Experience Delivers

Adobe Experience Manager and Liberty Global

2013-05-21T17:00:00.000Z

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

CQCON2013IntegrationTesting

2013-05-19T23:30:00.000Z

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.

CQCon 2013: Efficient content structures and queries in CQ5

2013-05-16T19:40:00.000Z

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.

CQCon 2013: Automated self-testing of live CQ instances

2013-05-16T11:55:00.000Z

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 2013: CQ Maven Methods – Mastering Development Workflows that Combine Adobe Experience Manager with Apache Maven and Git

2013-05-15T00:30:00.000Z

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!

Adobe Experience Manager at Academy of Art University

2013-05-14T23:33:00.000Z

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.

Now available on-demand: May 1st WEM Wednesday Webinar—Mobile Content Management and Personalization

2013-05-08T16:56:00.000Z

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!

Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics at Swisscom

2013-05-07T17:09:00.000Z

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.

My favourite CQ5 util classes

2013-05-07T09:53:00.000Z

In this blogpost I want to give you an overview of my favourite CQ5 util classes.

Some of these classes might already be known to you, hopefull you will find a new one that will help you during your CQ5 development work.

With every class I will give a small code example on how you can use it.

Join Us: 2nd Adobe Experience Manager Multilingual Content Intelligence Special Interest Group Meeting

2013-05-06T15:50:00.000Z

The Multilingual Content Intelligence team at Adobe is excited to host the 2nd Adobe Experience Manager Multilingual Content Intelligence Special Interest Group (SIG) on May 9 in San Jose, California. This time we plan to deep dive into Multi Site Manager in Adobe Experience Manager (which now includes all CQ capabilities) due to the high interest in it from the community. This is a great opportunity to understand basic concepts of Multi Site Manager, related best practices, and the general collaboration around using Experience Manager in a global context. The attendees will also meet Adobe internal experts to share experiences, and network with peers from various industry leading companies that are putting Experience Manager to use.

Here are the meeting details:

Date: Thursday, May 9, 2013

Time: 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM PDT
Address: Adobe San Jose headquarters
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA, 95110

The event is free, but you must register in advance to attend. For registration, please click here: http://adobecqsig.eventbrite.com

For more information or any questions, please contact: Seungmin Lee seunlee at adobe.com

We hope to see you in a few days!

Seungmin Lee

Sr. Program Manager

Multilingual Content Intelligence, Adobe

For AEM Developers: CQCON content preview. Register now.

2013-05-06T09:18:00.000Z

CQCON, the CQ developer event organized by Unic, that will take place in Basel on June 19-20 2013, is open for registrations and is ready to offer a great preview of the content. I am excited to provide here a sneak into some of the topics and to introduce some of the speakers that will take part to the event.

Register to CQCON from the conference website.
Seats are limited as this is shaped as a rather small event, to allow participants to engage in a warm and collaborative environment.

Here is a small anticipation of the conference topics:

Automated self-testing and health check of live AEM instances
presented by Bertrand Delacretaz, Senior Developer at Adobe Basel and member of the Board of Directors of the Apache Software Foundation.

Mobile First development with AEM made easy
presented by Bruce Lefebvre, Computer Scientist at Adobe Ottawa

Scaling AEM
presented by Michael Marth, Senior Engineering Manager at Adobe Basel

And several other compelling sessions and speakers are already confirmed and will be announced shortly in the final program of the conference. Some of the topics include:

Security
Integration with backend systems
Apache Sling component filters
Integration with PhoneGap
Integration testing
Efficient content structures and queries

CQCON is going to be a unique opportunity to gather more experience on some key topics that make AEM development projects successful and to engage with AEM developers as well as with some of the key developers of the product.

Book your seat now and register for CQCON!

Universal video, rich integration, dynamic personalization with the latest release of Scene7

2013-05-02T20:37:00.000Z

We’ve updated Adobe Scene7, now part of Adobe Experience Manager, and are excited to share the latest features with you. Our newest release includes enhanced features and tighter integration with Adobe Experience Manager to streamline campaign management, improve customer experience, and increase conversion.

Key features included in the release are:

A new universal video player that enables you to design once in HTML5 and deliver video optimally to every device. With the universal video player, Scene7 can automatically detect each viewer’s browser type and network bandwidth, and serve up the best viewing and playback experience.

Adobe Experience Manager at My Move

2013-04-30T17:00:00.000Z

By taking direct control of its web content with Adobe Experience Manager, My Move has increased customer satisfaction by 25% and reduced the time it takes to update online offers.

My Move offers tips, tools, and special offers to movers. Its original website, launched in 2011, was built using an open-source portal that required extensive customization. But limited publishing capabilities, including difficulty re-using unstructured content, prompted My Move to seek new tools.

Ada Vassilovski, vice president of product and marketing for My Move, says, “We needed a more robust web content management solution. Time to market is critical for us, so we looked to provide our editorial and marketing teams more direct control so they could publish more current content and targeted offers rapidly, without having to go through our development team.”

CMSwire April Tweet Jam

2013-04-25T18:29:45.364Z

Our Tatiana Mejia had a chance to join in on CMSwire's most recent Tweet Jam, aimed at growing and engaging online communities. You can find a full recap of the online conversation below. Enjoy!

Conquering the Webinar Process—from within Adobe Experience Manager

2013-04-23T23:10:00.000Z

As thousands of digital marketers from across Europe gather in London for the start of Adobe Summit today—and also coming hot on the heels of the latest version of Adobe Experience Manager 5.6 (which now includes all CQ capabilities)—we’re excited to announce Adobe Experience Manager webinars, powered by Adobe Connect.

Webinars have become an increasingly important part of the digital marketing mix as organizations work to engage with prospects and customers and to cost-effectively drive leads. However, to be successful, marketers need to be able to draw large audiences, effectively engage and communicate with participants, and measure the effectiveness of each webinar like they would a search campaign. And, importantly, do so as part of their overall online presence. Often times, challenges associated with this process can result in marketers not getting the return they need from their online events, at the expense of driving interest, revenue and loyalty.

That’s where Adobe Experience Manager webinars, powered by Adobe Connect, can help by providing marketers with a complete set of capabilities to conduct webinars and manage the process from within the Experience Manager environment.

Extract replication logs to separate files

2013-04-18T19:59:58.485Z

Replication is a key feature of the AEM solution. As such it should be carefully monitored, and there are a couple of ways to achieve this:

JMX: since version 5.5 AEM offers JMX MBeans to monitor a number of aspects on your instance, including the replication Agents, the complete list is available here: http://localhost:4502/system/console/jmx.
Logs: replication APIs output a certain volume of logs, that can be used to monitor the various agents in real time.

Now option 2 is probably the simplest to use, but all of these logs are written in the main AEM log file: crx-quickstart/logs/error.log. This means that this file will grow fast on large infrastructures where a lot of replications are performed, and monitoring replication can become quite cumbersome.

To avoid this we can arrange for these logs to be written in different files, by creating a new Logger configuration.

Modify the auto-generated DIVs using cq:htmlTag

2013-04-18T18:57:00.000Z

Out of the box AEM creates a number of div tags in the HTML code, these are used by the editing system, but also to identify the various components in the DOM.

As a designer you want to make sure the HTML presented to the end user complies to what you originally put together, so these generated elements can often be seen as a nuisance.

However there are a few ways to work around this, one of them is to use the cq:htmlTag node as described in this post.

Web Experience Management Wednesday Webinar: Mobile Content Management and Personalization – New date for live webinar, May 1st

2013-04-17T16:52:06.149Z

The next WEM Wednesday webinar, originally scheduled for April 17^th, has been rescheduled for May 1^st(following the Adobe Summit in London). In this webinar, we will continue the exciting conversations around “mobile,” focusing on the ability to deliver relevant experiences across the multitude of mobile and tablet devices available today.

Our experts, Ray Pun, Gunnar Klauberg (@Aeroid) and Gabriel Walt will discuss the importance of investing in mobile personalization, and showcase how Adobe Experience Manager, with integration of Adobe Target, provides the capability to deliver personalized experiences through mobile channels.

Register for the live webinar here. We hope you’ll join us.

Adobe Experience Management Highlights at Adobe Summit 2013 in London

2013-04-16T20:14:00.000Z

In just one week, we all will be turning to London for Europe’s biggest digital marketing event of the year: Adobe Summit, The Digital Marketing Conference. Following on last year’s success, we can again expect a great community of digital marketing leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs who are sure to deliver fascinating insights and best practices to solve marketers’ growing challenges. No doubt that next week will spark new ideas and accelerate many others. Here’s a peak at what’s in store for Web Experience Management:

· Curious about the true value of enabling marketers to self-publish in 40 languages and 72 countries to establish a digital presence that captures and sustains their audience’s attention? Then join SAP’s Shawn Burns, Global VP of Digital Marketing and our Loni Stark in their session on “How to Stand Out: Survival of the Most Relevant.”

· Interested in taking a closer look at how pharmaceutical reps’ sales presentations, delivered on a iPad, can be authored centrally with Adobe Experience Manager, Analytics and PhoneGap to return actionable leads and meeting notes? Don’t miss Miro Walker, CEO of Cognifide and Cédric Hüsler show how to “Build blockbuster mobile apps the easy way!”

· Looking to have several of the most popular digital marketing myths debunked? Get great insights from Stevin Treurniet, Senior Marketing Consultant at DSM and Adobe’s Marcel Boucher on the do’s and don’ts of personalisation and brand engagement in their session, “The marketer's guide to solutions for building brands online.”

These are just three of the twelve sessions in the Web Experience Management track. There’s much more, including sessions focused on:

· Digital Asset Management – how marketers are taking new approaches to creating, managing, and delivering digital assets for dynamic multichannel experiences

· Experience-driven commerce: Turning passion into purchase

· The 10 hottest new features in Adobe Experience Manager

Don’t miss it! Choose your Web Experience Management session before they fill up.

All of this great content and networking comes on the heels of the newest release of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM 5.6) which features a host of new capabilities in Digital Asset Management, Social and Mobile, as well as even deeper integration with other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Adobe Summit is the premier opportunity to hear directly from Adobe, our customer and partners gathering in London why Adobe Experience Manager has been named THE leader Web Content Management for Digital Customer Experience in latest Forrester Wave report.

We look forward to seeing you in London!

Gunnar Klauberg (@Aeroid)

How to add custom text in your context menu

2013-04-15T11:47:00.000Z

When you place a new component onto your page, then by default you have a context menu that allows you to edit/delete etc the component.

In this blogpost I will explain you how to add some custom text into the context menu in order to identify your custom component more easily.

March 2013 Omnichannel Commerce Round-Up: Must-Read Tips and Best Practices from Our Digital Experience Experts

2013-04-12T17:39:08.248Z

In March, with the peak holiday shopping season behind us and before merchants head into planning and start locking down their sites for this coming year, we featured content around commerce best practices and how to optimize the customer experience across the growing number of devices and channels.

Experts from the Adobe Experience Manager product marketing team shared “Quick Tips” for leveraging channels and content to create optimized commerce experiences that help drive ROI. We also curated related articles and blog posts from across the web and shared many of them via our @AdobeWEM Twitter account. We’ve compiled the great content here in one blog post for easy reference.

Let us know what other types of monthly content you would like to see in the future.

Adobe Quick Tips for Omnichannel Commerce:

Tip One: “Beware password fatigue! We all want to move beyond guest checkout to know our customer better and amplify our relationship going forward, but requiring everyone to create yet another user account with yet another complicated password to remember isn't the answer. The answer? Use social sign-in and allow your customer to sign-in with their Facebook account or similar. More than 75% of carts are abandoned and this final step of sign-in is a key component. There are additional benefits of allowing social sign-in as well such as being able to know your customers likes and interests and use this information to further personalize their shopping experience with targeted content to make their visit more relevant.”

