Enterprise software is complicated. That’s why it’s called “enterprise.”

Enterprise software licensing is labyrinthine. That’s why it’s called … well … a whole variety of things that aren’t polite to include in a professional blog.

For the record, Adobe has never tried to overcomplicate licensing around their DAM product. Since they first went to market with Adobe Experience Manager Assets, the license structure has been built around one major factor (e.g. number of instances) with a few minor factors (e.g. number of users). 

But as Adobe has improved AEM Assets and connected it to various other Adobe products, the pieces have gotten more complicated.

This article is the first in a series to explain the various pieces that make up AEM Assets today. Elements with potential licensing impacts will be covered in the first three posts, and we’ll conclude with a post on components included in the base licensing.

Last point: since Adobe’s product investment in AEM Assets shows no sign of slowing, this article may be missing new modules in a few months. While this content may not always be current, Freedom’s people will be.  Feel free to contact us if you have questions about a module that isn’t covered here.

AEM Assets

This is … the DAM.  You know you’re reading a DAM blog, right?

Seriously, this is the core DAM functionality.  It includes metadata, search, workflows, renditions, collections, security, link sharing, and about a zillion other core DAM functionalities.

Dynamic Media

This is a service for public delivery of images, videos, and documents. As the name suggests, those files can be dynamically adjusted—from simple changes like reducing video resolution to complicated changes like overlaying text or changing a product color. Users can publish finished assets from AEM Assets to Dynamic Media for public consumption via a push of a button. Once an asset is published to Dynamic Media, it is accessible via a public URL—usually for use by a digital platform like eCommerce or email marketing. Each system using that asset URL can request the asset in different ways—optimized for web or cropped for a mobile application. Dynamic Media creates each variation on the fly at the time of request rather than duplicating many similar files.

Ugh—we’ve chosen our words as carefully as we can here, and even we’re bored and confused.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?  At the risk of broken links in the future, here are the URLs that help illustrate what Dynamic Media does:

Wait, where did Micky go? Well, it turns out that this cup company didn’t shoot every cup they sell—they’ve assembled each image dynamically.  A sort of … dynamic media … if you will.

(Side note to Tervis analytics team after you track down some referral anomalies: much respect to your Dynamic Media team. It’s just the coolest example we could find.  Please never change your URLs.)

Dynamic Media is the most common add on to AEM Assets, and Freedom recommends it for many DAM clients for a whole slew of use cases.  The most common is a sort of skeleton key for integrations with digital distribution platforms. But even for companies without this use case, Dynamic Media can be used to minimize production work on images, save storage space by preventing redundant asset copies, improve color handling, and replace standalone video platforms.  Dynamic Media is priced by volume of images, videos, and documents served by URL, so companies that have smallish internal-only use cases or B2B companies with moderate web traffic often find the product good value for money. Higher volume B2C scenarios will cost more but presumably realize more value.

Dynamic Media Classic

Like the name suggests, this is an older iteration of Dynamic Media.  The product used to be known as Scene7 before the rebrand.  If you have shopped for almost anything, you have almost certainly seen this software in use.  It is quite popular with clothing retailers who don’t want to shoot every piece of clothing in every possible color combination.

There are some minor feature and function differences between the two products, but the main difference is that Dynamic Media Classic can be managed separately from AEM Assets.  The newer Dynamic Media product requires AEM Assets.

Smart Cropping

Ok, this isn’t actually a separate module—it is functionality included with Dynamic Media. But it is super cool and Adobe rightfully talks up this capability, so we’re including a brief explanation along with the good news that it doesn’t cost extra.

cropping-examples.jpg

Basically, before Smart Cropping, the only way Dynamic Media could crop an image or video was based on very specific rules … say removing 200 pixels from the left and right.  Which is fine provided the focus of the image is always directly in the center and there are always 200 pixels to spare on each margin.  But with variable inputs and different aspect ratios, it was quite common that cropping decisions required human input.

Smart Cropping relies on artificial intelligence or machine learning or magic spells—we’re not quite sure of the details—to analyze an image or a video and make intelligent cropping choices based on the content. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.  It provides the ability for humans to quickly override inaccurate automated crops. Automated crop decisions will improve based on this manual guidance—so Smart Cropping for a car company will learn to include vehicles with a higher preference than Smart Cropping for a company that sells building materials. 

This may just seem like cool technology and it is.  But the bigger impact is on business value. It is hard to overstate how much this single functionality helps to realize the potential of multi-channel delivery from a single source of truth.

Personalized Media

This is an add on to Dynamic Media to allow even greater levels of personalization. It supports a fairly narrow use case for companies that want to allow their end customers to personalize images. 

Want to sell a monogrammed towel and allow web visitors to see their own initials in the monogram?  You’ll need Personalized Media.  If not, this module probably is not necessary.

Is that it? Far from it! We just got tired of writing. Figured readers might want to take a break as well. But we have a lot more to cover.

In the next post, we’ll discuss portal options, Smart Content Services, and a few other pieces that are relevant to specific business problems. The post after will explain what Adobe means when they talk about Managed Services and other products in the AEM family, like AEM Sites or AEM Forms. Then we’ll dig into the free components like Desktop App or Asset Link—just because these pieces are free doesn’t mean they’re not important.


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