Experience Delivers

Build brand, drive demand and extend your reach with web experience management

Once upon a time... CQ teamed up with Sencha's ExtJS to provide customers with good looking, feature rich web interfaces that felt much like desktop apps. But some paths lead to new roads. Adobe CQ (now part of Adobe Experience Manager)  has found a new love in the shiny new world of tablets and smart phones.

Join me at CQCON 2013 in Basel and I'll' introduce you to CQ's new love. I’ll explore the advantages that you will have in your future work environment and explain why Sencha ExtJS is still an important part of Adobe CQ. I’ll do a deep dive into the new touch optimized user experience interface, highlight its benefits and give you insight about the new opportunities coming. Our story will not end here, I will also give you a peek into future developments with RESTful touch friendly web applications with responsive layout and fast Javascript magic on top.

It's a romantic idea: a website capable of detecting the exact device it's being rendered upon and bringing forth a page perfectly tailored to its environment and network characteristics. Every pixel (or em) of available viewport real estate is accounted for. Staples of the individual device user interfaces - such as leatherbound skeuomorphism on the iFamily or clean, grid based UI on Windows - are included to give your page that native feel. Device features including touch gestures and geolocation are included for those device groups which support it. Each piece of hardware your client wishes to support is accounted for. 

However, the device manufacturers have other agendas. They want to make them smaller, then larger, up the pixel density, and make them wearable. TVs can now browse the Internet. Game consoles, too. New web enabled devices are entering the market faster than ever and their users expect your website to be usable. How can you keep up?

Enter responsive web design. In 2010, Ethan Marcotte wrote an article on A List Apart [0] that would launch RWD into the spotlight. In this article he outlined what it meant to be responsive and detailed the "three technical ingredients" necessary for RWD:

• fluid grids
• flexible images
• media queries

With the momentum behind RWD picking up steam, we at Adobe began fielding questions on the best practices for implementing a mobile first site with Adobe CQ, now part of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). 

I hope that you will join me @CQCON 2013 where I will present patterns for responsive design in Adobe Experience Manager and explain how to provide a media-rich HTML5 experience that is performant on low bandwidth connections. AEM's Geometrixx Media reference application, delivered in full source code with the product, demonstrates these techniques. I'll dive into how we used mobile first design principles, adaptive images and progressive enhancement to create it, and discuss the pitfalls that we encountered along the way.

[0] http://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design

The world’s largest international cable operator clearly understands that the quality and depth of digital experiences directly affects customer satisfaction. That’s why Liberty Global uses Adobe Marketing Cloud.

The company’s old websites provided access to basic services and information. Unfortunately, the content management system Liberty Global built in-house couldn’t adequately support increasing customer service demands or the need to generate new business opportunities online.

To create and deliver dynamic digital content across devices, Liberty Global chose Adobe Experience Manager. Its web content management and digital asset management capabilities helped Liberty Global build once and use everywhere. The company’s first new website using Adobe solutions was created in Germany and took six months to build—new experiences could be built even faster.

“By reusing the components and templates in Adobe Experience Manager, we built websites containing more than a thousand pages for our Swiss operation in only eight weeks,” says Morgan Evans, Director Online at Liberty Global.

Adobe Experience Manager integrates smoothly with other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions, including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target. Adobe solutions provide solid analytics across channels that help Liberty Global continuously measure, analyze, and optimize performance across its websites.

“For the company, the returns from optimization have been strong. For example, optimizing call-to-action buttons on the product page produced a 23% increase in clicks,” says Evans. “By using Adobe Marketing Cloud to optimize our websites, we are able to more readily take advantage of opportunities and trends we see in the marketplace in order to improve customer engagement.”

Learn more about Liberty Global and how it’s using Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions to enhance customer experiences by clicking here. http://adobe.ly/YHZlDA

I hope you will join me at CQCON 2013 where I will cover the Integration Testing Framework used in Granite and Adobe CQ (now part of Adobe Experience Manager). In this session I will give an overview on how JUnit integration tests can be set up for any application based on Sling/Granite/CQ. Adobes Integration Testing Framework is based on the Sling Testing tools which supports client/server interactions over HTTP and scriptable server-side tests.

I'm looking forward to CQCON 2013 in Basel and hope to meet many of the developers out there.

As the size of an Adobe CQ5 instance (now part of Adobe Experience Manager) increases, the performance of an application on top of the CRX repository can become a bigger topic to focus on. In my talk at CQCON 2013 I will present some of the inner workings of CQ5 with CRX as the underlying repository and explain how a good content design helps to keep a CQ5 application fast and responsive.

Another area for performance optimization of a CQ5 application often also include JCR queries. During my talk I will present some of the tools available in Adobe Experience Manager that help you troubleshoot queries and provide an overview of commonly used JCR query features with the performance you can expect from them.

I'm looking forward to CQCON 2013 in Basel and hope to meet many of the CQ5 developers out there.

I'm looking forward to my talk on automated self-testing and health check of live Adobe CQ instances (now part of Adobe Experience Manager) at CQCON 2013 in Basel. A number of Apache Sling and CQ5 developers have been working on various tools to check the health of a live CQ or Sling instance, and we seem to be converging on a set of simple tools that can be very helpful for system administrators and developers.

