We train customer teams on the platform before starting the development process, rather than after implementation.
Problem: Lack of Standardization
When working with Adobe, it can be challenging to decide whether to use content fragments or experience fragments, and when to extend a core component versus building a new one.
Without clear standards for component development, there’s a risk of creating numerous variations of components, which can lead to management difficulties in the long run.
Solution: To address this issue, it is crucial to define and enforce standards to reduce component variations and simplify component authoring. Here are some ways to handle it:
- Create additional components only when necessary; avoid unnecessary variations.
- Convert interactive components into experience fragments to enhance reusability across channels. For instance, an interest calculator for a personal loan can be reused across microsites and campaign landing pages with different variations.
- Use content fragments instead of traditional dialogues for configuring complex authoring components.
This approach will streamline development and ensure a more manageable and scalable implementation over time.
Problem: Headless Implementation
The discussion around headless vs. head-full implementation adds another layer of complexity. What is often overlooked is that the decision to adopt a headless approach depends on the nature of the content and the required functionality.
For instance, AEM provides headless server-side rendering (SSR) capabilities by default, which are suitable for content pages. However, for building functional pages with calculators, product configurators, etc., it often makes more sense to consume other front-end technologies like React or Pacvue.
Solution: To prevent your implementation from failing, it’s crucial to carefully identify use cases for headless implementation. Properly dividing between headless and head-full approaches will ensure success and save you time and resources.
Considering a hybrid implementation of native AEM pages, React SSR, and standard React components can be beneficial. This approach enables selecting the best method based on specific project requirements.
Problem: Clarity in Content Source and Usability
A significant but often overlooked problem is the lack of clarity regarding the content source. When content is displayed on a page, it’s often unclear whether it was authored directly, generated by an API, or sourced from a batch file.
This discrepancy often leads to surprises at the end of implementation, causing mismatches between expected and actual component behavior on pages. Consequently, it undermines the integrity and reusability of the content strategy.
Solution: Involve business teams early to map out expected component behaviors and clarify content sources.
Implement the VBRD (Vision, Business, Requirements, and Design) process, specifically tailored by DEPT® for AEM implementation. This process helps identify content sources, missing APIs, and practical content aspects before initiating development, ensuring a clear and aligned implementation from the outset.
Getting Your AEM Implementation Back on Track with DEPT®’s Expertise
We have a two-phase approach to tackle the challenges around AEM:
- We start with an audit of your system to analyze the structure of the front-end code and the process behind component creation. Following this, we define your mapping and content workflow.
- This audit helps us determine if the automation processes for content generation are correctly implemented and if the selected content blocks align with the given use case. After the audit, our focus shifts to reducing the number of templates and components. We establish development practice standards, standardizing the content creation process and its presentation to end-users.
This phase brings consistency to your current AEM implementation and significantly streamlines future releases.
Our holistic approach has already proven successful for numerous global customers, including major banks, insurance companies, and automotive firms. With a dedicated AEM team, we offer robust resources spanning design, development, and marketing.