Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise content management system that covers dynamic digital asset management, contact form and document management solutions, online community experience management, user-generated content organisation and countless social engagement features.

AEM acts as a central hub for creative, marketing and IT teams, ensuring that processes and media delivery are seamlessly streamlined across all departments. AEM aids siloed teams with managing their digital assets, and the solution further provides an arena for delivering attractive media enhanced for different channels on demand.

AEM version 6.5 connects with other Adobe products such as Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud. This enables teams to create, curate, and distribute media across various avenues to ensure an enriching journey for customers.

Overall benefits of Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 include:

• Accelerated Digital Transformation – the platform manages and develops established digital channels, allowing teams to focus on emerging areas for consideration.
• Personalised Experiences – Delivery of real-time and personalised experiences by streamlining the sourcing and management of assets at scale.
• Enhanced Customer Engagement – customers are engaged across all digital channels by delivering experiences to owned, earned and paid touchpoints.
• Java 11 support – AEM 6.5 supports Java 11 while also maintaining Java 8 support.
• Enhancement of core components – Many core components have been enhanced, and a core components library has been created, which showcases the variety of available features and their uses.

We’re going to explore some of the latest features of AEM version 6.5 which include an overview of the capabilities, plus benefits to enhance our digital stack.

What is Experience Manager Sites?

AEM Sites is a content management system within Experience Manager that gives you one place to create, manage, and deliver digital experiences across websites, mobile sites, and on-site screens to make them global in reach yet personally relevant and engaging.

Sites is an architecturally advanced CMS aimed at enterprise customers. The combination of extensibility, experience management potential, and enterprise readiness in terms of connectivity, scalability, and security.

Experience Manager Sites Benefits

• Improved SPA (single-page application) editor – Experience a completely authorable experience with a rich, marketer-friendly editor. 
• JavaScript SDKs – Use this SPA Project Start Kit, and its supporting tools, to develop SPA independently of AEM.
• Content and Experience Fragments – Edit content fluidly with Content and Experience Fragments and their added capabilities.

What is Experience Manager Assets

AEM Assets is a digital asset management (DAM) system that uniquely connects to existing creative workflows, providing distributed teams with a centralised location to manage and deliver engaging, channel optimised experiences across the customer journey.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets Brand Portal helps managers easily acquire, control, and securely distribute approved creative assets to external agencies and internal business users across devices. AEM Assets improve the efficiency of asset sharing, accelerate time-to-market, and reduce the risk of non-compliance and unauthorised access.

Experience Manager Assets Benefits

• Adobe Asset Link  – Connect AEM to Adobe Creative Cloud desktop apps, facilitating a streamlined collaboration with all content creators on your team. In AEM 6.5 specifically, a visual similarity search has been added to Asset Link to aid the discovery of similar images.
• Dynamic Media – Enrich your Adobe assets to support your marketing needs. With Dynamic Media, you can generate multiple variations of your assets to deliver interactive, scalable, performance-optimized content. In AEM 6.5 specifically, videos can feature a zoom function, 360-degree spin, and custom thumbnails.
• Adobe Stock integration  – Access Adobe Stock images from AEM Assets, assuring a smooth content discovery experience. 
• Connected Assets – Seamlessly access and use AEM assets remotely, working on multiple AEM sites.
• Brand Reinforcement – Consistent and optimised assets across the customer journey strengthen brand perception and collaborative management across teams, which means savings are made financially and on time invested.

What is Experience Manager Forms?

AEM Forms combine form authoring, management, and publishing along with correspondence management capabilities, document security, and integrated analytics to create engaging end-to-end experiences. Designed to work across web and mobile channels, AEM Forms can be efficiently integrated into business processes, reducing the “paper mountain” and errors, all while improving efficiency.

For large enterprises, forms are often created once and reused by copying to a content management system. Keeping a large database of up-to-date forms and making them discoverable can be a considerable challenge. AEM provides a customisable Forms Portal that ensures customers find and access forms they need across web and mobile channels.

