Adobe Experience Manager (AEM): What It Is and How It Works (2023)

Dec 8, 2021

By Tayo Olayinka

The online market is highly competitive. Therefore, to keep up with the competition, your website needs a content management solution.

That’s where Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) comes in. Working with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) offers you a chance to cater online content and experience to meet your customers’ individual needs.

With so many functionalities and features for users to take advantage of, it’s no wonder why AEM is such a popular CMS system among enterprise users.

With this powerful application, you can set up your enterprise-level content management system (CMS) quickly and easily.

This article breaks down the benefits of using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and the reason enterprises choose AEM to manage their websites/mobile apps, and more.

What is Adobe Experience Manager?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a content and digital asset management application that allows organizations to create, manage and deliver content across every digital touchpoint.

This comprehensive content management solution streamlines the process of managing content assets. You can manage documents, images, videos, PDFs, online forms, and more.

Built on Adobe Cloud technology, AEM helps you easily access and use assets from anywhere to support your digital experience without the complexity of networking protocols.

Adobe Experience Manager changes the way you operate online. AEM provides a set of features that are used to create, publish, and deliver your digital content quickly and efficiently.

With AEM, you can quickly publish a customer-facing website, a social page where customers can interact with your brand or a blog where customers can find a wealth of content related to your business.

Whether you’re building websites or mobile apps, Adobe Experience Manager is ideal for automating your content strategy to create consistent, engaging customer experiences that drive growth.

Install Adobe Experience Manager to build websites, mobile applications, and forms for your marketing team.

Make it easy for visitors to find the information they need quickly and lead them down a path that makes them want to remain loyal to your brand.

(Video) What is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)?

Now that we know what AEM is, let’s look at how it works.

How does Adobe Experience Manager work?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM): What It Is and How It Works (1)

Adobe Experience Manager AEM is a component of the Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC), which allows you to create and deliver exceptional digital experiences for your customers and employees.

It was developed to work with the rest of the Adobe Marketing Cloud product suite, including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Commerce Cloud, and Marketo Engage.

Adobe Experience Manager uses advanced digital marketing tools to help you gain insight into your visitors and improve your site’s user experience.

It can help you track conversion rates, personalize content and pages, and discover which ads drive the most traffic.

Also, Adobe Experience Manager helps your sales team manage customer relationships, deliver rich multimedia experiences, and do targeted marketing.

With Adobe Experience Manager, you can deliver personalized experiences to your customers across every channel using the full power of Adobe’s industry-leading marketing solutions.

Integration with these solutions provides visibility into data analysis, customer segmentation, lifecycle marketing, and more.

AEM provides the following services for websites with large amounts of content:

  • Tag management, APIs for analytics, image generation, and marketing campaigns, among other things
  • An open-source system built on Java for flexibility
  • Page and asset replication to separate AEM Publish servers to ensure fast end-user access
  • User-friendly online tools that simplify the process of content creation for Authors

What are the benefits of Adobe Experience Manager?

AEM provides dozens of out-of-the-box features that help businesses differentiate themselves, drive efficiency, increase productivity and revenue. Some of the top benefits of AEM includes:

1. Improved Search

Adobe Experience Manager allows you to search your rich media content without spending time finding the right file. It makes future searches faster and improves efficiency across the team.

AEM improves search in many aspects throughout the software. The photo manager in AEM, for example, is built with search-by-metadata to find the photos you want based on how they are tagged.

This makes finding media much faster because the tags are applied based on your specifications, not automatically assigned based on set parameters.

2. Better Task Management

AEM is designed to provide users with better task management and more detailed analytics capabilities. It allows the team to work on multiple projects in a distraction-free environment without any overhead involved.

As your project expands, AEM helps reduce the clutter so you can stay focused on the task at hand. AEM can provide individual workspaces for different projects. This ability to work with multiple projects simultaneously helps teams stay productive and deliver outstanding results.

AEM helps you manage your entire project life cycle. You can create team workspaces, host conversations, organize multimedia assets, and easily check every task’s progress.

This includes the ability to schedule tasks, share files in real-time, connect with colleagues across multiple devices, and receive feedback in the form of comments and annotations.