Tatiana Mejia is a senior product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager with a focus on the Social Communities capabilities. Tatiana’s extensive experience in SaaS, collaboration and productivity applications, and social marketing helps marketers build communities and integrate social into their digital properties.

Tip Two: “All too often we spend a great deal of creative energy designing the checkout experience and then push it out to the general public to find we still have high abandonment rates. As e-commerce practitioners we have to shift to a testing mentality rather than the big annual redesign workshop. The returns can be astounding. Last fall I read a blog entry saying colored header bars across the page created a psychological barrier for the customer to move from one form area to the next (e.g., from shipping Address to billing address to payment details). At first, knowing that my own checkout page included a solid background color in the form header titles, I scoffed at the insight. Then I decided to test the idea and remove the color bars that divided the page from one section to the next. The results were a 16% lift in conversion!”

Darin Archer (@darinarcher) is a senior product marketing manager at Adobe and is responsible for the company’s "experience-driven commerce" initiative as part of the Adobe Experience Manager team. He leverages his expertise in eCommerce, CRM experiences and technology to help customers meet business needs and deliver a single immersive experience that enables commerce at every point of content consumption.

Tip Three: “As the customer journey increasingly passes from home to work to in-store and everywhere in between, serving the same content on a product detail page minimizes the opportunity. We have an opportunity to consider the customer journey, where they might be, what device they're accessing our page from and what type of bandwidth they may have to dynamically assemble a different experience in context of these things. On the mobile side we need to consider the different styles of the tablet vs. the mobile phone such that in the tablet case we may want to have huge beautiful imagery that creates a catalogue like experiences to flip through on a couch. Whereas if the customer is accessing that same product detail page on their smartphone they may be in our stores or competitors store trying to determine where it might be in stock or whether or not it's in inventory at the store they're in. With these different cases, taking the customer journey into consideration will drive a different experience for your pages. Take advantage of the insights you have with device detection.”

Gunnar Klauberg (@aeroid) is the product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager with a focus on all things mobile. Gunnar has more than a decade of experience in content management and enjoys helping customers drive their business through a coherent and agile web experience.

Tip Four: “We now hold displays in our hands on the couch that have incredible resolution, fidelity and interactivity that far surpasses any print catalogue ever created. Yet, too many websites still showcase the products in multiple tiny columns and rows of product shots. Tip: Create product category pages and special merchandising pages with the product imagery as the focus point. Use large images and a swipe design element to make it fun and visually stunning to look at your products. Include the ability to zoom in further or turn the product around to see it from different angles, and seamlessly bring product sku information forward such as price or ratings at the touch of a finger. Creating a more catalogue like shopping experience will increase engagement and maximize the opportunity for conversion.”

Elliot Sedegah (@esedegah) is a product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager, where he brings to this role a breadth of experience in both public and private sector software engineering, product management and IT consulting. His focus and interest is helping organizations take full advantage of online, mobile and social channels to increase customer engagement and provide compelling online experiences.

Tip Five: “Companies today make some of the most beautiful products, yet they're often relegated to a simple product shot with a white background. It's as if the dinner plate only exists on its own with no purpose. Tip: Rather than showcase that dinner plate next to many others in columns and rows of plates, put it back in its natural setting on an a similarly beautiful dining table in a decorated room bringing the joys of a dinner party to life further accentuating the dinner plates contribution. In our stores and our catalogues we know that our products sell better when we can merchandise them in their natural setting with other similar products, yet we miss this opportunity in our e-commerce stores. Showcase your products and inspire not only the sale of that plate, but the entire dining room of products.”

Vebeka Guess is a product marketing manager for Adobe Experience Manager solution. Vebeka focuses on helping businesses deliver rich, engaging and customized digital experiences by leveraging the dynamic media, personalized media and video capabilities available as part of the Experience Manager Digital Asset Management offering.

Tip Six: “Site becomes the store: Many consumer goods manufacturers and some retailers have a "brand site" and an e-commerce "store". The marketing investments are divided and often favored to the "brand site" where showcasing the product in its best light is the focus rather than e-commerce. Alternatively, the e-commerce team then drives a store experience that has the same product information although sometimes less engaging. Tip: Let the site become the store. All of the rich compelling marketing pages showcasing the latest collection, hot trends or new version need not ask the customer to go "shop the collection" when they're interested in buying. Rather, take advantage of that moment and let them add to cart and purchase right there vs. requiring them to go find the product of interest in the ‘store’.”

Articles and blog posts from around the Web:

Crate & Barrel: A Company that Began with a Dream

Tablet traffic surpasses smartphone traffic for the first time

How mobile-optimised sites drive conversion rates and AOVs

Mobile Shopping Catches on with Affluent Consumers

Forrester: U.S. Online Retail Sales to Hit $370 Billion by 2017

Everyone loves a deal, but U.S. web shoppers love it most of all

The Ultra-Modern Store That Gives E-Commerce A Whole New Dimension

Each Channel Has A Unique Merchandise Profile

Report: 70% of Consumers Trust Brand Recommendations From Friends

Consumers Favor Trad Online Vs. Social Media For Shopping Info

The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Retail

Understanding the Stages of Retail

Hope you enjoyed the compilation! In April, Adobe Digital Marketing experts will share targeting tips, so keep checking the Adobe Digital Marketing Facebook page for new tips.

What other topics would you like to see us cover? Let us know your thoughts.

How to find the Test&Target client code

2013-04-11T11:47:00.000Z

When you are beginning with the integration of AEM and Adobe Test&Target you may run into your first issue how to find the client-code when you are configuring the connection.

This small blogpost will show you how to find it.

Resources for CQ Developers

2013-04-10T16:52:00.000Z

CQ Developers around the globe are tuning in to our newest webinar series: Adobe CQ Gems on Adobe Experience Manager to gain valuable insight, tips and code while interacting with Adobe experts.

Two new sessions have been added to the schedule.

· April 17^th Jon Fait, Project Lead for Digital Marketing at Adobe who will be presenting AEM 5.6 Media Publisher

· April 24^th Felix Oghina, an Adobe Product Developer, will present hybris and AEM 5.6 - eCommerce framework integration.

Each session is designed to be interactive and is limited to 45 to 60 minutes in length. Sessions begin at 8:00 AM Pacific/ 4:00 PM GMT (convert to your time zone). Sessions will include presentation/ demo and a dedicated Q&A session.

Adobe named the Only Leader in Forrester Wave on Web Content Management for Digital Experience

2013-04-08T16:17:27.468Z

We are on an incredible journey—one that is transforming web content management and the role and impact of digital marketing.

Two and a half years ago, Adobe not only decided to run Adobe.com on a web content management system called CQ5, but we loved it so much, we acquired the small Swiss company that built CQ5, Day Software.

Today, it is clear that CQ5 is looking better than ever as the heart of Adobe Experience Manager, the content foundation of Adobe Marketing Cloud. Forrester Research, Inc.'s recognition of Adobe CQ as the only leader in the "The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For Digital Customer Experience, Q2 2013" is, in our opinion, a testament to this fact.

It's a major milestone. I am so proud of the team here at Adobe and grateful to our customer and partner community who have placed their trust in our product and people.

There are two particular words from report authors Stephen Powers and David Aponovich I want to focus on from the Forrester report. They speak to the strategy and execution of what we have been focused on these past couple of years. The words are not mobile, social or cloud. These words are really the means to an end.

The two words that stand out are "needs" and "imagination."

Needs: The definition of digital marketing is rapidly evolving and the demands have never been greater. Brand perceptions and customer interaction are increasingly happening online. Everyone in an organization is a digital marketer; web content management, the means for companies building their digital selves.

Organizations need to stand out to survive.

It's estimated in 2012, 1.8 zettabytes of content was created on the internet. More than 7 million times the entire digital asset collection stored by the US Library of Congress. Customers don't need more content or data—they need more relevant content based on desires expressed through data insights. Attention has become the scarce commodity online. To build brands that drive demand in the evermore-crowded digital world, organizations need a web experience management solution that helps them capture customer attention and stay relevant.

It is this need that we have focused on. We've made Adobe Experience Manager even easier-to-use for marketers while striving for the most powerful capabilities. We have kept to the principles of ease-of-integration from our open source foundation, while innovating rapidly across mobile, social and video to give organizations the time-to-market they need.

Imagination: Imagination is powerful. I was reminded of a Dr. Seuss quote recently, "It's not about what it is, it's about what it can become." Web content management software should expand the imagination, not limit it. We strive to build technology that gets out of the way. Technology that lets marketers and organizations create the purest expression of their imagination and to gain the most visceral reaction from the audience.

Digital marketing and technology is evolving faster than ever. Today, mobile, social and video are critical channels for marketers. Because of this, our latest release of Adobe Experience Manager came out with innovations around responsive design, richer social community support and inclusion of Adobe Scene7 video as part of the offering. However, tomorrow, there will be other ways to engage with customers that we have yet to dream of.

As the digital world changes, know that the Adobe team will stay relentlessly focused on your needs as customers and partners and make technology that gets out of the way, so you can unleash your imagination.

I'd encourage you to check out a complimentary copy of the full Forrester report, which we've made available here. We also distributed a press release today with additional details.

Two final words: Thank you.

Loni Stark (@lonistark), director of Product and Industry Marketing

Crate & Barrel: A Company that began with a Dream

2013-04-03T17:17:54.844Z

“A company that began with a dream, one employee, and no cash register.”

I suppose any number of companies could make this claim, but it might surprise you to know that this is proudly stated on one of the most well known retail home décor and furnishing brand’s eCommerce site.

Yes, Crate & Barrel has come a long way since then. What caught my eye recently is how they are innovating their online shopping experience by letting customers mix and match comforters, pillows, sheets and shams, to create their own customized bedding ensemble. Seamlessly integrated with the shopping cart, you simply select the pattern, color or style you’d like to see, and an image of a fully made bed is instantly presented to you with your bedding choices.

Introducing Adobe Experience Manager, powered by Adobe CQ 5.6 – On-demand recording available

2013-04-03T15:48:55.226Z

Last week’s Web Experience Management (WEM) Wednesday webinar gave us an exciting opportunity to continue the conversation we began with the community at Adobe Summit – and extended further – by “Introducing Adobe Experience Manager.” Thank you to everyone who joined us from the community. It was a great conversation!

Our experts, Cedric Huesler (@keepthebyte) and Loni Stark (@lonistark), discussed and demonstrated how Experience Manager can help you easily organize and manage the delivery of content and creative assets across marketing channels, including Web, mobile, social media, and video. They gave particular attention to new integrations with Adobe Target, responsive design and video capabilities for optimizing and delivering personalized experiences.

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

And, for those of you located outside of the US, there will be ‘Introducing Adobe Experience Manager’ webinars offered in EMEA. Check out the dates and regions below to register. We hope you’ll join us.

April 10 – Germany register now

April 11 – UK register now

Adobe Experience Manager (CQ) Developer Events 2013

2013-04-02T12:40:00.000Z

2013 is shaping up as explosive year for Adobe Experience Manager. This is great news for CQ Developers around the globe. Adobe is here to help by providing educational and knowledge sharing events like the CQ Gems webinar series. We are very pleased to announce that Adobe is also sponsoring live events for developers across the world:

CQCON - Basel, June 19-20
Evolve - San Diego, August 26-28
adaptTo() - Berlin, September 23-25

With 1 event in North America (Evolve) and 2 events in Europe (CQCON and adaptTo()), developers from around the world have a great opportunity to connect within their community, as well Adobe experts participating to those events.

