Adobe Experience Manager Reviews

Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system, and we use it to create and manage a website.

The solution's pricing and stability could be improved.

I have been using Adobe Experience Manager for more than a couple of years.

I rate Adobe Experience Manager an eight out of ten for stability.

Adobe Experience Manager is a scalable solution. Around 100 users are using the solution in our organization.

We've seen the benefits of using Adobe Experience Manager regarding ease of use, content, structure, and updating our website.

Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced.

A team of three or four developers is needed for the solution's deployment and maintenance. Users must set up a team with all the professionals they need to use the product and create their website.

Overall, I rate Adobe Experience Manager an eight out of ten.

Adobe Experience Manager is a CMS or content management system. It's primary use for web development involves hosting a website. That is, anything that we develop, such as a new feature, a new website, or upgrades, is hosted in Adobe Experience Manager.

I like the native applications such as Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Experience Platform. Because of these, it's very easy to connect and obtain reports on how my website is doing, how many have visited it, how frequently, etc.

The multiple publisher concept is one of the best parts of this solution.

The latest trend is to render everything in the client-side framework. For example, SPA or single page application. This is a feature that needs improvement.

The cloud deployment pipeline needs to be improved as well.

I started using this solution in 2013, so I've been working with it for nine years now.

So far, the stability has been good. Since Adobe Experience Manager has the multiple publisher concept, if any one of the servers goes down because of the traffic load, you can easily spin up a new server.

If the solution is deployed in the cloud, it will automatically spin up when needed. If it's not on the cloud, then you can easily spin up a new server as you scale up and the traffic load increases.

We have about 200 people from marketing, target analytics, and web engineering teams who use Adobe Experience Manager.

The move to the cloud has been challenging, and I've had to contact technical support. I would rate them at seven on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is very straightforward and user-friendly. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes.

Because of the improvement needed with the client-side framework and because page loading takes time, I rate Adobe Experience Manager at seven out of ten.

Integration is the most valuable feature because it is the main selling point for customers.

It helps standardize the branding of pages across an enterprise by locking down what can be entered into page types.

The idea was to make it easy for the marketing teams, but it requires engineers who are hard to find and expensive to employ.

I have used this solution for three years.

Overall, there were no stability issues; I have found bugs and workarounds, like on any other platform.

There were no scalability issues as such. It is hard to auto scale on AWS because of the customization, but since AEM is an enterprise-level platform, sites can be provisioned for worldwide use.

The technical support for AEM has to be at a very high level to begin with, so, I've worked with some amazing people; Adobe hires some great people. Working with Adobe technical support was great, although it can take time for the back and forth, as they have to understand the details surrounding your issue.

I used to make WordPress sites. AEM is a CMS and so much more, it requires more of my skills. Companies usually switch because they can integrate more marketing tools easily with their website. Many companies have migrated from SharePoint.

The setup was complex due to the learning curve. Integration requires some planning ahead and communication between various IT factions. Often, the digital marketing departments may feel isolated.

First, you're going to spend a lot more than you think.

I never purchased it but yes, it's very expensive, so companies have to think about how to justify the cost and have to look at alternatives.

Have a good relationship with budgeting and your various in-house IT divisions; have them understand the needs of digital marketing.

Ease of use for content authors and tight integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud Products like Target, Analytics, Campaign; a complete solution for organizational digital marketing needs.

My organization is a services company.

Speed of web response for high transaction websites.

Those websites which have a lot of user interaction in terms of forms submissions, live comments, etc.

Over five years.

Rarely.

No.

Six out of 10. The tech support from Adobe is slow to respond and takes a lot of time to fix product related bugs.

No.

As simple as double clicking a .jar file.

Depends on usage and number of sites to run, but pricey.

Full knowledge with its technical stack.

The following features are most valuable:

• OSGi bundles capability
• DAM (Digital Asset Management)
• E-commerce capabilities
• Campaign management 
• Components re-usability for making pages

Creating new pages that have similar aesthetics to existing pages does not require any new development requests. An author/user has many flexible options for making new pages. In addition, by adding new pages to an existing website, the author/user saves time and money.