3. Visual Media Conversion

Visual media conversion is essential for all marketers. Whether you’re a content creator or a content curator, you want to publish your video in the formats that work best on the platforms your audience uses.

To address the diverse needs of content creators and marketers, Adobe Experience Manager provides built-in support for converting creative cloud files into different formats and frameworks to drive results across channels and devices.

AEM helps you manage and convert your digital media assets to different formats. Automated, centrally managed workflows enable the bulk conversion of your assets to both current and emerging file types.

(Video) Beginners Tutorials | What is Adobe Experience Manager(AEM)

With Adobe Experience Manager, you can easily create and manage important content for your business. It adapts across screen sizes, formats, and channels to drive great experiences for your customers, from images to videos.

4. Personalized Content

Adobe Experience Manager lets you deliver a truly personal experience to your customers. Deliver content that is consistent with your brand while giving your customers a personalized touch.

AEM personalized content is flexible and customizable. It allows you to display a one-of-a-kind experience with your branded media to your target audience.

Providing your customers with a personalized user experience is essential.

With Adobe Experience Manager, you can facilitate the creation of a personalized digital experience for your customers.

Not only will this help you to differentiate yourself from your competitors, but it will also drive more traffic to your site, which ultimately leads to increased conversion rates.

5. Flexibility

Adobe Experience Manager delivers flexible publishing, consistent management, and powerful workflows to your web content.

It makes it easy to create and distribute content through a central platform, so getting your content to users is more efficient than ever before.

Adobe Experience Manager puts content at their fingertips and helps you engage and delight them on every screen, from visitors to registered users and customers.

Experience a world of flexibility that makes managing your website across multiple sites more accessible than ever before. With features designed around teams and partners at every implementation stage, more people can join the process.

6. Easy-to-use CMS

Start with a familiar, easy-to-use CMS that helps your marketing team boost their productivity. Adobe Experience Manager enables you to create, publish, track, and report on your digital assets in minutes.

Adobe Experience Manager is a powerful and easy-to-use CMS that enables your marketing team to manage web and mobile content from a single platform.

It incorporates inline editing and drag-and-drop functionality into a modern interface that makes it easy to create and deploy content quickly.

Create interactive experiences using designs from Adobe Stock for any screen size. Whatever your goal, from website personalization to email marketing. AEM helps you connect with customers at every touchpoint.

7. Simple Add-on Functionality

The Adobe Experience Manager has an add-on function that allows users to use add-ons from third parties.

The ability to add simple add-on functionality to a website has been a hallmark of Adobe Experience Manager.

Add-on functionality enables you to integrate your eCommerce site with dozens of services. For example, suppose you want to enable social sharing buttons so your customers can easily share products on Facebook or Twitter.

You could do this by adding the relevant Add-on module. With this software, you can create an online store that matches your business, giving your business an edge in the world of e-commerce.

You can create your solutions for your store using the extensive functionality of the AEM ecosystem through marketplace extensions.

Features of Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM): What It Is and How It Works (2)

Below are some of the key features of Adobe Experience Manager.

(Video) AEM What is Adobe Experience Manager AEM CMS

Content Management System

As your company’s content volume continues to rise, it becomes increasingly important to provide personalized information, relevant products, and optimized search results to each customer.

With Adobe Experience Manager, you can easily manage your online content and brand assets across devices and channels. Create sites quickly and easily with pre-built templates for responsive web experiences.

Cloud Service

AEM features a Cloud-native content management system that lets you manage your site securely, at scale, and without expensive upgrades.

Use Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Service, the first cloud-native content management system (CMS), for building websites that customers love.

Digital Asset Management

With Adobe Experience Manager Assets, you get immersive content experiences across audiences and channels. With Assets, you can source content from a range of sources using automated workflows.

Use the new Management Console to centralize asset management, search, and use smart tools to rapidly adapt and deliver assets to the right people at the right time.

Digital Enrollment and Forms

Forms are the industry’s first digital form platform that embeds valuable information in the document itself for seamless two-way data exchange.

It includes an intuitive, easy-to-use Digital Enrollment solution, enabling you to pull customer information directly into your forms to streamline your enrollment process.