Experience Managers Forms – Benefits

• Transaction reports – Track the usage of AEM forms on your applications. Clear transaction reports will help you visualise the number of forms submitted, processed and rendered. 
• Adobe Sign integration – Use Adobe Sign’s cloud-based digital signatures with your adaptive forms. The signage process can be managed using a browser or a mobile device.
• AEM workflows with adaptive forms – Improve form processing and approval scenarios by using AEM workflows used within AEM forms. With AEM 6.5, specifically, you can use variables to pass information between various workflow steps. You can also use a workflow with different adaptive forms.

What is Adobe Experience Manager Communities?

AEM Communities is a capability that helps users to manage online community experiences, including forums, user groups, learning resources, and other social features that are valuable to customers, employees, and your brand.

Making meaningful connections with your customers builds brand loyalty and trust. Adobe Experience Manager Communities makes it easy to curate, moderate, and elevate a wide range of social content. Using the Experience Manager platform, users can create personalised community experiences that are consistent across mobile and other digital channels.

Experience Manager Communities Benefits.

• Customer Connection – When brands learn about their communities, insights can be integrated with other marketing data to drive value and loyalty. This improves the overall impact of digital experiences.
• Community Creation and Customisation – Brands can create unique, mobile-ready community experiences. As communities grow and evolve, brands can easily adapt where they need to.
• Highlight Key Ideas – Brands can crowdsource content from subject-matter experts that has the scope to grow. Then use pins and featured content sections to show off high-quality work.
• Fuel Social Learning – Brands can quickly publish how-to resources, track progress, and encourage knowledge exchange between community members.

What is Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre?

Content velocity is among the top challenges that marketers face today. We know that content is increasingly important in the buyer’s journey. According to Forrester, a customer engages with 11.4 pieces of content prior to making a purchase.

AEM Livefyre is an all-new Experience Manager capability that lets brands tap into content shared on the web to create a constant flow of fresh and high-quality content on your site. Billions of pieces of social content are created every day. With Livefyre, brands can tap into this source of authentic content from the very people who care about their business.

Experience Manager Livefyre Benefits.

• Discovery – Brands can quickly find content across social media channels, RSS feeds, and blogger influencers.
• Publish – Brands can present content in various visualisation styles including media walls, maps, carousels and more. Brands can easily publish User Generated Content (UGC) on pages created in Adobe Experience Manager Sites or AEM Communities (Note: Livefyre integrates with AEM tools but is CMS-agnostic.)
• Engage – Brands can gain more insights about customers using features such as comments, side notes, live blogging chat, and polls. Auto-moderation allows brands to set rules that block spambots, hate speech, and profanity from appearing alongside your content. Livefyre also integrates with Adobe Target to pull in relevant customer data, so users see tailored content.

What is Adobe Experience Manager Screens?

Optimising content for different platforms, and thus screen sizes, has never been more important with users switching between desktops, tablets, and phones multiple times per day.

AEM Screens ensures a seamless experience by facilitating the publication of interactive and dynamic digital content on multiple types of screens in conjunction with a digital marketing platform. Integration of Screens allows you to re-use existing content and still deliver high-level digital experiences.

Experience Manager Screens Benefits

• DayParting – DayParting allows you to split a day into time slots, specifying which content will play at which desired time. Scheduling can occur within a day, week, or month as per the requirement.
• ContentSync – Using ContentSync technology, AEM Screens provides offline support for all channels by using a local HTTP server to serve unzipped content.
• When a channel is configured to run online, the player serves the channel resources by accessing the AEM server. However, when the channel is configured to run offline, the player uses the channel resources from a local HTTP server.

Are you interested to find out more about Adobe Experience Manager version 6.5 features?

Our Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) engineers are the most experienced available with a long track record of successful Adobe solution implementations. This trusted content management solution is ideal for enterprises that want to easily and consistently deliver great digital experiences across all platforms. Get in touch with our experts today and discover how Adobe Experience Manager can elevate your brand to the next level.