In the full spirit of "the community for the community", all these events are organized and promoted by well-known Adobe partners, respectively: 3|Share (Evolve), Unic (CQCON), and pro!vision (adaptTo()). And in order to be in touch as closely as possible with the developer community, Adobe is eager and committed to participating with great sessions to all these events.

Here is a quick overview of each of the three conferences, listed in chronological order, with details about organizers, content, call for papers and registration.

CQCON - Basel, June 19-20

Content focus (from the official website): "CQCON will be a unique opportunity to aggregate CQ developers [...] to share their experiences, the best development tools and practices, and learn about the most demanded deep technical dives. These will include sessions on development practices, scaling & performance, front end and back end development and specific deep dives into some CQ features [...]"

Registration will open on April 16

Evolve - San Diego, August 26-28

Content focus (from the official website): "[...] the “Deploy” track is ideal for attendees looking to roll out CQ for the first time. The “Enhance” track will demonstrate how attendees can enrich their current CQ environment. The “Maximize” track is non-technical and will illustrate how the attendees can get the most from their CQ investment."

adaptTo() - Berlin, September 23-25

Content focus (from the official website): "adaptTo() is a technical meetup focused on the technical stack of Apache Sling including Apache Jackrabbit and Apache Felix and is addressed to all developers using this stack or parts of it. [...] additional sessions will cover commercial implementations like Adobe CQ and CRX, with particular focus on how these products leverage the architecture."

Registration will open in May

I hope that you are able to take advantage of these events to show case your expertise, expand your skills and your network.

City College of San Francisco and Adobe Experience Manager

2013-03-28T23:37:00.000Z

By eliminating a hodgepodge of web publishing tools scattered among 3,000 users in 60 departments across nine campuses, the City College of San Francisco wanted to project the school’s organization, quality, and professionalism through a clean, consistent web experience.

Since its last redesign ten years earlier, the website had become an unmanageable collection of more than 20,000 static HTML pages, many of which were being maintained by student volunteers using whatever tools they had at their disposal. Consequently, visitors had difficulty performing basic activities, such as registering for classes, finding grades, and applying for admission.

“We’re the largest community college in California, and we’re in the center of where many of today’s technology innovations start,” says Beth Cataldo, web project lead and coordinator of CCSF’s Multimedia Studies Program. “As an institution offering degrees across many technology disciplines, we needed a state-of-the-art website that presented CCSF in the most polished, professional way possible.”

After evaluating multiple options, CCSF standardized on the Adobe Experience Manager solution in Adobe Marketing Cloud. The Web Content Management and Digital Asset Management capabilities within Adobe Experience Manager provide an easy-to-use, web-based environment built on Java for creating, managing, and delivering personalized online content.

Adobe Experience Manager has helped solve a number of problems. Intuitive, standardized templates for web pages and streamlined, standardized processes allow users to create and update their own content. Content creators can also maintain a consistent appearance, structure, and navigation for the site. Training and policies also help ensure compliance with accessibility requirements, such as those by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the U.S. Federal Rehabilitation Act’s Section 508. Finally, transforming the website has also eliminated printing expenses and making digital content easier to find.

Learn more about how CCSF used Adobe Experience Manager to create and maintain a sleek, professional, easy-to-navigate website by clicking here.

CMSwire Tweet Jam Recap: Defining Employee Engagement

2013-03-28T23:18:00.000Z

Our own Scott Date recently had a chance to participate in CMSwire's most recent Tweet Jam, focusing on employee engagement. You can find a complete recap of the event below. Tune in next time using the #SocBizChat hashtag on Twitter.

Open Source, Open Standards: View from the Shoulders of Giants

2013-03-28T16:47:00.000Z

I'm often asked, "Why would a long-time open source community member join a proprietary software company like Adobe?"

When people think about Adobe, they often think about our great software products, such as the Creative Suite, Acrobat, or Photoshop. More recently people think about Adobe Marketing Cloud, which provides a complete set of analytics, social, advertising, targeting and web experience management solutions for digital marketers.

When people think about Adobe, they probably don't think about Open Source or Open Standards. But maybe they should!

Here are some things I found out about Adobe and openness before joining:

Adobe is on GitHub and SourceForge, with projects including an editor, fonts, and contributions to WebKit.
Adobe has an Open @ Adobe blog and Twitter account, carrying on the conversation about Open Source and Open Standards for the last couple of years.
Adobe host forums for discussion around Open Source.
You can find a summary of many of these open source efforts on the Adobe website, with more details at the Adobe Developer Connection. Adobe employees contribute to a wide range of open source projects, and Adobe hires more Apache Software Foundation members than just about any other company.
Adobe also contribute to web standards, and has a whole suite of tools aimed at making it easier for people to build a beautiful, modern web. Adobe actively encourages contributions to many related projects.
Adobe's broader engagements with open standards are detailed on the standards blog, where for the last year the conversation has spanned a wide range of topics.
Adobe also sponsors a number of events in both open source and standards. Most recently, the Open Source Think Tank 2013 and Eclipsecon, and the Open Futures Meetup at SXSW with W3C and IEEE.

Now that I've joined, I've been able to see the true depth of Open Source use. Just focusing on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and taking a quick look at its architecture:

At its core, AEM is built upon a content repository. The content repository stores files in the tar format (IEEE standards POSIX.1-1988 and POSIX.1-2001), on top of which is the content repository API for Java (JCR; standards JSR-170 and JSR-283, both led by Adobe's VP of Enterprise Technology, David Nüescheler).
AEM has a modular architecture based around the OSGi specification, and so Apache Felix is used to provide the pluggable framework.
The web framework and RESTful architecture are delivered by Apache Sling, which leverages the underlying JCR implementation to store and manage content.
Pinning all of this together is a huge list of open source dependencies, managed using Apache Maven.

It's great to see such a wide range of open source software used in the AEM solution, but more importantly each of these open source projects (and many more) regularly see active engagement and contributions from Adobe developers.

Adobe is not just passively benefiting from all this code: Adobe developers are in fact frequently working within open source communities creating and driving these projects forward, hand-in-hand with defining and developing the open standards and specifications that they implement.

There's a saying, often ascribed to Sir Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". It is frequently used in reference to open source software, to describe the rapid advances that can be made by leveraging the software commons rather than reinventing the wheel.

It's great to see how Adobe has pulled together best-of-breed open source projects to build Experience Manager, a powerful web experience management solution that implements (and sometimes defines) web standards. I'm looking forward to playing a part in evolving web experience management, and to seeing the associated innovations and specifications becoming part of future successful open source projects.

Fore more on Adobe and openness, see http://www.adobe.com/open.

Andrew is a Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Experience Manager at Adobe. Prior to Adobe, Andrew spent several years working in a mobile consortium building mobile platforms, and also worked extensively in systems integration where he delivered a wide range of enterprise content management solutions. At Adobe, he provides a bridge between engineering and the wider world, ensuring everyone knows about the great new features and functionality that are being built, and how best to use them, with a mobile focus. Andrew is passionate about open development, is active in a number of open source communities, and is also an Apache Software Foundation Member.

Adobe Experience Manager and CQ Digital Asset Management at Adobe

2013-03-26T18:34:00.000Z

Our own employees and approved vendors use Adobe Marketing Hub to obtain logos, email signatures, corporate templates, and other content for projects. But inadequate metadata and search capabilities often meant manually browsing through file trees, redundant work efforts, and an increased risk of using unauthorized content.

When our colleagues needed a more reliable, centralized digital asset management system, well, they found it using our solution. With Adobe Experience Manager Digital Asset Management, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, content developers can now efficiently create and upload thousands of assets with streamlined asset tagging, including automated metadata entry.

Marjorie McGonigal, senior product manager, Marketing Insights and Operations at Adobe, says, “When content creators upload new assets to the Marketing Hub, Adobe Experience Manager templates can instantly prepopulate metadata fields based on the file and upload folder. Prepopulation can greatly speed tagging for content publishers, accelerating uploading for some users by as much as 30%.”

Detailed metadata also improves searchability. Users can search for content by product, type or other criteria through a simplified user interface.

Adobe Experience Manager eliminates the challenges associated with enforcing brand guidelines, too. Now, when users access content in the Marketing Hub, they are required to accept usage terms before downloads. By tracking downloads and acceptance of usage restrictions, we’re better able to manage accountability.

Check out our full story here.

Changing resources in AEM5.6

2013-03-26T13:14:00.000Z

In this blogpost I want to show you some code around a new way you can change resources via the ResourceResolver

Live Webinar March 27 – Introducing Adobe Experience Manager, powered by Adobe CQ 5.6

2013-03-22T16:40:32.688Z

Earlier this month at Adobe Summit, we unveiled the latest version of Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud and powered by Adobe CQ 5.6 and Scene7, to help our customers create competitive advantage by delivering multi-channel, personalized experiences. To continue the conversation we began with the community at Summit—and, indeed, to extend it further—we’re planning a live webinar on March 27, “Introducing Adobe Experience Manager”.

Join our experts, Cedric Huesler (@keepthebyte) and Loni Stark (@lonistark), as they’ll delve deeper into how Experience Manager can help you easily organize and manage the delivery of content and creative assets across marketing channels, including Web, mobile, social media, and video.

In particular, you’ll hear and see more about new integration with Adobe Target that helps optimize how visitors browse, find, compare, and select relevant content on Web and mobile sites. And, by leveraging new responsive design capabilities, they’ll show off the ability to preview exactly how experiences will adapt for mobile and tablet devices, as well as the desktop. And, importantly, how to control video and image re-sizing and delivery in order to ensure the best and most appropriate performance by device. There’s more, too, but we’ll save that for the event itself!

You can register for the live webinar here. We hope you’ll join us.

Adobe Scene7 named a Strong Performer in Forrester’s Online Video Platform Wave Report

2013-03-22T16:36:00.000Z

We’ve all done it - clicked the “play” button, cycled through related content, and 30 minutes later found ourselves wondering where the time went.

Do you remember the first couple of videos that got your attention? In my case, they were always striking, unique, funny, and had a powerful soundtrack. We remember videos because they tell a story, and engage our senses. The ability to create that lingering memory is powerful.

Now that technology has begun to enable high quality video production at lower costs, and customers have become our best advocates by sharing videos within their social networks, we are seeing the proliferation of video content across channels and industries. Video is no longer optional, but an essential tool for businesses to remain competitive and relevant to their customers.

At Adobe, we are excited to announce that our Scene7 product, has been recognized as a Strong Performer in “The Forrester Wave™: Online Video Platforms, Q1 2013”, by Forrester Research, Inc. Adobe received the highest score possible in the areas of differentiation and roadmap, video editing features, player customization, extensibility and scalability. Specifically noted was the end to end Adobe video solution from content creation to management to analytics and optimization. It is great to have what we consider to be validation of the work we are doing from an independent research firm.

When I see the unique implementations of video across industries, from brand and community outreach projects, to educational and instructional videos, to product introductions and reviews, I am amazed at the ingenuity and reach that the platform offers our customers.

A toast to all of the digital marketers out there creating video – Cheers to you and lets continue work together to delight our customers!

To request a copy of the Online Video Platforms Forrester Wave™ report and request the latest information from Adobe on video conversion best practices, Visit here.

For our Developer Community: Announcing New Technical Webinar Series on Adobe Experience Manager and CQ

2013-03-14T13:45:00.000Z

We are pleased to announce a new series of webinars on Adobe Experience Manager and CQ: the CQ Gems.