You do not need to create new pages for different kind of products; a single page works for all product kinds and types, by using the same product template page like on the sample site Geometrixx.

Integration with MongoMk for storage, in place of TarMK, is not efficient. But if it becomes efficient, this improvement would solve storage problems for many of AEM's big clients.

I have used this solution for three years.

AEM, when setup using Mongo, rapidly gains size. Hence it consumes a lot of storage space in a very short period of time.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, as it requires running a single .jar and deploying code and content into it. For production, the combination of author and few publisher AEM .jars, the dispatcher, and few AEM configurations needs to be fulfilled.

The cost can be high. But for large websites with a lot of dyanmic data like e-commerce, or for clients looking for user-data based campaigning, the solution can be very efficient in the long-term. 

This product has a lot of valuable features.

• CRXDE that really allows you to browse static content data and change it on demand at runtime. From the business perspective consider this feature as the online DB viewer.
• General framework architecture – a group of instances (authors) where content is co-authored and a group of separated instances (publishers) via which content is available on the Internet.
• Publication – you just press Activate on a page and then your changes are sent to all publish instances, so complete and clear separation of what is to be published and what is actually published.

• App SideKick – a blue window that allows you easily to drag and drop components on the page.
• Content Finder - you activate it via #cf in your url. It is the left blue window on the page that allows you to drag and drop DAM assets. Actually, this is the part of CQ that connects your pages with DAM.
• Admin console given by Apache Felix.
• JCR – place to put static content available via CRXDE for users.
• Mod_disp – special module for WWW servers.

• JCR access – lack of transaction from development perspective
• Memory leaks - problems related to OSGi and bundles management
• Lack of support for InteliJ and NetBeans when it comes to IDEs
• Very protected documentation with very limited number of solutions available on stackoverflow.
• Sometimes developer did not know why some files were still being cached by dispatcher. This Mod_disp is just very much black-box-like solution.

From the business perspective:

Pages were very related to each other when it comes to behind the scenes JavaScript dependencies and their internal structure design. Content managers were not able to understand why they had to publish some extra related pages to the one just they wanted to publish. It is a problem of transitive JavaScript dependencies. This approach generated a lot of frustration. Actually, in my opinion, the concept of JCR should be hidden from content managers.

Memory leaks - yes that really impacts overall stability. Actually, it is the problem of zombie OSGi services.

No - it is better than ATG, Magnolia, etc. It is a first-in-class product.

Very very poor.

Yes - Magnolia and Joomla, Liferay, etc. I switched my working places and it was just the main product used in the department.

Setup of localhost dev. environment. Very complex. Actually you cannot start development alone. Somebody must introduce to the concept of Sling and JCR etc. Very, very hard intro.

CQ is very expensive. The licensing model is not clear.

CQ is expensive but the worth money. If you are looking for a free or cheap equivalent use Magnolia CMS. Very similar in the general design idea.

In general, we work a lot with software requests by our customers, mainly enterprise companies. Typically, our clients are in supplies and they require a complex web portal. They are demanding in terms of quality and usually prefer to work with Adobe and not with Drupal or other platforms because here in Italy, Adobe has a lot of commercial support. We manage a software factory with over 150 employees. We are customers of Adobe and I'm a chief technology architect. 

I'm quite happy with the platform. It requires particular skills, so it's not so easy to prepare or find resources to specialize in it but with the right resource system and the right competencies, it's easy to work with. 

The programming model could be improved, it's a monolithic solution and that's what we don't like. Some features are badly defined in the solution. It's difficult integrating so we're forced to develop other APIs in order to simplify things. It's a weak feature of the product. 

Adobe usually don't want to speak to the integrators, they want to speak with the client. That's the approach in Italy. I don't know if the commercial strategy is different in other countries, but in Italy we had lots of issues when we tried to talk directly with Adobe. It's not so easy. Typically, any issues are inherent to knowledge about the platform. If the issue is that something is not working as expected, we usually discover the problem is linked to the fact that we don't know the platform well. That's when we ask for support and usually with some configuration, or by using the platform in a different way, we are able to fix or bypass the issue.

The initial setup usually takes somewhere between five and nine months. Typically these portals require a lot of time and in my opinion, implementation depends more on the type of projects, rather than the type of web content management system. We prefer to manage directly on the AWS environment, which our clients typically already have. 

