Prologue

Well, AEM 6.1 has been out for a while now and it seems to be the right time to conclude my series of posts on the new stuff AEM 6.1 has to offer and how you can build a great solution , whilst avoiding the landmines. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here.   

I had planned this for much earlier, but the delay has been timely in a sense as the experiences of the past few months present a much better foil to Adobe’s offering.

This post will focus on Mobility as  core segment of the Digital User Experience  and customer journeys and what are the various options available in  AEM 6.1.

A Brief Background –  (Or Ignore Mobile at your Peril )

By now, if you hear of an Enterprise stating that it’s going to focus on the mobile angle of its user experience, you know it’s already, at least half a decade behind! The devices in people’s hands are phenomenally powerful and it’s no longer ok to simply convert your brochure-ware website to responsive and still say that’s your mobile strategy.

There are enough metrics and studies that scream at us that mobile solutions can no longer be simply tacked on as an afterthought

People use mobile devices today to execute transactions, get location specific & personalized content, and engage with companies and associated ecosystems in constructive or destructive ways. 

As a brand, if your content and user experience are suboptimal on anything but the desktop, you’re going to be losing a lot of ground very fast.

Addressing Mobile

There are a few broad ranges of methods that companies have chosen to address user engagement across the mobile channel

They fall into the following buckets

• Responsive Websites – By far the most popular and cost effective, but also increasingly being considered as a bare minimum capability and no longer acceptable as a complete mobile strategy
• Adaptive Website – Still around, but with more and more powerful devices with capabilities that rival desktops as well as the increased cost of maintaining separate code bases, it’s falling out of favour. Still legacy websites and niche markets with specific handsets necessitate adaptive websites at an extra cost
• Mobile Apps – Increasingly being leveraged in a variety of models from content dissemination to transactional capabilities, as well gamification of the user engagement with the brand and more. There are a few core types
  • WebApps – Essentially a responsive website packaged for the mobile form factor – works on all devices with modern web browsers but is little more than a glorified website with little to no capabilities to take advantage of being accessed on a device
  • Native Apps – The heavy duty applications , separately built for each platform , these apps may cost more but have the best user experience and access to device capabilities than anything else . They cost the most to develop and deploy across different ecosystems however
  • Hybrid Apps – A webapp with a native API wrapper , allows companies to package their single webapp for different ecosystem to behave as a native app. Can be incredible powerful or limiting depending on how you invest in making the webapp capable of leveraging device  capabilities regardless of the ecosystem .  Native apps still have the best user experience and feature set . Both Flipkart and Amazon had to revert to native apps from hybrid , due to the sheer performance needed for their user experience 

Any solution also has to fulfill several non-functional requirements such as accessibility, performance, ease of upgrade and the like.

How Does AEM fit in  ?

Adobe are squarely focused on Hybrid Apps strategy for mobile device engagement.  It’s a natural fit for an ecosystems which has already has

• AEM for fully responsive websites
• PhoneGap for hybrid app delivery
• Digital Publishing Suite for interactive tablet based digital publications

AEM 6.1 aims to bring all these features together to provide enterprises a single place to manage content for a variety of device based channels. It also enhances the core capabilities of the CMS to make it easier to make responsive websites

Note: These options also benefit greatly with integration with Adobe analytics suite, ( e.g.  AEM Apps where one can see a visual representation of the user journey from the point of opening the app ) For this blog we will focus on the core features w.r.t AEM 

New Responsive Layouts

AEM 6.1 really brings Touch UI in the forefront, with classic UI loosing just a bit more of it’s shine (though it’s still quite capable ). In a nutshell it is geared towards touch devices , uses the latest HTML5 and CSS3 , and is less heavy than Classic UI.  The new layout feels more robust and naturally aligned towards creating light, powerful and fully responsive websites, especially using  Sightly as the templating language.

It’s not fully decked out yet, with some features and functionality still better in classic ( e.g. workflow inbox ) , but it’s getting there.

To this,  AEM 6.1 brings with it Responsive Layouts with the Layout container. This is essentially Adobe’s way of provide a much better user friendly way to emulate content for different form factors ( remember the clumsy mobile templates we had to build back in the day ?  )

With the Layout Container and Layout Mode, authors can easily visualize the content on different easy switchable form factors and devices from within the natural authoring interface.  On the face of it, this looks pretty awesome, but digging a little deeper you begin to understand there are various considerations you must make before you make this your strategy

To actually make use of the Layout Mode and Container, you will need to use the new Layout Container as the new ParSys, register your pages, add in the mobile devices that you want to view as a config, and also include in CSS code specific for Layout Container in your project.  There are a lot of moving parts here and you may not be able to use other CSS frameworks as AEM uses LESS 

Thus it’s a bit of work to get this to work correctly and ties CSS & UI development to AEM development at this fundamental level. I am not sure whether this was a right thing to do , especially considering that this seems to go against the core philosophy of Sightly i.e. to help   UX development and AEM development streams and teams as much as possible.

