When it comes to content management systems, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a heavy hitter鈥攚ith no shortage of name recognition. The fast-growing enterprise platform is trusted by major corporations looking to simplify the management and delivery of their digital assets and create compelling, consistent experiences for their customers.
We understand the appeal of Adobe, and while it works well for some organizations, the total cost of implementation and time to deployment is limiting for others. We know that can be frustrating, so we鈥檝e stepped in to help numerous Adobe customers make the most of their investment.
We built Brightspot because we are committed to creating the right outcomes for our customers. This principle has always been our company's focus, and it drives Brightspot's product roadmap.
If you鈥檝e already made the financial commitment to using Adobe Experience Manager, there are plenty of opportunities to optimize its functionality by leveraging Brightspot CMS, our powerful, integration-ready solution.
In what follows, we'll explore the hurdles our customers have identified with Adobe AEM, as well as specific examples of how we've helped a variety of well-known companies optimize their Adobe investment鈥攐r transition off of the platform entirely.
The challenges of Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe is adept at marketing and selling, and the company tends to market Adobe Experience Manager to IT execs who may not necessarily manage the end-users and have a full picture of how the CMS or other publishing tools need to work.
Adobe Experience Manager鈥檚 somewhat rigid release schedule also means that heavy IT involvement is usually required. The need for such hands-on implementation and maintenance also means it takes longer to set up and use the platform.
Right out of the box, Brightspot offers a slew of functionality that you don鈥檛 have to pay extra for: things like bulk editing, a customizable dashboard, the ability to save drafts and revisions, and advanced version control鈥攅ach of which either doesn鈥檛 exist or is substantially lacking in Adobe Experience Manager.
How Brightspot can make the best out of your investment in AEM
Many Brightspot customers come to us because of their frustrations. They feel stuck with Adobe; after all, it鈥檚 not always easy or financially possible to walk away from a product you鈥檝e put perhaps $1 million toward and spent significant time implementing.
In some cases, to make the most of an Adobe investment, we help Adobe Experience Manager users improve their CMS experience by creating applications that add new functionality. In other instances, we help companies move their entire content operations over from Adobe Experience Manager to Brightspot.
Below we鈥檝e outlined examples of how we鈥檝e helped various clients either optimize AEM or transition to Brightspot altogether.
- Problem: National Geographic needed help with video asset management. Adobe Experience Manager made posting content a time-consuming and manual process that was overly complex on the back end.
- Solution: Brightspot created a seamless integration with National Geographic鈥檚 existing OVP, Comcast MPX, to ease the process of managing, hosting and presenting compelling video content. This solution increased discoverability by instituting a company-wide taxonomy system for tagging related content, which significantly simplified and accelerated editorial and development workflows.
Scripps Networks Interactive
- Problem: Scripps鈥� channels HGTV and Food Network had limited searchability in their photo galleries and recipe files, which made improving the sites for these brands time-consuming and difficult.
- Solution: For HGTV, Brightspot created an add-on for Adobe Experience Manager that allows editors to search for images by parameters, from subject to color (e.g., couch > modern > mid-century > red). A publisher creates a gallery in Brightspot, which delivers it to AEM via API. For Food Network, Brightspot created Recipe Box to operate the same way for searching recipes.
AARP
- Problem: AARP produces using Adobe Experience Manager, but they were encountering challenges in generating the sitemaps and feeds necessary for syndication.
- Solution: Brightspot set up a one-way content sync from Adobe Experience Manager to Brightspot, which AARP leverages to easily send content for Apple News and serve AMP articles for Google search.
- Problem: Sotheby鈥檚 Adobe Experience Manager content management system was inhibiting the organization鈥檚 digital innovation; the site was out of date, and the editorial team was restricted by the types of content it could publish. The CMS codebase had become difficult to maintain, especially without significant development support.
- Solution: Sotheby鈥檚 migrated its flagship corporate site from Adobe Experience Manager to Brightspot, which opened up many new avenues for innovation. For instance, Sotheby's can now produce and present content in multiple languages with corresponding URLs and metadata, and editors can manage millions of assets using the built-in digital asset manager.
Signing up for a solution that doesn鈥檛 explicitly embrace these qualities comes at a high cost, a truth that Adobe Experience Manager customers often find out the hard way. Brightspot is a platform designed to respond to new ideas and requirements, supported by professionals who know how to engineer digital transformation and innovation.
If you鈥檙e ready to explore a powerful, more affordable alternative to Adobe Experience Manager, request a demo today and find out how you can either optimize your Adobe Experience Manager or replatform quickly to drastically improve your overall content management experience with Brightspot CMS.