This new initiative is intended for all developers working on the Experience Manager and CQ platform, to provide more and higher-level content on top of our existing training and documentation resources.

As the name alludes, the CQ Gems is a series of deep dives, each delivered by an expert in a specific area of the technology, and each time focused on an in-demand topic based on the feedback we’ve heard from you.

This initiative started in 2012 as an internal knowledge transfer at Adobe—directly driven by our engineering team—to share with the larger internal Adobe community special content, tips & tricks, and best practices, which are sometimes hard to cover in a time-constrained course or are not always easy to gain from official product documentation.

We felt the natural evolution was to take this initiative out to you, to share and discuss it with the entire community!

Webinars will be hosted on Wednesdays, at 8am Pacific Time.

Here is a preview of the first three sessions on the books, and trust me there is much more to come:

March 20: The eCommerce integration framework, by Paolo Mottadelli (@paolomoz)
April 17: AEM 5.6 upgrade mechanisms, by Bertrand Delacretaz (@bdelacretaz)
May 8: Architecture of the AEM 5.6 platform, by Felix Meschberger

And as a special welcome gift, we’ve posted the session presented last week at the U.S. Adobe Summit by David Nuescheler and Cédric Hüsler: The Top 10 new features of AEM 5.6; so go check it out.

Each of the webinars will be designed to be interactive, so attendees will be able to address direct questions during the presentation and we’ll be certain that follow-up after sessions is supported to ensure all questions are answered and sufficient background material is provided.

Sessions will also be recorded and made available as part of a repository from CQ Gems Home.

So, if you are a developer working on Adobe Experience Manager and CQ and are keen to go, please Register to join us.

Adobe Experience Manager at FirstEnergy

2013-03-12T23:32:37.310Z

Managing 11 websites takes a significant amount of time and energy. That’s why one of the largest investor-owned electricity generation, transmission, and distribution companies in the U.S. chose to leverage the power of Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, to manage its own online presence, as well as the websites for 10 distribution companies.

FirstEnergy was previously using a proprietary web development tool and a separate content management system. The combination required expensive manual processes to maintain the sites and made it difficult to keep information current across domains. Consequently, FirstEnergy wasn’t providing customers with optimal online experiences and the company wanted to do more.

Scott Infante, manager of IT enterprise technologies at FirstEnergy, says, “Our objective is to make FirstEnergy websites the best place to pay bills, initiate service requests, track energy usage, report power issues, and manage other activities.”

With the help of CITYTECH, a development partner, FirstEnergy selected and implemented Adobe Experience Manager. The solution integrates with back-end systems and helps adapt content for mobile devices, enabling the company to deliver superior customer experiences, improve satisfaction and loyalty, and aid compliance with regulations regarding outage and status information during emergencies.

Integration with back-end systems also enables customer self-service for everything from bill paying to usage tracking to outage reporting. By automating several processes, the company has both reduced operating costs and improved customer service.

Infante also shared that, “working with CITYTECH and Adobe Experience Manager, our behind-the-scenes marketing, business and development processes are much cleaner and more efficient. Our customers are more engaged, we’re saving money on everything from not having to send out paper bills to streamlined content publishing and access. At the same time, we are continuing to reduce our impact on the environment.”

Check out FirstEnergy’s full story here.

Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe CQ at New Mexico Department of Transportation

2013-03-12T15:42:00.000Z

When the New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT) saw the congestion, roadblocks, bottlenecks, and unnecessary detours on its Website, it chose Adobe Experience Manager, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, to map out a new solution.

After eight years, the existing site had grown to an unmanageable 800+ pages. Site visitors had difficulty finding information, and the site’s managers had difficulty ensuring the quality and availability of current content. By choosing Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe CQ, the NMDOT team realized it could offer site visitors a cleaner, simpler, easier-to-use experience and deliver them to a variety of devices.

Jeff Woodman, Web development lead at NMDOT, says, “Adobe Experience Manager gave us a strong foundation for meeting our Web publishing needs today and in the future as we start to think about delivering content on more mobile devices and building social communities.”

New Mexico became the first state Department of Transportation to implement Adobe Experience Manager, including Adobe CQ Web Content Management and Adobe CQ Digital Asset Management. Design and implementation of the new site took only six months, partly due to the easy integration of Adobe’s software with the department’s existing technology. The number of Webpages was trimmed to just 72, which increased the quality and navigability of the site, and improved customer satisfaction both inside and outside NMDOT.

“Site visitors can now find information with just one or two clicks, while with the old system, the same search might have taken seven or more clicks,” says Bruce Oakeley, NMDOT IT Information Systems manager.

The department worked closely with Adobe partners, including training specialists, so staff could rapidly learn to use Adobe Experience Manager and begin publishing when the new system went live. More than two dozen authors can now quickly create and preview content to see how it will appear on Web pages, speeding up the publishing process. Plus, NMDOT is using capabilities within Adobe Experience Manager to help it comply with the state’s Electronic and Information Accessibility Standards (section 508).

Check out NMDOT’s full story here.

Adobe Summit 2013 Day 2 Recap

2013-03-08T15:42:00.000Z

Day 2 of Adobe Summit is officially in the books! It was an amazing one filled with inspiring speakers, informative presentations, and non-stop networking opportunities that we hope gave attendees everything they could want.

How do you top the performance of Wednesday night’s concert by The Black Keys? Rolling out Felix Baumgartner (of Red Bull’s incomparable stratosphere jump), Julie DeTraglia discussing how NBC’s omnichannel Olympics coverage broke new ground, and NASCAR’s Marc Jenkins relaying how the racing organization leverages its online presence to build community! Each speaker went into depth from their own perspective on the new world of audience engagement.

Adobe Summit 2013 Day 1 Highlights

2013-03-07T15:08:28.003Z

Adobe Summit – The Digital Marketing Conference – is officially underway! Over 5,000 marketers and thought leaders have come from across the globe to participate in the best platform demos, information sessions and networking opportunities of the year. Adobe’s SVP and general manager of Digital Marketing, Brad Rencher, kicked things off with a rundown of Adobe’s vision for the future: providing an end-to-end marketing experience. New integrations between Creative and Marketing clouds have made creating assets, optimizing them for publication, and measuring their effect smoother than ever.

Solving the digital asset management challenge - from creation up to the last millisecond of delivery

2013-03-07T15:06:35.826Z

Marketers are well aware of the effectiveness of digital assets. As a matter of fact, we love them. The digital product photography, marketing banners, and video and other rich media we use to promote our products, services, or brand can have a positive effect on our bottom line if shown to the right customer, through the right channel, at the right time.

But as our customers’ appetites for these digital assets increase, so does the cost and complexity of managing and delivering these assets - especially in a world where customers appear to be adopting devices with screens of all sizes (desktop, mobile, tablet, etc.)

The process of shepherding assets from a creative team, going through multiple reviews and approvals, and then finally delivering those assets across a diverse set of channels isn't such a breeze.

With the new release of Adobe® Experience Manager DAM, we united this process from creation to delivery.

Uniting Creative and Marketing

Purging your versions correctly

2013-03-06T23:00:00.000Z

Since CQ 5.5 there are now 2 different ways of purging your versions.

Responsive design with adaptive images

2013-03-06T21:59:00.000Z

As you know CQ 5.6 has recently been released, and if you've seen demos or read the release notes you will have noticed that this new version offers support for responsive design. So what does this mean exactly? And how can you leverage the new features to ensure your website is responsive as well, let's find out!

First things first, it's important to define what responsive design means exactly. Even though we've covered the topic in the past (in this post), it can be hard to understand precisely what this term implies. There are loads of resources available on the net of course, but I find that this small sample illustrates the concept really well: it's really just about making sure your website design can adapt to various resolution and devices and offer an optimal user experience in all cases.

So how is this supported in CQ 5.6? With two main features:

Responsive design preview in authoring
Geometrixx Media

Let's explore these and see how the magic happens.

Meeting your Visitors’ Mobile Priorities

2013-03-06T05:36:42.541Z

As mobile Internet use increases, new devices find their way into the pockets of consumers around the globe and tablets replace PC’s, everyone’s feeling the pressure to go and do mobile, sooner rather than later.

But how? App or mobile Web? Native or hybrid? iOS or Android? Responsive? All those options can make things seem confusing.

So let’s start from the consensus: Mobile will be massive!

But that’s about it in terms of common ground. For each product, market, region, age group, and income the needs of the mobile visitor look very different. But, in fact, that’s actually the opportunity for digital and mobile marketers—there is no single truth or recipe for success. The opportunity is to quickly make sense of your customers’ mobile needs and priorities and use the most flexible approach to optimize for success.

With the new release of Adobe Experience Manager (and CQ 5.6)—which we announced today —marketers get the support they need to be flexible and shape spot-on mobile experiences.

Making your website social

2013-03-06T05:21:30.240Z

Five years ago we were talking about the mobile web. We talked about it as if it was something separate. And it was for a while. We started with WAP, moved on to mobile sites, and added apps. Today the discussion has changed. We no longer talk about the mobile web. We talk about the web, and it is mobile. The discussion has moved on to where we now we debate mobile first and contextual experiences.

Similarly, today we talk about the social web. We treat it as if it was something separate – an island. We tell people to go be social over there; and then we invite them back. Back to the mainland, to our .com pages, to purchase our products and services or consume our content. And we want them to tell their friends.

Include enterprise forms and documents in online experiences with Adobe Experience Manager Document Services and Adobe Experience Manager Document Security

2013-03-06T04:50:09.827Z

Digital marketing is a delicate balance between offering personalized experiences that share and collect relevant information over multiple channels while preserving the trust of customers. In Adobe Experience Manager web content management 5.6, we’ve included a couple of add-ons that help achieve that balance.

Adobe Experience Manager document services and Adobe Experience Manager document security add-ons, powered by Adobe LiveCycle^®, lets digital marketers integrate secure enterprise forms and documents into online experiences. Now, your online marketing can

· Simplify the process of converting prospects into customers by creating, publishing, and managing enterprise forms on websites and mobile sites

· Comply with electronic data capture requirements in regulated industries

· Securely track and share high-value digital content optimized for different channels

An integrated digital marketing campaign should include all the tools to convert a prospect to a customer. Yet some purchases, like insurance or financial products, require users to fill out more than a simple web form. Experience Manager document services makes it easy for your potential customers to fill out branded enterprise forms that meet regulatory requirements via their mobile device or computer.

Example of a cq:PollConfig

2013-03-01T14:24:00.000Z

In this blogpost I want you to show you an example of the custom node type cq:PollConfig. This can be used to import data at a certain interval, or to do other actions that are interval based.

Instead of writing custom code to fire events, I will show you an example whereby an Importer is called from the CQ-container.

Sample

2013-02-28T18:35:47.611Z

Sample

Adobe Summit 2013: Marketer's Guide to Standing Out in the Digital Galaxy

2013-02-25T21:56:52.368Z

Between the Super Bowl, Grammys, and Oscars there was a lot of marketing dollars spent these last couple of months. Some of it garnered brands such as Coca Cola, Oreo and JCPenny a coveted spot in the minds of consumers. Perhaps long enough of an impression that they will reach out whether today, tomorrow or in the near distant future…and buy a can of Coke, a box of Oreo cookies or visit JCPenny.

Regardless of how slick these ad placements, micro sites and social campaigns are, many marketers are still grappling with the best way to spend their investments across digital channels: trying to separate fad from forever, trying to reach beyond buzzwords to business value.