This is also not recommended as a replacement of actual device testing and considering that there are also several browser plugins to emulate various devices, the option of Layout Mode and Layout Containers seems to be for those that are happy to use the LESS framework and have a tight UX and AEM team as a single unit.

AEM Apps

AEM 6.1 boasts the new module AEM Apps which provides for native integration with PhoneGap . Adobe  have  also provided starter kits https://github.com/Adobe-Marketing-Cloud-Apps/aem-phonegap-starter-kit to help start leveraging AEM content into Apps right away.

This seems to be a very cool and very powerful integration. Note that Adobe released PhoneGap core APIs as Apache Cordova   and you may develop your own integration with that, however if you ‘re looking already  built core integration with analytics built in  PhoneGap Enterprise with AEM Apps may be for you.

 There is a lot going on here.  You have the core capabilities to   

• Develop applications and build for different platforms directly , and author content collaboratively
• Manage App metadata, such as descriptions , screenshots, across all available apps from a single place
• Manage Staging and Publishing of content
• Send out authored push notifications to any apps
• Monitor your app statistics , including crashes, launches, installs and session length
• Re-use content for AEM Sites for AEM Apps for consistency and faster time to market*

*The last point on that list is critical. Without it , all the others are core functionality that you expect from any mobile application development environment. However, with this capability being on AEM, your enterprise gains the advantage of being able to craft  truly cohesive and consistent multi-channel experiences , without the overhead of separate system maintenance , or separate author teams.

The content that is available for your authoring into your website is also simultaneously available for authoring into your apps. This does come with a very important catch – and that is deciding your content strategy for multiple channels. 

You need to be very clear on this and understand  how your content information architecture must be in order to facilitate seamless re-purposing across channels. E.g. an Ecommerce sites with image based product catalogs can easily be published in an App, and also a website, but only if each product has in addition to detailed description , has a concise list of key features available for display on a small screen

If your content strategy does not take these elements into account , then you will not be able to realize the benefit such an integration brings, and will more than likely be incurring higher overheads for either maintaining two separate sets of content, or, forcing poor user experiences onto your users

DAM assets are typically the easiest to have a strategy for multi-channel consumption, while authored content will take considerable thought and forward planning even before you decide your template and component development

 AEM and Digital Publications Suite

Finally we have the integration with the Digital Publications Suite.  DPS is a set of tools for Indesign and the Adobe Creative Suite to allow the creation and manage digital content for mobile devices , especially tablets. Best use cases are epublications, and digital magazines that may or may not have interactive content. The 6.1 release provides DPS integration that brings content management and crafting within sphere of your CMS system.   Content can be imported from InDesign / CS , and existing content within CMS itself can be leveraged to create your publications  issues or folios , which is then packaged and distributed via the AEM/DPS integration and DPS App builder.

Customers can use a DPS Viewing app to view this folio.  The viewing app serves as a home to deliver new content directly to consuming devices.

The advantages here are similar in nature when discussing AEM Apps integration – leverage the content for your websites for digital publications. DAM for images, imported content from Indesign ( for content that requires precise printing specifications ) , or existing templates from within AEM system

Key Consideration:

AEM provides you interesting options to focus on building  centralized content management systems for digital content. With the exception of AEM responsive layout, both AEM Apps and AEM DPS are typically licensed

Consider AEM Responsive Layout , if you have a very tight AEM and UX team , and need to give your authors a bit extra when it comes to mobile authoring. Be prepared to pay more for development and maintenance as well as potential lock in ( for responsive behavior ) to the LESS framework

Consider AEM Apps for a potentially very powerful way to streamline content curation and publication for apps and responsive web at once. Great if you are looking at hybrid apps. Needs well thought out content strategy to reap the most benefits

Consider AEM DPS integration if you have a channel for digital publication.  Digital Publication Houses will be the most obvious fit, but if you regularly produce info-issues or the like , then this could be for you

Moving Forward

Recent months and years have seen an evolution of CMS, ECM , and WCMS into an as of yet amorphous field called Digital Content Management – far from being just a word to describe  content management of digital media, it’s clear that DCM is set to become the underlying foundation of many solutions of the here and now and the not so far future.

Before any technology is brought into the picture, its imperative that business truly understand the flow of information across systems and across all possible touchpoints, both digital and offline.  Often overlooked, the potential of a tech solution to enhance offline interactions  ( e.g. shop floor or  branch desk ) , is massive and is the key to true business transformation.

Business are feeling the tremendous pressure for staying relevant in the face of an ever increasing mass of consumers for whom the following is the truth of the digital age

“ Any Device is the Right Device , Any Time is the Right Time, Any Place is the Right Place, give me  what I want before I ask for it “

How do you solve this problem? – well I can’t promise any fix-it-all pills but in future posts, we will explore DXM and the opportunities and challenges it brings. 

 That's it for this post. How about you ? Have you crafted anything that takes advantage of what Adobe has to offer or sees AEM and associated tech being put to use in a unique way ?  I'd love to hear your experiences on building digital solutions with AEM and continue the conversation .