Project Dashboard

The project dashboard provides a quick overview of your current projects. A project is a discrete unit of work to define specific goals, activities, and business outcomes.

You can use this section to view the key components of the project, including project status and details on planned and actual resource usage.

The project dashboard also gives you quick access to related assets such as team members and connections.

Out-of-the-Box Technology

Adobe’s Experience Manager (AEM) core components are available to install and try directly in your organization, no matter what edition you’re using.

These components adhere to Adobe’s out-of-the-box mantra, ensuring that your organization uses the most up-to-date technologies regardless of the edition.

Adobe Experience Manager developer role

The Adobe Experience Manager developer role is a critical position that will directly impact everything from commercial success to customer satisfaction.

By helping define and build solutions, developers can shape their organization’s future as it expands its digital footprint across the web.

AEM developer’s responsibilities and role are as follows:

UX Design

This assists AEM developers in gaining insights into the user experience, user engagement, and a small piece of architectural information.

Front-end Development

Developers should have a thorough understanding of front-end code. Developers working with AEM will learn about task runners such as Gulp/Grunt, NPM, and Node.

AEM Component Development

This stage comprises the creation of dialogs in XML and the creation of client libraries. The dialogue box’s information may be used to add content to the components using these tools dynamically.

AEM OSGi and Servlets Development

AEM developers must have a solid understanding of OSGi frameworks, OSGi services, and OSGi annotations. With experience in Java development, developers should be able to develop OSGi and Servlets with relative ease.

(Video) What is Adobe Experience Manager?

AEM DevOps and Production Support

Developers can use Adobe Experience Manager developer to carry out manual production movements to ensure that all the processes are executed according to a checklist.

How is AEM better than other content management system solutions?

AEM isn’t just a powerful digital platform, it is also a way to customize your brand. AEM delivers the most advanced content management system (CMS) functionality for digital enterprises.

As the leading solution for the enterprise, AEM is designed to create custom digital experiences for individuals.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM): What It Is and How It Works (3)

Also, AEM provides a complete set of capabilities that enable enterprises to be more competitive on the web.

AEM gives them all-inclusive control over presenting content in digital channels like the Web, mobile apps, and social media.

With its open platform, digital asset management (DAM) capabilities, and a wide variety of industry-specific solutions, AEM makes it easy to create integrated digital content management.

Apart from website management, AEM offers solutions for marketing automation, e-commerce, and engagement platforms.

The platform’s comprehensive feature set may already include what you need; if not, it is designed to easily scale up through the open development structure for specific business needs.

Additionally, AEM is an all-in-one platform to power your enterprise digital marketing, combining content, social, experience, analytics, and insights in one place.

Whether you’re creating, distributing, or managing rich-media assets for marketing or advertising campaigns, AEM makes it simple.

Conclusion

An enterprise content management system, Adobe Experience Manager, powers thousands of websites worldwide.

Incorporate dynamic web content, integrate with your social sites, and empower your site visitors to publish their content.

This solution is the perfect all-in-one platform to manage all aspects of your business’ online identity.

Need help?

If you need help getting started or transitioning to Adobe Experience Manager, complete the form below to arrange a conversation with one of our AEM consultants.

FAQs

Is Adobe Experience Manager easy to use?

Yes. AEM enables your team to design, build, and manage dynamic and responsive digital experiences with straightforward content management.

Is Adobe Experience Manager a CMS?

Yes. AEM is an API-first content management system (CMS) that allows brands to effortlessly deliver headless content to power all kinds of modern applications, no matter where they reside.

What language does AEM use?

AEM uses the HTML Template Language to develop custom front-end services.

Is coding required for Adobe Experience Manager?

It is possible to handle most needs without coding, but more complex ones require scripting, mostly in Adobe Launch.

Interested in learning more about Adobe Experience Manager capabilities? Send us a message.

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FAQs

What is Adobe Experience Manager? ›

Adobe Experience Manager Forms is an end-to-end digital document solution that makes it easy to create responsive forms that customers can easily complete and securely e-sign, making a seamless customer journey from acquisition through retention.

Why use Adobe Experience Manager? ›

Adobe Experience Manager helps by giving you collaborative tools to rapidly deliver personalized and compelling content experiences to every customer, no matter the device or screen.