Adobe Summit – the Digital Marketing Conference – happening next week in Salt Lake City is a chance for more than 4,000 marketers and technologists to come together and share best practices and gain valuable insights into what is working and what isn't. For example, in my session, which I am co-presenting with HealthNow entitled, "How to Stand Out: Survival of the Most Relevant," I'll be exploring my findings on best practices I've uncovered in my interactions with some of the world's top brands. I'll share insights into what it really takes to build brand loyalty through sustained conversations across channels and how to convert that to business value.

When there were only a few sites online, manageable levels of emails entering our inboxes and limited search engine capabilities, standing out was easier. Companies online initially had the advantage of being the first movers. The challenge back then was there were few people online and those surfing around confined their activities simply to browsing. Today, while the opportunities for businesses are real and transformative, it’s getting really crowded out there.

You are not imagining things…as marketers, it is getting harder to get the attention of your visitors.

In my session with HealthNow, we'll be sharing insights of what has worked across industries and companies as well as specifically at HealthNow. I'll be talking about the three "R"s that all marketers need to know in order to survive in this digitally immersed and distracted world.

But the insights you will gain on how to stand out is not just limited to my session, there are 14 sessions specifically on Web Experience Management which will focus on how to use owned properties such as websites, mobile sites and tablet apps to build an online presence that meets your business purpose. Across all of Adobe Summit there will also be insights and how-to sessions on getting the most from data collected across channels, optimizing your advertising spend and how to make sense of all the social buzz.

While these are focus areas that all have a significant play in your digital marketing mix, Adobe's also bringing it together, forming the most comprehensive digital marketing offering, Adobe Marketing Cloud.

If you think about how much you will spend on marketing and building your online business this year both in people and budget, and the potential for growth in this part of your business, you will realize this is a conference you can't miss. For the thousands of you already attending this year, I look forward to seeing you there. For those who haven't decided, I say, seize the moment, grab your bag, snag a plane ticket and get your spot. The digital consumer waits for no one.

Register now to be part of the most important digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Do be prudent and use this promo code ASM2013 to save $200. Spend wisely, but remember, "Fortune favors the bold".

To Adobe Summit or bust! :-)

P.S. Of course, the parties are awesome as well. There will be the Summit Party featuring the grammy award winning group Black Keys. And for all you WEMmers and AEMmers…there is a WEM Meet Up where yours truly will be the host along with the entire WEM/CQ/Scene7 team. Can't tell you everything here, but let's just say there will be lots of little surprises…but nothing dangerous.

Loni Kao Stark

Director of Product, Solution & Industry Marketing

Adobe Summit 2013: Launching a personalized, multichannel campaign is easier than you think

2013-02-25T20:40:41.497Z

Every savvy marketer knows that creating personalized and engaging landing pages can increase conversion through higher SEO techniques, increased reuse of offerings, and shorter routes to relevant content. The question is: why don’t they do more of it?

The reality is: it’s hard and it takes a lot of resources.

It takes time to get these, in theory, “quick marketing campaigns” out the door. A lot of times it takes multiple teams to create the assets. Marketing teams have to hire outside digital agencies to manufacture the HTML, CSS, and assets. Once it’s finally delivered to the marketing teams, there is back-and-forth process between the marketer and agency to get the details right. Do you have the right text? Is the exact imagery what you’ve been looking for? Does it show correctly on the website? Does it render appropriately across mobile devices? Form factors? Then, on top of it all, marketers have to make sure the messaging is engaging across a wide variety of audiences.

Not only do you have to take all of these appropriate steps for each landing page you create, you also have to iterate quickly enough to ensure it’s resonating with your target market. Otherwise, all of this trouble isn’t worth it.

Attend my session, “Launching a personalized, multichannel campaign is easier than you think,” at Adobe Summit from March 4th-8th, in Salt Lake City, Utah, to learn why marketers are struggling to capture a critical mass of demand gen and how they can easily take steps to correct that.

There are 13 more sessions dedicated to Web Experience Management, as well as many more fun activities and thought provoking content to discover at Summit. To find out more about Adobe Summit and some of the activities we have planned read my previous blog.

This is an event you won’t want to miss. Register now to be part of the largest digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Remember to use promo code ASM2013 and save $200.

Chris Nguyen

Product Marketing

@ChrisNguyen

Adobe CQ Package Share Contest: Announcing the Winners and Looking Closely at Criteria and Best Practices

2013-02-22T16:41:00.000Z

I recently had the great honour of being part of the team reviewing the entries to the Adobe CQ Package Share contest. For those who missed it, Adobe was giving away a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro for the best five packages submitted, based on the following judging areas: 40% creativity, 40% overall quality, and 20% reusability. We appreciated all who participated and submitted – thank you!

A package is just a zip file of content in a special format, and by uploading packages in Package Share you can make your custom code – such as templates, libraries, or even content – available to everyone using Adobe CQ in your company, or anyone else using CQ worldwide. It's also a great way to discover new functionality, and to quickly and easily download and install new CQ feature packs. For more background on packages and Package Share, check out my recent video.

Adobe Summit 2013 - Creating a compelling customer experience

2013-02-21T19:41:17.831Z

If you are aiming to accelerate your online business there is one key element that you need to get right: the customer experience across all channels. In a world of nearly complete price visibility the experience is the differentiator, as Darin Archer pointed out in his recent post.

Now, what needs to be done to create this outstanding experience? We all have our own practical knowledge of how it should be and - more often - how it should not be. From an external perspective it often seems so easy and obvious. And for your customers, it needs to be like this – natural and smooth. However, for your organization there can be so many obstacles and stumbling blocks to get it really right - or at least to be better than the competition. It is not trivial but worth the effort to start the transition to experience driven commerce.

Join us at Adobe Summit from March 4th-8th, in Salt Lake City, Utah, to hear about best practices for creating a compelling customer experience. Razorfish's Samantha Starmer (@samanthastarmer), who is a recognized expert on customer experience and e-commerce with extensive practical background, will be presenting with me in the session: “Amplifying conversion between marketing campaigns and commerce.” We will discuss important elements of experience-driven commerce, challenges that you might encounter and approaches to overcome those.

This is only one of 14 sessions dedicated to Web Experience Management and Adobe Experience Manager (which Adobe CQ is now part of). You will have the opportunity to hear about all the latest news and future direction of Adobe Experience Manager. Learn more about this year’s highlights.

In not much more than a week Adobe Summit will be opened. Don't miss this opportunity to learn about trends and innovations in Digital marketing and have some fun together with your peers and the Adobe team. Register now to be part of the largest digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Remember to use promo code ASM2013 and save $200.

Adobe Summit 2013 - Seven secrets to making the most of your digital assets

2013-02-20T19:04:30.011Z

What are the important factors when choosing a digital asset management system for implementing in your organization? Is it enough to make all the metadata fields required to ensure your digital assets are easily searchable? What can be the biggest challenge in your DAM implementation? (Hint - it's not the DAM product you chose!). Questions like this are essential to marketers who want to make the most of their digital assets.

Join us at Adobe Summit from March 4th-8th, in Salt Lake City, Utah, to learn best practices for creating,
managing, and delivering digital assets and rich media to create engaging experiences. We will demonstrate how to make the most of your digital assets based on a real-life DAM implementation project:

- What to take into account when choosing a DAM system
- How you can design metadata taxonomy and tagging structure
- How to ensure assets are available for a broad user base
- What is a crucial yet often forgotten aspect of any DAM implementation project

Presenting with me will be Adobe's own Lukas Ryf, who has been leading an IT project team on the Digital Asset Management implementation for Adobe’s Global Marketing Organization, and will share practical knowledge gained during the project.

In addition to this session, there are 13 more sessions dedicated to Web Experience Management and Adobe Experience Manager (which Adobe CQ is now part of), including a presentation of the top 10 hottest new features in Adobe Experience Manager; plus many more fun activities and thought provoking content to discover at Summit. Learn more about this year’s highlights.

This is an event you won’t want to miss - think Felix Baumgarner or Sal Khan delivering keynotes on top of everything else. Register now to be part of the largest digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Remember to use promo code ASM2013 and save $200.

On-demand now Available: Our February Web Experience Management Wednesday Webinar—Adobe CQ Digital Asset Management

2013-02-20T17:26:46.567Z

During last week’s Web Experience Management Wednesday webinar, we were excited to showcase the capabilities of Adobe CQ DAM, part of Adobe Experience Manager. We had a good turnout from the community (thanks to all) and great conversation on the topic.

Our experts, Elliot Sedegah (@esedegah) and Greg Klebus (@gklebus), discussed and demonstrated how CQ DAM, in part through integration with Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe Scene7, can make it easier for you to plan, produce and deliver rich digital assets across all of your channels.

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

And if you’re interested in learning all there is to know about what’s coming in Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe CQ, as well as the entire Adobe Marketing Cloud, we encourage you to join us at Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2013 March 4-8 in Salt Lake City, UT. You can register now using promo code ASM2013 and save $200.

We’re planning for our next WEM Wednesday webinar now and will be sure to share more details on the date, time and topic soon. In the meantime, you can register to join us for the next live webinar here.

Adobe Summit 2013: Your Customer Just Shopped at Amazon…in your Store

2013-02-19T23:07:33.036Z

We’ve all done it. You probably have their app on your phone now. I’ll admit it, I have it. I’ve walked into one of my favorite household goods retailers, enjoyed a little cooking show, eaten their treats, drooled over some Le Creuset pan I don’t need, and then purchased a brand new, beautiful slow-cooking recipe book…from Amazon…on my phone…while in their store.

Why did I do this? Because, it was easy, less expensive, and will be at my door before I need it next.

Now, as retailers and consumer brand manufacturers, you can try to mitigate this by minimizing what products you sell through online e-tailers and sometimes differentiate the product by retailer just enough so that consumers can’t easily do price comparison. But, the reality is that with a few clicks to one’s favorite search engine, a shopper knows which model number matches the other one from another retailer and can still price shop.

So, how do we change the focus?

We make the shopping experience more compelling. We become a trusted advisor in the latest fashion trends if we’re an apparel company, or the expert in photography if we’re selling digital cameras. We don’t lead with simple online e-commerce experiences that position our brand and our products in boring rows and columns on a product category page. We sell the lifestyle and personalize the shopping experience so that customers want to buy from us.

Interested in hearing more?

Join me at Adobe Summit from March 4th-8th, in Salt Lake City, Utah, and learn how to shift gears to experience-driven commerce. In my session, “Experience-driven commerce: Turning passion into purchase,” I’ll share insights on how you can change the customer journey across social, advertising campaigns, in-store experiences and, of course, your Web experience on every device. The goal: Inspire the customer to buy from you rather than focus on price. Also in this session, Robert Morris from SitOnIt Seating will share his journey creating an experience-focused, omni-channel commerce strategy for their direct and retail business.

That’s not all…There are 13 more sessions dedicated toWeb Experience Management, including a presentation led by our Adobe Experience Manager product management lead, Gerd Handke and Samantha Starmer (@samanthastarmer), VP of Customer Experience, Commerce at Razorfish, where these two industry will dive into tips and tricks on how to transition to a customer experience focus within your own organization, including insights on e-commerce platform changes and how to bring together stakeholders that may own different touchpoints of the customer journey.

These are just two of the attractions – there are many more fun activities and thought provoking content to discover at Summit. Learn more about this year’s highlights and see why this is an event you won’t want to miss. Register now to be part of the largest digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Remember to use promo code ASM2013 and save $200.

Adobe Summit 2013 - Let's talk DAM with General Motors and Travelocity

2013-02-19T16:40:34.256Z

If you think your organization's approach to managing digital assets is clumsy, archaic, and out of date, don't worry, you are not alone. Many organizations are often paralyzed by inefficient processes when creating and managing digital assets, especially when it comes to delivering those assets to multiple channels. Business owners are forced to rethink how they strategize to unlock digital content across teams, channels, and partners.

