AEM is Living on the Edge

One strength of Adobe Experience Manager has always been its flexibility when it comes to what can be built and the authoring experience that can be created for site content owners. And with Adobe’s Edge Delivery Services (EDS), AEM has become even more pliant in terms of the deployment and authoring possibilities.

Edge Delivery is a composable set of services that allows for a high degree of flexibility in how you author content on your website. As mentioned previously, you can use both AEM authoring and document-based authoring. This means creating websites quickly with a streamlined authoring experience and a framework that enables testing and experimentation before deploying using a fast and reliable content delivery network (CDN).

In AEM, there are now three ways that content owners can create the content that will ultimately be shown to site visitors.

WYSIWYG

“What you see is what you get” is the way we have been doing things for a long time and it is still here. AEM’s native authoring experience brings together all AEM features into a cohesive page editor. Assets, out of the box and custom components, experience fragments and content fragments plus any third-party plugins are all available to an author in a user-friendly drag and drop experience. Authors get to view and preview their changes real time and publish immediately or schedule publishing for when they want content to appear to the world.

Document-based Authoring (formerly known as Project Franklin or Helix)

This innovation is perfect for microsites especially. Using programs that are familiar to almost anyone who uses a computer, like Microsoft Word and Google Docs, an author can create and update a webpage using a document. The aptly named Sidekick can be installed as well to integrate the document with AEM Assets allowing the author to utilize assets that already exist in AEM and place them directly into their document. When the page is ready, it can be published directly to the AEM site

In-context Authoring

While AEM may be the place that content is stored and created, it is not always where a website is created. But with Universal Editor, whether the site is published in AEM or outside of it, you can configure an authoring experience to work. This makes the valuable ability to edit content in-context available and publishing easy. Once the Universal Editor is configured properly, it’ll recognize and allow the author to edit AEM content including images and meta data. The author can even add some components to a page. Content Fragments are a critical feature of Headless sites and again that editing is possible too.

Beyond Authoring

What else is great about EDS? I’ve talked a lot about the benefits for authors, but Adobe does all this along with maintaining a CDN that ensures content published is available immediately. A big shift for some teams will be that document-based authoring will use front-end languages since Adobe has already taken care of the back-end. So, you only have the front-end to be concern with when using this method. I'll have more on the technical side in a future post.

If you want to chat with 3|SHARE about the possibilities that Edge Delivery Services or AEM can open up for your website, contact us. We are ready to work with you!