What is AEM for a beginner? ›

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is one of the leading content management platforms to build websites, mobile apps, and more. This AEM tutorial covers end-to-end about Adobe experience manager and helps you understand its features, architecture, tools, and how you can work with it. Rating: 4.8. 53628.

What is Adobe experience platform used for? ›

Adobe Experience Platform helps you deliver the right experience every time by transforming all your data into robust customer profiles that update in real time and AI-driven insights you can activate in every channel.

Does AEM require coding? ›

While you need to know how to code, that isn't where the bulk of AEM work is performed. The real expertise in working with AEM is to understand how to properly configure it. The subtle intricacies of the software make it so you can just use simple HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Does AEM involve coding? ›

As a cloud service, AEM enables complete end-to-end code-propagation. Code commit, static code analysis, style checks etc. can all be configured. CI/CD across various environments is also enabled as a part of the cloud service.

Is AEM difficult to learn? ›

Introduction to AEM development

Understanding AEM and building the best AEM website is as challenging as building a difficult product within a short time. You need to get a grip on the technology before you start exploring the most awaited methodologies.

What are the main features of AEM? ›

AEM Forms as a Cloud Service provides several cloud-native capabilities such as a cloud-native architecture, auto-scaling, zero downtime for upgrades, a CDN (Content Delivery Network), cloud-native development environment, and ability to self-Service the environments via Cloud Manager.

What are the skills required for AEM? ›

AEM Front End Developer Skills
  • Working knowledge of AEM Developer tools like as: ...
  • Understanding of the Java Content Repository API.
  • Understanding of OSGi and its Declarative Services.
  • Familiarity with building tools, including Maven.
  • Knowledge of version control tools, particularly Git.
Jan 18, 2023

How long does it take to learn AEM? ›

If you are a student, it may take three months to be an AEM analyst, as you also need to learn the programming languages. If your IT professional already knows programming languages, it may take four weeks to complete the course.

How do you learn AEM from scratch? ›

Basic AEM Developer
  1. Create a Template.
  2. Create a component in classic ui.
  3. Create a component in touch ui.
  4. Switch between Classic ui and Touch ui.
  5. Convert Classic ui dialog to Touch ui Dialog.
  6. Create a Dialog.
  7. Create a Design Dialog.
  8. Create a Page in AEM.
Nov 29, 2016

Which language is used in AEM? ›

For custom development for the front end, AEM uses HTL (HTML Template Language). HTL is JSP-like in that it mixes HTML and special directives.

What is the difference between Adobe Experience Manager and platform? ›

In a way you can say AEP is the heart of experience platform. AEP is across all the solutions and empower them by providing various capabilities. AEM is essentially the solution inside Adobe Marketing cloud with which we manage the experience creation and delivery.

What are the products of Adobe Experience Manager? ›

  • Adobe Experience Manager.
  • Products. Content Management. Asset Management. Digital Forms. Digital Screens. Adobe Learning Manager.
  • Cloud Service. Cloud Service overview. Cloud Acceleration Manager. Developer App Builder.
  • Solutions. Headless CMS. Work anywhere. Connected commerce.
  • What's new.
  • Get started.

Is AEM SaaS or PAAS? ›

AEM as a Cloud Service is a native cloud solution or so-called Software as a Service (SaaS).

Is AEM easy to use? ›

Is Adobe Experience Manager easy to use? Yes. AEM enables your team to design, build, and manage dynamic and responsive digital experiences with straightforward content management.

What is AEM developer salary? ›

AEM Developer salary in India ranges between ₹ 4.0 Lakhs to ₹ 11.0 Lakhs with an average annual salary of ₹ 6.5 Lakhs.

Is AEM a database? ›

AEM is based on the Java Content Repository model, which is much closer to a NoSQL database than a Relational Database. It has very different performance characteristics than a Relational Database, but also offers a much richer and more flexible data model.

Is AEM Java based? ›

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is built on a rich open-source software stack that exposes many Java™ APIs for use during development. This article explores the major APIs and when and why they should be used. AEM is built on four primary Java™ API sets. Product abstractions such as pages, assets, workflows, etc.