Most organizations are struggling with the same questions:

Why can't I find the digital assets I need?
How can I easily share marketing content with partners?
How do I unlock my organization's creativity to increase revenue?

This year at Adobe Summit from March 4th-8th, in Salt Lake City, Utah, we will have multiple sessions focused exclusively on getting the most out of Digital Asset Management (DAM) for marketing and content publishing. Join us in Utah and hear the latest thought leadership, real world examples, and tips and tricks to help you get the most value out of your digital assets.

In the session –“Is your digital asset management strategy ready for multichannel marketing?” – we will discuss the new approaches marketers are taking to create, manage and share digital assets. You will also hear thought leaders at General Motors and Travelocity discuss their own approaches to solving the digital asset management and distribution challenge.

This session is promised to be very entertaining and informative. And, there are 13 more sessions dedicated to Web Experience Management, as well as many more fun activities and thought provoking content to discover at Summit. Learn more about this year’s highlights.

Adobe Summit is only a couple weeks away. This is an event you won’t want to miss. Register now to be part of the largest digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Remember to use promo code ASM2013 and save $200.

Adobe Summit 2013 – How to transform random social activity into loyalty and revenue

2013-02-15T20:06:51.532Z

If you are like most marketers, you are aware of the importance that social can make to your brand and to your bottom line. But also, if you are like most marketers, you are wondering how to best leverage social as a channel and make it work for you.

Here is a secret: In order to best leverage social, you cannot treat it as a channel, you cannot disconnect it from your business goals and you cannot remove it from your core experience.

The best managed brands deeply embed social into their web experience in order to hook their visitors and turn them into fans and loyal brand advocates.

Join us at Adobe Summit from March 4th - 8th in Salt Lake City, to see how Adobe Experience Manager customers are using Social Communities as part of their websites and learn:

· What you can do to make your site more compelling;

· How to react to changing requirements and different community profiles;

· How to combine premium content with premium communities;

· What secret optimization tricks you can apply to optimize sites with massive user generated content;

· What community managers can do to keep their community active and engaged;

· The importance of search and navigation for user generated content;

· And: how to measure business impact of social communities.

Also presenting in this session are, Scott Petry, Vice President at SapientNitro, and Kyle Chau, Partner Solution Architect at Adobe, to give you the best combination of business insight, technical know-how and product background.

In addition to this session, there are 13 more sessions dedicated to Web Experience Management, including a presentation of the top 10 hottest new features in Adobe Experience Manager; plus many more fun activities and thought provoking content to discover at Summit. Learn more about this year’s highlights.

This is an event you won’t want to miss. Register now to be part of the largest digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Remember to use promo code ASM2013 and save $200.

Live Webinar: Tips to Boost Rich Media ROI with Adobe Scene7

2013-02-15T17:21:01.649Z

Are you putting your rich media to work in all channels? Are you using personalization to increase click through and conversion on product images, banners and video?

Whether you are just getting started with video and personalized rich media, looking to improve what you are already doing, or planning to extend current initiatives into new channels– Adobe is here to help support your efforts. Our work with customers who have used Adobe Scene7, part of Adobe Experience Manager, to develop rich content marketing strategies across their channels and devices, in web, video, email, and print, affords us a unique view to learn what drives business results. We are excited to share these best practices to help you get the most out of your rich media in 2013.

Please join us, February 21^st at 1:00 p.m. PT, where we’ll discuss how Adobe Scene7 can help you maximize the value of your rich media investment. Scene7 product experts, Cynthia Tillo and Mathias Siegel, will demonstrate best practices for creating and publishing truly dynamic media, from interactive videos with embedded calls-to-action to targeted marketing campaigns that enable new levels of personalization. Discover how these capabilities combine with Adobe CQ DAM and have proven to significantly help drive increased conversion.

For more info and to register, check out the webinar details page.

And, if you’d like to meet the Adobe team and your peers in person, as well as learn more about where digital marketing is headed, including our own Adobe Marketing Cloud, be sure to join us at Adobe Summit: The Digital Marketing Conference March 4-8 in Salt Lake City, UT. This is an event you won’t want to miss. There are 14 sessions dedicated to Web Experience Management and many more fun activities and thought provoking content to discover at Summit. Learn more about this year’s highlights.

Register now to be part of the largest digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Remember to use promo code ASM2013 and save $200.

The styles tab

2013-02-09T11:21:00.000Z

This blogpost is about how to use the default rich-text-component for all the style requirements you have in your project. Quite a lot of times you see that new components are created to meet a certain style requirement, but if you take a step back it is just a Text-component with some extra styling.

Customer Story: Nelly.com

2013-02-08T18:07:00.000Z

For Nelly.com, supporting its impressive growth of more than 4,000% over the past four years meant adopting tools that would provide customers with richer online viewing experiences. As one of the largest fashion and beauty online retailers in Sweden and the European Union, the retailer turned to Adobe Marketing Cloud to effectively create, deliver, and manage a large volume of high-quality online content.

“At brick-and-mortar stores, customers have the advantage of being able to pick up products, try them on, and inspect all of the details,” says Richard Woodbridge, chief operating officer at Nelly.com. “While online retail stores offer anytime, anywhere convenience, they can lack the immediacy and hands-on insight that customers need to be comfortable making purchases. This is particularly true in fashion, where physical details about a product often make or break a sale.”

Adobe Scene7, part of the Adobe Experience Manager solution in Adobe Marketing Cloud, helps Nelly.com achieve its goals by dynamically generating and delivering digital content in real time—eliminating the need for manual image editing. Staff is now able to add video and images in multiple angles for approximately 300 new products every day.

Interactive zoom and high-quality video allows customers to see greater details—from fabric choices and decorative details to how clothing moves on the runway—helping to eliminate uncertainties that might prevent sales. “With interactive zoom, we can highlight details that customers might not see otherwise,” explains Woodbridge. “Video and zoom enabled by Adobe Scene7 work together to give our customers a virtual shopping experience that rivals a trip to a store.”

Adobe Marketing Cloud offers the product views that the company needs to provide customers with exceptional online shopping experiences. “By delivering dynamic media content, we can give customers more engaging experiences that ultimately lead to higher satisfaction and greater sales,” says Woodbridge.

You can read more about how Nelly.com uses Adobe Marketing Cloud here.

Adobe Summit 2013 - Manage and deliver dynamic video on any device

2013-02-08T17:50:07.510Z

Is creating compelling video content one of your top marketing initiatives this year? As online video consumption continues to grow, video marketing is becoming an essential strategy for driving consumer awareness, engagement and conversion across all industries. Yet the lack of a standard video format and a fragmented landscape of screens and devices has hampered deployment. In addition, marketers have limited options to incorporate localization, promotional calls-to-action, or target and even personalize video content without incurring additional production costs.

Join us at Adobe Summit from March 4th-8th, in Salt Lake City, Utah to learn best practices for managing and delivering dynamic video that will engage your customers on any device and keep them coming back. Video marketing guru, Priscilla Lawrence, will demonstrate how to:

· Streamline video production time and costs using integrated workflows to transcode, add interactivity, and publish high quality video experiences to your online properties.

· Optimize video playback and scale across devices by automatically serving the right video format, in the right video player, for the web, tablet, mobile, or social sites.

· Maximize video conversion by creating personalized, interactive video with relevant clickable call-to-actions.

This is an event you won’t want to miss. There are 13 more sessions dedicated to Web Experience Management and many more fun activities and thought provoking content to discover at Summit. Learn more about this year’s highlights.

Register now to be part of the largest digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Remember to use promo code ASM2013 and save $200.

Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe CQ at HealthNow New York

2013-02-07T22:06:00.000Z

For HealthNow New York, its website is the primary communication channel between the company and the people it serves. But an inflexible legacy system made it difficult for the health benefits company to accomplish its goal of improving community health and well-being.

One of the biggest challenges was the time and resources required to update site content. Simply uploading a PDF file, for example, could take nearly 18 minutes, resulting in delays to push out large volumes of new content and high costs to maintain the site. The legacy system’s proprietary coding libraries also made it difficult to customize user experiences.

Allessandro Renzi, director of digital experience at HealthNow New York, says, “In the past, bounce rates on our homepage could be as high as 75% because site visitors couldn’t easily find the information they wanted.”

The company wanted a centralized Web content management and digital asset management solution that enabled modular, rapid development. That’s why it chose Adobe Experience Manager, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, and its key components, Adobe CQ Web content management and Adobe CQ Digital Asset Management. In less than 12 weeks, HealthNow New York updated more than 2,000 web pages.

The revamped site easily guides users to the information they need. The Adobe technology helped integrate front- and back-end processes, meaning both health plan enrollees and employers get custom information immediately when they log in. Homepage bounce rates dropped to 35% and the site’s overall exit rate dropped to 33%.

To learn more, read HealthNow New York’s full story here.

Add default components in the Sidekick

2013-02-06T17:02:00.000Z

Lately I've had a few developers come to me with the same question: how do you set the default components appearing in the Sidekick when first opening a page?

It's a legitimate question, switching to Edit mode for every page can be quite annoying, and we don't necessarily want to let the authors decide what components they are allowed to use in a particular Parsys.

However this is quite easy to fix, and here is how.

Adobe CQ Multilingual Content Management SIG – Highlights from the latest Meet-up

2013-02-05T17:22:54.180Z

The Adobe CQ Multilingual Content Intelligence special interest group (SIG) recently hosted its first meeting of 2013 at Adobe headquarters in San Jose. Adobe senior product managers presented sneak peeks of exciting new features coming in the next version of Adobe CQ. Several translation technology vendors, including Translations.com, Lingotek and Cloudwords, participated in a rapid-fire showcase of their integration solutions for localization and improving the multilingual content delivery experience. This first all-day event concluded with customers from 10 different companies sharing best practices and probing questions about implementing CQ in the multilingual, multisite enterprise.

Our Scott Date kicked off the morning session with a presentation of the Social Communities capabilities that enable customers to extend the power of Adobe CQ to manage and moderate user forums, knowledge bases, user-generated content and more. SIG participants reflected on the implications of managing multilingual social content, raising interesting questions around the best practices for organizing forums (single forum, many languages, separate forums per language) and the potential use of machine translation to make user-generated content available across languages. Cedric Huesler (@keepthebyte), CQ demo guru extraordinaire, gave attendees a sneak peak of new capabilities coming in CQ, highlighting that customers can look forward to strengthened support for mobile sites and multi-level campaigns.

There was also an extensive discussion of MSM/LiveCopy and rollout practices for multilingual websites. Customers would like simpler methods for managing multi-tiered geographical structures and the corresponding rules required around MSM, blueprints, LiveCopy, and rollout behaviors.

The vendor showcase featured a summary of the extensive integration Adobe partner Translations.com has achieved between Adobe CQ and their GlobalLink translation management system. Lingotek showed an intriguing possibility for a CQ integration leveraging site analytics and a simple dashboard to make the business decision whether to localize a site in a new language. Cloudwords introduced a beta version of a CQ connector to their cloud-based localization management interface.

Overall, it was apparent there is a need for better understanding of MSM and best practices to implement when an enterprise has many sites, many languages and complex business rules for the frequency and extent of translation across sites. There was interest in a special webinar to drill down on these complex use cases and share best practices and solutions. The vendor showcase was a nice introduction to different technologies for addressing translation management of CQ generated content. It was great to see the progress vendors are making in integrating to Adobe CQ. These integrations are becoming more sophisticated, taking advantage of analytics to drive localization business decisions, and providing the flexibility of managing localization projects in the cloud.