The focus of my talk is presenting the SLING-2822 prototype that I've been working on recently that allows for creating health check tests for Sling systems in an extensible way. Out of the box, you can configure rules to check MBean attribute values, OSGi bundles states, disabling of Sling default accounts or any rule that can be checked by executing a script in a language that Sling supports. Extension points allow for registering additional rule types as OSGi services.

This prototype is not a finished tool. The goal is to start a concrete discussion about what's actually needed in terms of health checks. This can be seen from various angles: checking that the CQ security checklist has been applied, checking that the system is still in good shape after upgrading some OSGi bundles, checking that performance counters are within acceptable limits, etc.

With this in mind, I hope that you will attend CQCON 2013 and join in the open discussion to provide feedback on which direction such tools should take. I'll make sure to mention the idea of using server-side JUnit scripts for auto-testing production instances, as reactions to that idea have been varying from sheer enthusiasm to cries of horror. Just slightly exaggerating; but it looks like opinions may vary on which tools to use where.

I'll also present related tools like Joerg Hoh's cq5-healthcheck tool and Davide Gianella's sanity check tool. We haven't yet decided if and how much we should merge all those ideas into a common tool, so getting feedback from you and the rest of the CQCON audience on that will be invaluable.

CQCON is a month away, and I'm excited to be delivering a talk there on CQ Maven Methods.

Daunted by the complexity of starting or managing a project with Adobe CQ, now part of Adobe Experience Manager? Do you ever wonder what to do with the heap of project code you've just been given? How do you build it? How do you install it? How do you use it?

One of the biggest challenges in working with any technology is knowing where to begin, and having a good foundation upon which to build your work. It's even harder if you're working in a team, where you need all the developers to hit the ground running. You want to minimise the time spent on setup, initialisation, and on duplicating build infrastructures across laptops.

In my talk, I'll show you how to solve all these challenges. I will be covering how to use Apache Maven and Git to structure your projects involving the CQ capabilities of Adobe Experience Manager, to ensure you have a repeatable build that anyone can work with. I'll show you how Maven can simplify deployment of your code, and how you can keep all your work safe using Git – not just for collaborative development, but also for managing all aspects of your projects.

CQCON is shaping up to be the essential event for anyone working with Adobe Experience Manager. I look forward to seeing you all there!
 

One of the first colleges in the United States to offer online degrees for art and design now powers its classes with content managed by Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud.

San Francisco’s Academy of Art University developed a highly specialized learning management system to manage and deliver dynamic, creative course content. For its web content management system, the school turned to Adobe to improve the look and feel of its interfaces and tools, as well as for managing and updating course assets.

Chris Lefferts, executive vice-president of online education at Academy of Art University, says, “Adobe Experience Manager offered the right content management environment to provide all the functionality we wanted, at the level of quality we demanded. Plus, it offered streamlined integration with our learning management system, which was essential for us.”

Experience Manager also integrates seamlessly with Adobe Creative Suite, which the university uses extensively to build online coursework and teach students. The university also leverages responsive design in Experience Manager to accommodate students accessing course materials from multiple devices, including smartphones and tablets.

Learn more about the ways Academy of Art University uses Adobe Experience Manager by checking out their full story here.

During last week’s Web Experience Management Wednesday webinar, we had an exciting discussion about “mobile,” focusing on the ability to deliver relevant experiences across the multitude of mobile and tablet devices available today. We had a good turnout from the community (thanks to all) and great conversation on the topic.

Our experts, Ray Pun, Gunnar Klauberg (@aeroid) and Gabriel Walt, illustrated why it’s important to invest in mobile personalization. They also demonstrated how Adobe Experience Manager mobile capabilities, combined with Adobe Target integration, uniquely enable the delivery of personalized experiences through mobile channels.

If you missed the live webinar, we’ve now got you covered with an on-demand version. Check it out here.

Also, planning is underway for our next WEM Wednesday webinar which will focus on digital asset management (DAM). We will look at how Experience Manager DAM and its integration of dynamic media capabilities (formerly Adobe Scene7®) and Adobe Creative Cloud™ can help you to simplify the planning, production and distribution of your digital assets.  Register here for this live webinar taking place on May 22^nd.  We’ll see you there!

Switzerland’s leading telecommunications company chose Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions to engage clients in attractive and intuitive ways—regardless of the device they use or the language they speak.

Swisscom provides mobile, cable and broadband communications to millions of business and residential customers. To simultaneously improve customer experiences and streamline internal processes, Swisscom standardized web content management across business units using Adobe Experience Manager.

Christoph Bracher, online solutions manager for Swisscom’s Online division, says, “We wanted to attract and retain customers with intuitive, state-of-the-art web experiences. We chose Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics because the combined solutions offered an engaging experience for site visitors—and ease of management and use for us.”

Improved efficiencies include automated layout that adapts content to fit any device and automated translation of sources into four languages: German, French, Italian, and English. Plus, Experience Manager enables the ability to repurpose content across business units.

Measuring customer engagement and enhancing experiences has helped improve conversion by up to 150% for Swisscom, while providing new marketing efficiencies. For example, Virtual Business Club, the company’s customer self-service portal, is also close to reaching its goal of delivering new information and services 25% faster while cutting costs 20%.

Swisscom IT Services Ltd. (ITS) provides services and consulting for IT infrastructure and maintenance, enterprise applications, and content management. It’s leveraging Experience Manager to dynamically publish time-sensitive content directly to the web, including contact forms for technical information that help generate sales leads.

Check out Swisscom’s full story here.