Content Automation in AEM

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Adobe on a beta program, which was for Content Automation in AEM as a Cloud Service. This service provides the ability to apply operations to content in Assets that would typically require someone running a Creative Cloud application, perform an operation (or set of steps), and then export a finalized asset. That asset would then need to be uploaded to AEM where it would then perform additional processing, depending on processing profiles configured for it. This was very intriguing to me, for a few reasons:

1. I am a technologist at the core, and I come from a background in the CMS world. Any opportunity for automation that simplifies content authoring is the kind of thing I need to know.
2. I'm also a photographer and videographer. As a Creative, I especially wanted to know what this functionality was going to do.

I'll go straight to the point: Adobe did a great job of bringing in content automation to Cloud Services, which can vastly save the amount of time it takes to apply Create Cloud operations to Assets managed in AEM. The processing profiles allow several types of operations, including the following:

1. Apply a Lightroom Preset to your assets
2. Auto-Tone or Auto-upright your assets
3. Execute a set of Photoshop commands (known as an Action Script) on your assets
4. Apply Smart Object replacement with your assets

Notice how assets is plural? Yes, because you can do this in batch! So instead of having to complete these repetitive tasks manually, have it done in AEM Assets!

I had created a simple processing profile, which does nothing more than apply a Lightroom preset: Convert my image to black & white:

Original:

Processed:

Not only did the processing profile create a new image as processed, but it also created a new rendition of the original file!

So the possibilities are endless, and you can have these done in batch. Although the functionality has been around for a while, I highly encourage Marketers and teams that work with Creative Cloud applications to integrate this in AEM, assuming you're on Cloud Services.

I'm still pretty passionate about it since it bridges my "day job" work with my photography. Learn all about it at Adobe's documentation page on this topic.

#adobe #contentautomation #aem #aemaacs