The Adobe CQ Multilingual Content Management SIG meets virtually through our LinkedIn group, and in-person on a quarterly basis. The next meet-up is expected in late April/early May. We’ll continue the great discussions from our January meeting and probably add a new theme around using Adobe CQ and the challenges of multilingual SEO. We hope you will join our community and add to the dialog. Please reach out in comments if you’d like to learn more, or just have questions or comments.

Adobe Summit 2013 –Web Experience Management Main Attractions

2013-02-04T19:38:08.989Z

Interested in getting hands on training with Adobe Experience Manager to drive more engaging marketing campaigns? Perhaps you want to know what the latest trends are in the industry and steps you can take to incorporate them into your organization. Or, is it quite simply the fact that you love David Nuescheler’s Top 10 features for Adobe Experience Manager presentation? In any case, it’s that time of the year again: Adobe Summit Time!

With only 4 weeks to go, Adobe Summit - the Digital Marketing Conference - is right around the corner! This year’s Summit, from March 4th-8th, in Salt Lake City, Utah, will feature the largest Web Experience Management track to date with 14 sessions dedicated to Best Practices and Tips & Tricks.

Thought leaders from a large cross-section of enterprises will speak to the most innovative and latest trends they are seeing in content marketing. Product experts will show you first-hand advanced techniques on how to better use Experience Manager with other parts of the Adobe Marketing Cloud to meet strategic business objectives. Attendees will walk away with a comprehensive set of skills and knowledge, not to mention inspiration, to do their jobs more effectively and successfully.

Highlights for this year’s WEM track:

Speakers from companies such as Dupont, HealthNow, and Activision
Coca-Cola presenting on its Content 2020 initiative in the Luminary track
The very popular 'Adobe Experience Manager Top 10' – presented by our very own: David Nuescheler and Cedric Huesler
Scott Liewehr from Digital Clarity Group presenting on: Content Marketing Best Practices
A WEM meet-up (aka PARTY) plus added fun activities specifically designed for the WEM and Scene7 community, which promise to be a blast. Stay tuned for more details!
7 sessions devoted to Best Practices and 7 sessions devoted to Tips and Tricks
The hottest topics around Mobile, Social, Cloud, DAM, Commerce, and more
Ski day at the Canyons Resort in Park City on Friday March 8th!
Rock out to the three-time Grammy Award winners, The Black Keys!

Luminaries, including Adam Bain from Twitter and John Batelle of Federated Media Publishing, will share their unique insights and perspectives on the digital marketing industry. And, you won’t want to miss keynotes from renowned skydiver and BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner, or Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy and one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people in the world in 2012.

Don’t miss out on the largest digital marketing and Web Experience Management event of the year! Reserve your spot today! Use this promo code ASM2013 when registering and save $200.

Chris Nguyen

@chrisnguyen

AEM Product Marketer

Top 10 reasons to attend Summit

Sessions at a glance

ValueMap and his friends

2013-02-01T18:28:00.000Z

In this article I will give you some examples on how to use the ValueMap functionality in your CQ5 application.

And I will introduce two good friends of the ValueMap that are really useful.

February Web Experience Management Wednesday Webinar: Adobe CQ Digital Asset Management

2013-01-30T17:06:52.820Z

How much time have you spent in the past searching for a piece of marketing content or particular image for a new campaign or microsite? If you’re not working with an enterprise-class digital asset management (DAM) solution, chances are you’ve wasted hours—perhaps more—which isn’t only frustrating, but lethal in terms of “marketing agility”.

Please join us for our next Web Experience Management Wednesday webinar, February 13 at 10:00 a.m. PT, where we’ll discuss how Adobe CQ DAM, part of our Adobe Experience Manager solution, can help you speed time to market and jump ahead of the competition. Our Adobe CQ gurus, Elliot Sedegah (@esedegah) and Greg Klebus (@gklebus), will step you through integration with Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe Scene7, making it easier for you to plan, produce and deliver rich digital assets across all of your channels.

For more info and to register, check out the details here. We look forward to discussing with you online in a couple of weeks. And if you’d like to meet the Adobe team, and your peers, in person and learn more about where digital marketing is headed, including our own Adobe Marketing Cloud, be sure to join us at Adobe Summit: The Digital Marketing Conference March 4-8 in Salt Lake City, UT.

February Web Experience Management Wednesday Webinar: Adobe CQ Digital Asset Management

2013-01-30T17:03:32.450Z

Adobe Experience Manager and Scene7 at WOONIO GmbH

2013-01-29T21:26:00.000Z

When you’re an online furniture retailer catering to customers with a strong appetite for design and quality, you need a website that is as compelling as the products you sell. That’s why the German e-tailer WOONIO GmbH selected Adobe Marketing Cloud, including Adobe Scene7 within the Adobe Experience Manager solution, to improve the quality and delivery of its rich, dynamic online content.

Inside WOONIO’s website is a configurator that lets customers combine their ideas with the expertise of experienced designers. Everything from tables to beds to chairs is customizable. Plus, it automatically sends orders to manufacturers when a customer makes a purchase.

When launched in 2009, the original configurator required a third-party vendor to create virtual product models that were expensive and time consuming to produce. The models also tied up computing resources, and resulted in slow screen refreshes after users made changes. In one incident, system demand was so high that it caused a server outage that stopped business altogether. These problems were cutting into revenues.

“Our business model is focused entirely on online commerce,” says Roland Waedt, founder and managing partner at WOONIO. “Our audience wants to quickly see their self-designed piece of furniture and will not wait an eternity for a picture to show each change they entered.”

WOONIO chose Scene7 and Adobe Experience Manager as its long-term solution. It allowed WOONIO to use real photos of products in a new configurator. The new visual configurator enables WOONIO to update products and launch new products without an external provider. It also lets the company conduct market research, such as testing user response to new products. Plus, because Scene7 is offered as a hosted service, WOONIO no longer has to worry about server space and potential downtime issues.

The Adobe technology has simplified and accelerated workflows at WOONIO. According to Waedt, it is saving the company 80%, compared with the previous solution. Furthermore, the hosted solution has helped double conversions, largely because performance and reliability have improved and customers have more product filters and choices than ever.

To learn more, read WOONIO’s full story here.

OSGI Activate & Deactivate signatures

2013-01-29T12:35:31.020Z

it's sometimes a bit confusing which signature to use for activate or deactivate in an OSGI component. This is because you have the choice, and this is nice :-)

As long as you add the @Activate and @Deactivate tag before your methods, you can have zero, one or several arguments among following types (that will be automatically bound at component activation/deactivation):

Activation:

ComponentContext - the Component Context for the component
BundleContext - the Bundle Context of the component's bundle
Map - the Component Properties from ComponentContext.getProperties.

Deactivation:

int/Integer - the deactivation reason
ComponentContext - the Component Context for the component
BundleContext - the Bundle Context of the component's bundle
Map - the Component Properties from ComponentContext.getProperties.

For more information on this, you can look at the dedicated Apache Felix JIRA

Get child pages based on a template

2013-01-28T17:08:00.000Z

Sometimes when I need to parse a large CQ website using Java, I want to list the children of a page based on the template. This can be very helpful when creating a carousel displaying featured pages, or working on a search functionnality, as in both cases we need to create a list of pages we want to display back to the user.

There are a few ways to do this: I can use the query builder to create a query based on the cq:template property, but the code can be a bit complex. I could also simply iterate over the children of the page and read the property to create my list, but it's a rather inelegant approach.

So I had a look through the CQ Page API, and found a nice and easy-to-use function for this: listChildren(filter). It fits my requirement perfectly, as I will illustrate here.

Create a custom adapter

2013-01-28T14:48:00.000Z

Although out of the box CQ offers a number of versatile object types and their associated APIs, it can sometimes be helpful to define your own Java value objects. However the actual data is stored in CRX, so I need an easy way to map my product node in CRX to my Product class in Java. This is where the AdapterFactory comes in.

Most CQ developers are familiar with the concept of the adaptTo(), allowing them to adapt a few basic CQ objects to a number of more complex and more structured classes, as described here.

Well the AdapterFactory actually lets us create our own adapters, so we can then adaptTo() from/to any class we want! And it’s really easy to do too, as you'll soon find out.

Package Share and the Adobe CQ Package Share Contest

2013-01-17T18:04:14.947Z

In today’s post and video I'd like to cover three things:

- Packages

- Package Share

- The Adobe CQ Package Share contest

Packages

If you've been using Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe CQ for a while, you may have come across them. A package is just a zip file of content in a special format: a file system serialization of the repository. A package contains a group of files and folders that you have selected, as well as meta information from the repository, including properties and configurations for those files and folders. A package can include any content or project-related data from your repository.

Bringing UNILIN Flooring to Life with Adobe Scene7 from Adobe Marketing Cloud

2013-01-15T18:12:00.000Z

One of the hardest parts about shopping online is trying to imagine how products actually look in real life. It looks great on the screen, but what does it feel like? And how will the color look when it gets home?

Premium flooring manufacturer UNILIN helps customers make buying decisions on even the biggest online purchases with the virtual Quick-Step Floor Advisor made by INDG using Adobe Marketing Cloud, including the Adobe Scene7 product within the Adobe Experience Manager solution. Using the dynamic imaging capabilities of Scene7, customers can change the flooring, wall color, and lighting of a sample room to design their dream room in on the fly with photo-real results. Customers can even upload a photograph of their room to make sure that they choose the perfect Quick-Step flooring for their room.

Customers love the Quick-Step Floor Advisor, spending up to 21 minutes on average customizing their dream room and trying out different flooring products. With the new customer interactions, UNILIN is reaching customers in more meaningful, engaging ways and driving sales for online and retail stores.

“From the moment we saw the Floor Advisor 3D demo, we knew that it would help transform our business,” says Jurgen Derycke, international communications manager at UNILIN. “Our mission has always been to create beautiful and convenient quality products, and now we’ve brought our core mission of design, innovation, and quality to the online experience.”

To learn more, read the full story about UNILIN here.

Using Event filters for handling JCR events through an event handler.

2013-01-10T13:57:00.000Z

In a previous post, i was explaining how to handle events generally, with several solutions among which:

jcr observer
sling event handler

a distinction was made between both around the fact jcr observers are low level, but allow to do more. While this is still true :-) this POST will explain how to do a fine-grained jcr event listening through sling event handler (and take profit of the sling event handling framework for those events).

While in jcr, everything is content, in sling, everything is a resource, so instead of listening to node/property added/removed we'll listen to resource changed, through the 3 topics :

SlingConstants.TOPIC_RESOURCE_ADDED,
SlingConstants.TOPIC_RESOURCE_CHANGED,
SlingConstants.TOPIC_RESOURCE_REMOVED

Now we should have a handler that listens for all the repository, for those -very common- events, which will certainly be a performance killer. Thus we need to filter out this by adding osgi event filtering.

This EventConstants.EVENT_FILTER property takes LDAP filter syntax, and has a path attribute, so we can do e.g. (path=/content/my/root/*) or even (path=/content/my/root/*/myNode).

A sample code would then be :

@Component
@Service(value=EventHandler.class)
@Properties({
 @Property(name= EventConstants.EVENT_TOPIC,value= {SlingConstants.TOPIC_RESOURCE_ADDED,SlingConstants.TOPIC_RESOURCE_CHANGED, SlingConstants.TOPIC_RESOURCE_REMOVED}),
 @Property(name=EventConstants.EVENT_FILTER,value="(path=/content/my/root/*/myNode)")
})
public class ExampleServiceImpl implements EventHandler { 
 final String[] eventProps = { "resourceAddedAttributes", "resourceChangedAttributes", "resourceRemovedAttributes" };

 public void handleEvent(org.osgi.service.event.Event event) {
  for (String eventProp : eventProps){
   String[] props = (String[])event.getProperty(eventProp);
   …
 }		
}

Pros of this approach vs. Jcr Observer are :

this is simpler.
this is cluster ready.
you have the user id information in it (userid attribute of the event).