Is Java required for AEM? ›

Prerequisites. Minimum requirements for installing Adobe Experience Manager: Installed Java Platform, Standard Edition JDK, or other supported Java Virtual Machines. Experience Manager Quickstart file (Stand-alone JAR or web-application deployment WAR)

Is AEM good tool to learn? ›

The best part, Adobe AEM is a content management system, although it isn't limited to only being that. For designers, it is a powerful, feature-rich, and user-friendly tool great for building front-end applications. For marketers, it is perfect for content management and optimization without any external dependencies.

Does AEM have future? ›

Adobe AEM is rising rapidly and probably become one of the top job sectors in the coming years. A minimum of the next 5-10 years, AEM will certainly be in excessive demand. With each release, Adobe is striving to make AEM development less complicated, and therefore the need for genuine AEM designers is on the rage.

Are AEM developers in demand? ›

AEM allows users and companies to easily build websites, apps, and to manage web pages and content. Adobe has a very large partner base, so AEM is a system that is used worldwide amongst some of the largest organizations making it widely accessible and in demand.

What framework does AEM use? ›

AEM is built using Sling, a Web application framework based on REST principles that provides easy development of content-oriented applications. Sling uses a JCR repository, such as Apache Jackrabbit, or in the case of AEM, the CRX Content Repository, as its data store.

What are the core components in AEM? ›

Core Content
  • AEM Forms Container.
  • Accordion.
  • Button.
  • Carousel.
  • Container.
  • Content Fragment.
  • Content Fragment List.
  • Core Form Container.

Can you learn Adobe on your own? ›

AdobeTV (Free) Adobe provides a series of free tutorials for all of their creative suite products, including Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere, and more. Each software has a set of 5-10 'Getting Started' tutorials as well as specific tutorials for certain techniques and effects.

Is Adobe difficult to learn? ›

Teaching yourself Adobe can be daunting and challenging, even with all the learning resources available. You can learn the basics with video tutorials or free seminars. But if learning through videos doesn't work for you, consider taking a course.

Is Adobe Experience Manager hard? ›

Cons: Adobe Experience Manager can be difficult to learn and use, requiring an experienced development team to get the most out of it. The cost of the platform can also be prohibitive for some organizations.

What is Adobe Experience Manager as a cloud service? ›

What is AEM as a Cloud Service? AEM as a cloud service is the next-generation platform to build and serve experiences using Adobe Experience Manager. It is designed to leverage the power of cloud technologies to develop and host AEM solutions.

Is it worth it to learn Adobe AEM? ›

Though the cost of the program is high and it will take extensive time to learn how to use it, the program's useful tools make it a wise investment, especially now that it's bundled with Adobe Experience Cloud programs.

What coding language does AEM use? ›

Front End Development

For custom development for the front end, AEM uses HTL (HTML Template Language). HTL is JSP-like in that it mixes HTML and special directives.

What is the difference between AEM and AEM cloud? ›

In AEM as a Cloud Service, the instances are continually updated by Adobe and managed in transient containers in the cloud. This drastically differs from the classic model where either the customer or Adobe Managed Services would deploy a known released version of AEM to a virtual machine running in the cloud.

What is AEM also known as? ›

Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service is also written as AEM Cloud, AEM Cloud Service or AEM CS.

Who uses Adobe Experience Manager? ›

Who uses Adobe Experience Manager? 733 companies reportedly use Adobe Experience Manager in their tech stacks, including LinkedIn, doubleSlash, and MasterCard.

Videos

1. Adobe Experience Manager Explained
(sree techno)
2. AEM Beginner #2 | Introduction to Adobe Experience Manager(AEM)
(AEM GEEKS)
3. AEM Overview | AEM Introduction | AEM Tutorial 01
(Java Shastra)
4. Adobe Experience Manager Tutorial | What is Adobe Experience Manager | AEM | Cloudfoundation
(CloudFoundation)
5. Top Digital Asset Management features in Adobe Experience Manager AEM Assets - Adobe Summit 2019
(Adobe Experience Cloud)
6. What is AEM or Adobe Experience Manager? #AEM #AdobeExperienceManager
(AEM and Web Development Tutorials)
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