Adobe is a more expensive solution than, say, Liferay. But we don't like the portal approach in Liferay, it's quite old. We've worked on our portal CMS since 2010, so it's been over 10 years. In Liferay, the core is still based on portal frameworks which is a disadvantage because we know that to develop something with that model is quite expensive. In general, our employees are more familiar with Adobe and have more confidence using that solution. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

1. 3D assets: Repurpose 3D assets to accelerate time to market and save on production costs. Upload, manage, view, and render 3D content created from Creative Cloud or many other popular 3D applications. Easily rotate, zoom, change colors, textures, backgrounds (stages) and lighting on 3D objects to create a new set of images from an infinite number of camera angles to use in digital marketing campaigns.
2. Source user generated content: Livefyre is now fully integrated within Experience Manager, enabling marketers to rapidly discover, filter and manage user-generated content into the central repository of Experience Manager. Unlock the power of user-generated content from social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and tell your brand’s most authentic and engaging story.
3. Social & UGC: Livefyre is now more fully integrated into AEM Assets. It still requires a Livefyre account though, which means the need for a license. But if you rely on User Generated Content, or want to start using UGC, then this is something to consider. There are some rights management requests to make sure that the content you want to use, is allowed to be used. Once approved by the owner; then it will show up inside your DAM to be used.

With the improvements made in Assets 6.3 for synchronization and accessibility of product data and content records, information can be utilized in a wide range of different channels, including catalogs and other designed documents.

Using this product data, they can be inserted semi-automatically into materials that can be printed, emailed, posted on websites, etc.

• The product is in constant evolution, with several key areas being improved in each iteration.
• The Assets capabilities of AEM 6.3.4 were basic and with troubles to scale, but that has changed significantly in newer versions where the Asset module has received a lot of focus and is currently one of the best solutions for Digital Asset Management out there.
• Adobe’s Cloud Manager can provision default three-tier architecture (Author-> Publish -> Dispatcher), any other complex variation, such as four-tier setup is hard to provision (Author-> Author -> Publish -> Dispatcher)
• Companies with heavy investment in Microsoft technologies and .net infrastructure find Adobe AEM hard to integrate and end-up using Adobe AEM as API backend

• Last but not least, Adobe AEM TCO (total cost of ownership) is very high with return on investment is slow (ROI is not necessarily low), which is why Adobe's focus is mostly large companies with deep pocket

I've used it for the past three years.

We have found occasional issues with stability, but those were in general caused either by custom developed code or issues in the implemented architecture.

When the application is installed in servers without the necessary requirements in terms of hardware specs, users may experience slow page loads and perhaps even systems not responding.

No problems with scalability.

Support from Adobe is good and responds in a timely manner. Their ticketing system works and is useful for getting to the bottom of the problems.

One thing to have in mind is that Adobe provides support only for the base AEM application, and not for custom code development to extend and/or customize its functionalities.

Being in a consultant company solely dedicated to Adobe CQ/AEM, this is not applicable.

Initial setup is very easy and straightforward.

The application comes in the form of a JAR or WAR file for easy deployment with various tools and systems.

Using the JAR, you can have the application up and running in five minutes, just by double-clicking/executing the file (it requires users to have Java installed, but that is a pretty common requirement these days).

Keep solution architecture easy to avoid unnecessary license costs. Start with the basic licenses to solve your immediate needs, and only increase them if the project really requires it.

I have worked with other similar solutions that solve parts of the complete set of solutions AEM provides, but none of them have the ability to handle so many of those areas in an integral way.

For Web Site and Content Management in general, sample tools are Drupal,
Joomla, and Wordpress.

Start small and plan your first set of objectives clearly, leaving all the “nice-to- haves” for a later phase.

Starting this way will help companies get a sample of the benefits, and get familiar with the tool in general.

After the first phase, they may find things that they thought they wanted are not really required or can be achieved in a better, more efficient way in the AEM world.

Another useful piece of advice is to avoid trying to re-create your current solution using AEM, and rather, try to look for new and different ways to achieve the same results that take advantage of AEM’s features.