In our first post about the various components of AEM Assets, we covered Dynamic Media and a few other wrinkles. In this post, we’ll continue with an overview of Brand Portal, Asset Share Portal, Smart Content Services, and InDesign Server.
Brand Portal
The Brand Portal is a multi-tenant software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) portal that connects to AEM Assets for distribution of finished assets to internal and external audiences. Just like with Dynamic Media, users can publish assets from AEM Assets with a push of a button. Unlike Dynamic Media, which distributes assets to systems, the Brand Portal distributes assets to people.
Not that kind of portal…
You know what, fine. These portals are almost as liberating for creative teams.
If you’re not a creative or a creative executive, imagine how many times each week creative teams field requests for the company logo. Or PowerPoint template. Or image of a popular product. Or 30-second spot. Or the headshot of an executive. Anecdotally, Freedom clients have estimated as much as a third to half of their time is spent on these kinds of request.
A well-organized Brand Portal can be a huge time saver for creative teams. The teams searching for assets should also appreciate their ability to more quickly self-service.
Although search-and-download is the primary use case for Brand Portal, Adobe recently added the ability for Brand Portal users to contribute assets that then route to AEM Assets for processing. This enables an external creative agency or a freelancer without full DAM access an easy way to provide assets to internal creative stakeholders.
Adobe includes the Brand Portal with the AEM Asset license in some cases but licenses it separately in others. Connecting and configuring Brand Portal is pretty straight forward and as a multi-tenant SaaS platform, maintenance is extremely minimal.
Asset Share Portal
Adobe gives you two portals for the price of one!
Well, that’s not true at all. You absolutely have to buy each portal separately.
But in most cases, organizations only need one portal.
Why does Adobe offer the Asset Share Portal at all? Flexibility. Unlike the SaaS Brand Portal, the Asset Share Portal is completely customizable. In fact, the Asset Share Portal is your very own website on your very own web server running a full version of AEM Sites—Adobe’s very sophisticated Web Content Management product. The license agreement limits usage to websites whose primary purpose is to distribute finished assets. But if you had a secondary purpose of sharing brand guidelines or communicating company history or making toast, you could build this custom functionality into an Asset Share Portal*.
In general, it only makes sense to consider the Asset Share Portal when some specific limitation of the Brand Portal functionality prevents an important use case. The extra cost to build and maintain an Asset Share Portal doesn’t make sense if all the desired functionality is available within the Brand Portal. The exception to this rule is for companies already running AEM Sites; these organizations usually have already invested in the necessary infrastructure and expertise to support much more complex and high-traffic sites than a typical Asset Share Portal.
* Freedom recommends checking with Adobe if the Asset Share Portal license covers toast-making functionality. This may require the AEM Toast module.
Smart Content Services
This is Adobe’s other cool artificial intelligence feature (see also Smart Cropping in Part I) where Adobe Sensei looks at an image and starts yelling out guesses like a quick-fire charades player. Rabbit! Duck! Duck-rabbit!
Adobe usually refers to this feature as Smart Tagging in demos, but licensing will refer to Smart Content Services.
Unlike Smart Cropping, this functionality can be a separate license line item or included as part of a package depending on a few factors. It’s typically not a huge cost if it has to be licensed separately.
A word of warning from your friendly DAM expert: Smart Tagging does not remove the need to tag an asset manually. The artificial intelligence is amazing, but your company is very unlikely to sell rabbits or ducks. Your company also doesn’t just sell “cars.” Your company might sell the Mercedes-Benz S Class Coupe 560 4MATIC in black with chrome finish … and in this particular image some agency genius decided to PhotoShop a bunch of ducks and rabbits in the background as part of some annoyingly complicated advertising joke about optical illusions.
Joking aside, this example illustrates the real value of Smart Tagging. A car company won’t be able to rely on Smart Tagging to tag a very specific car model and options. But Smart Tagging will help creatives find background details that no one would think to tag on an asset. In this case, Smart Tagging would absolutely help the next creative who has the unenviable task of trying to find existing images for new campaign to sell cars to ducks and rabbits.
Ducks and Rabbits Agree!
Cars are Fun to Drive!
XML Documentation for Experience Manager
This is a module that adds the ability to manage structured content in AEM Assets. “Structured content” is a term of art here—if your job regularly involves conversations about Darwin Information Typing Architecture (“DITA”), this is the product for you.
Since structured content geeks have already stopped reading to go schedule a demo, we’ll briefly explain structured content and why this product is cool to the rest of you.
Imagine your company sells a refrigerator. Someone in your company probably creates a user guide—a pretty long document with sections about features and functions. Next year, the product team adds some new bells and whistles. The user guide needs updating—at least for features and functions that have changed. The next year, the product team rolls out three different versions of the refrigerator—standard, premium, and luxury—with some features that apply to different versions. The people maintaining that guide are starting to get a bit annoyed with your product team’s creativity. Then your refrigerator business goes global and all the manuals need to be translated. Then some of your older refrigerators start to break and you have to create maintenance guides—that are also modular based on model, year, and language. Then legal insists that certain product-specific disclaimers are included in marketing materials and for some reason GDPR disclaimers need to be included in manuals for products sold in Europe. Some of your packaging also starts to need that modular content. And your website. And your recall notice emails.
Another solution: Transfer to the new Dishwasher division, which only has one model.
If you can work on units of content separately, and then assemble the content units that apply to specific combination of model, year, language, and channel, your content team has to do much less work. That’s structured content. And this add-on to AEM Assets can do exactly that—manage units of content and assemble them into PDFs or XML or JSON outputs based on business rules.
The documentation case above is probably the killer use case for this product. After all, Adobe seems to have invested all their creativity in product development and left very little for a creative product name. The XML for Documentation name was probably created by a market research firm that decided focusing on the documentation case was easier than explaining structured content. But structured content is a problem with more use cases than just documentation. And while this product is currently in a semi-incubation stage within Adobe, the feature set is already rich and well developed. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a rebrand of this product in the near future to address the broader use cases around structured content.
If your company’s creatives have extra time, they could also write mailers by hand.
InDesign Server
This product basically automates InDesign layout tasks at scale. Mail merging customer name and address onto postcard mailers? You or your printer are probably using InDesign Server. Dynamically assembling a catalog from long list of products? InDesign Server is probably being leveraged. Putting out a contact sheet of products in inventory every week for your sales team? Either you’re using InDesign Server or your creatives are doing a lot of dull and repetitive work.
Because this solution involves scripting for each template, it requires the combination of a large output volume and fairly standard layout design to hit the sweet spot of positive return on investment. But for companies with this kind of problem, InDesign Server solves a massive scaling problem.
Ok, that’ll do it for this post. In the next post, we’ll cover Managed Services and other products that make up AEM in addition to AEM Assets. And we’ll conclude with some important pieces of AEM Assets that don’t impact licensing.