A con i can see is that in the particular case of a bulk save done of N concerned resources, your handler will be called N times, and then if your handler does persist, you'll have a total of N (handler persistences) + 1 (bulk save) persistences done. While with a jcr observer, you can loop through all the changes of the transaction, and do another batch save, reducing the persistences to 2.

Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe CQ at Royal DSM

2013-01-08T17:02:00.000Z

With the Internet placing information at consumers’ fingertips, life sciences leader, Royal DSM, knows its web presence is key to delivering company and product information to potential customers. When the company decided to rebrand its website and other digital channels, the DSM marketing team turned to Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe CQ, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, to better engage customers through enhanced web experiences delivered across devices.

Marco Jongen, director of integrated web and application services at DSM, says, “Adobe CQ is more than a web content authoring system for us—it is an essential business tool that makes it possible for sales and marketing to contribute more value to the entire organization.”

With Adobe CQ providing easy methods of creating and publishing web content and digital assets, dozens of DSM managers from around the world can author and publish content without the need for technical training. Previously, updating web content was a lengthy process that involved coordinating with web and IT teams. Now, by reusing branded content and templates in Adobe CQ, managers can update pages on their own. The change dramatically shortened update cycle time from days to only hours.

To learn more, check out Royal DSM’s full story here.

Save the date: Quarterly Adobe CQ Multilingual Content Intelligence SIG meet up

2013-01-08T16:59:36.089Z

The Adobe CQ Multilingual Content Intelligence Special Interest Group (SIG) continues to grow…and we’d love for you to join us.

We’re a group of Adobe CQ users (including Adobe itself) that focuses on developing best practices around effectively using the technology to drive global digital strategy. We also include a team of Adobe product managers continually working on enhancements to the company’s products to be sure they’re ready for the global market. And our discussions cover a wide range of relevant topics: content translation, integration to translation management systems, multilingual search strategy, building global social communities, machine translation, community translation, multilingual text analytics for automatic keyword generation, and user experience/navigation of complex multilingual websites.

The primary purpose and benefit of the SIG is to learn from our collective experiences. You’ll have access to industry peers who can share their experiences with Adobe CQ and other cutting-edge technologies to build successful global businesses. It’s a place to explore challenges, brainstorm solutions, and help influence Adobe CQ and other Adobe technologies, with the ultimate focus on helping make you more effective.

The SIG meets again late this month to continue discussions on best practices, where Adobe CQ is headed, and general collaboration around using the technology in a global context. We look forward to welcoming representatives from global web/digital strategy, localization/translation, community/social strategy, and IT. If that describes you, we hope you’ll consider joining us!

And due to popular demand, we’re expanding our next meeting to a full day to include sessions around specific customer questions and challenges. Here are all the vitals:

Date: Monday, January 28, 2013

Time: 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM PT
Address: Adobe San Jose headquarters
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA, 95110

For more information, any questions and to RSVP, please contact: Christine Duran (cduran at adobe.com) or Mengmeng Niu (nium at adobe.com).

Mengmeng Niu

Multilingual Content Program manager

Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe CQ at Citrix

2013-01-01T12:07:00.000Z

Company websites often need input from dozens, or even hundreds, of personnel. The challenge is involving all of these content contributors with their varying levels of technical know-how without overloading web specialists.

When rebranding its website, Citrix adopted the Adobe Experience Manager solution, including Adobe CQ, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, to tackle the problem. With drag-and-drop capabilities and reusable components, contributors without advanced technical skills can now easily create and publish web content.

Instead of waiting hours for a member of the web team to create a table, contributors can reuse a table component and create a table in minutes. Rather than rushing to submit updates to the web team weeks before they go live, event organizers can post the latest information as they receive it. By empowering contributors to create their own content, Citrix has cut the load on its web team and boosted productivity as much as 300%.

Diamelin Lopez, senior project manager at Citrix, says, “If I had to point to the most significant impact this project has had on our organization, it would be the ability to rapidly respond to critical business needs. When the business comes to us with challenges, we’re able to perform in real time to get the results the company wants.”

To learn more, check out Citrix’s full story here.

Clientlibs explained by example

2012-12-23T18:31:00.000Z

In this blogpost I will go through the basic functionality that the ClientLibraryFolder offers, and how you can utilize that with the <cq:includeClientLib /> tag.

The "clientlib" functionality will manage all your Javascript and CSS resources in your application. It takes cares of dependency management, merging files and minifying content.

CQ Template design 101

2012-12-23T17:54:00.000Z

This blogpost will cover concepts on how to design templates and to utilize the maximum out of Adobe CQ5 and Sling.

I will do this based on a basic example and start from scratch using CRXDE Lite.

On-demand now Available: Our December Web Experience Management Wednesday Webinar—a Sneak Peek into the Next Version of Adobe CQ

2012-12-18T18:00:00.000Z

For last week’s Web Experience Management Wednesday webinar, we were excited to share a ‘sneak peek’ into the next version of Adobe CQ, part of our Adobe Experience Manager solution. We had a really strong turnout from the community (thank you!) and equally good participation and conversation on the topic.

Our own David Nuescheler (@DavidNuescheler), VP of Enterprise Technology, and Cedric Huesler (@keepthebyte), senior product manager, discussed and demonstrated a few of the cool new features planned for the next generation of Adobe CQ. We believe they’ll help us continue to lead and, more importantly, enable you, our customers, to build brand more effectively, extend marketing reach, and drive increased demand and revenue.

But don’t just take our word for it! If you missed the live webinar, we’ve now got you covered with an on-demand. Register for a free Adobe ID account, or use an existing one, to check it out here.

And if you’re interested in learning all there is to know about what’s coming in Adobe CQ, and the entire Adobe Marketing Cloud, we encourage you to join us at Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2013.

We’re now planning for our next WEM Wednesday webinar, which will take place February 13 at 10am PT. We’ll share more details on the topic as the date nears. In the meantime, you can register to join us here.

Wishing all of you a happy and healthy holiday season!

Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe CQ at University of Phoenix

2012-11-29T23:02:00.000Z

Since 1976, University of Phoenix has offered innovative learning environments that help a diverse student population balance education and the everyday demands of life. Realizing early that online engagement would be key to meeting student needs, the university was an early adopter of online communications and wanted to continue strengthening digital experiences through innovation and best practices. The university’s parent organization, Apollo Group, ultimately chose Adobe Marketing Cloud, including Adobe Experience Manager, as well as Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target solutions, to help achieve its goals.

Justin Richmond, chief digital officer and SVP at Apollo Group, says, “The website needs to provide the best possible user experience, right information at the right time, informative features and functionality, and all in a brand reverent manner to allow users to make more informed decisions regarding their educational needs.”

Using Adobe CQ, part of the Adobe Experience Manager solution, University of Phoenix gains a rich set of templates and components to support its website and help ensure brand consistency of user experiences in every online interaction. More than 40 content stakeholders at the university can leverage CQ to create their own pages and publish content, relieving technical staff from maintenance and updates. The university also uses the solution to provide personalized content, including video, for users who log in to the website.

To learn more, check out University of Phoenix’s full story here.

December Web Experience Management Wednesday Webinar: Shhh…It’s a Sneak Peek into the Next Version of Adobe CQ

2012-11-29T17:22:00.000Z

The November installment of our monthly webinar series on Web Experience Management explored the ability to accelerate time-to-market for mobile initiatives leveraging the cloud. We had a great turnout from the community and equally good conversation on the topic. You can check out our recap here to access the on-demand version.

Today, we’re sharing details on our December webinar, taking place Wednesday, Dec. 12, at 10am PT. And we think you’re in for a special treat, as our team of experts will offer an advance peek into the next version of Adobe CQ, part of our Adobe Experience Manager solution. This is a tradition dating back to Day Software, and only happens once a year—so we encourage you to set aside some time to join us!

We hope you’ll participate and add your perspective to the conversation. You can learn more and register here.

We look forward to seeing and hearing from you in a few weeks’ time.

Web Experience Management Webinar Series – New On Demand on Mobile+Cloud

2012-11-20T17:57:00.000Z

Last week, we held another one of our ongoing series of Web Experience Management (WEM) Wednesday webinars. Two of Adobe’s digital marketing experts—along with the community—tackled the challenge of launching mobile marketing campaigns in less time via the cloud.

For those who joined us, we hope you enjoyed the conversation with our Gunnar Klauberg (@Aeroid) and Chris Nguyen (@ChrisNguyen), as they discussed how organizations can quickly kick off mobile intitiatives with Adobe CQ Cloud Manager. They also shared demos of CQ Cloud Manager and Adobe CQ Mobile, and how they can help accelerate and simplify the deployment of mobile campaigns from development to production.

If you didn’t make it to the live webinar, not a problem, as we’ve now posted an on-demand version you can catch here.

We’ll be sharing information on next month’s event soon, and we think it will be of particular interest to the community. Keep an eye out for the details here and on Twitter (@AdobeWEM).

We look forward to continuing the conversation then. Again, please holler at us if you have topics you’d like covered in an upcoming WEM Wednesday event.

Whip Up That Package for Prizes (Don’t Be Shy—It’s Adobe CQ!)

2012-11-14T22:00:00.000Z

Have you ever wanted recognition for an Adobe CQ package you’ve developed? How about a MacBook Pro, a 15-inch with Retina display. Ever wanted one? If so, here is your chance to score both!

Beginning today, November 14, all Adobe CQ developers have a chance to submit a new package in the ‘Small Applications, Great Ideas: The CQ Package Share Contest’. All packages will be judged based on 40% Creativity (how cool is it?), 40% Overall Quality (it has to work, of course), and 20% Reusability (we want to be able to share your work with others).

You have until January 23, 2013 to submit a package for judging, and five winners will be announced February 22, 2013. And if you’re one of the winners, you may also have a chance to present your package at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City in March!

By the way, you may be asking yourself, what if I don’t know how to create an Adobe CQ package? Well, we’ve got your covered: check out the CQ Component Developer Program. Kathy Jo Nelson talks more about the program in her blog post here.

So go ahead and have a blast. Show the Adobe CQ community what you’ve got and in the process win yourself a brand new MacBook Pro! Enter the CQ Package Share Contest.

Chris Nguyen

Adobe CQ Product Marketing

@ChrisNguyen

NO ADDITIONAL PURCHASE OR PAYMENT OF ANY KIND IS NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. Enter by 11:59p.m. PST on 1/23/2013. Eligibility restrictions apply. Void where prohibited. Sponsor: Adobe Systems Incorporated, San Jose, CA, US. See the complete Official Rules for odds and prize descriptions: https://www.adobecqcloud.com/content/contest.html#

How to sanity check OSGi bundles across environments

2012-11-12T21:45:00.000Z

I would like to thank all for feedback and encouraging words on my earlier article "Unit Testing Email Notification" [0] & like to share another custom tool called OSGi Diff. This tool help to address some of frequent question I hear from the most customers like

How to verify the system (OSGi bundles) is in order across various environments (DEV, QA, Pre-prod, DR, PROD ...)
Some functionality no longer work in another environment,
How to ensure after upgrade all my bundles are updated.
How to ensure service pack is installed correctly.
Some times restoring the instance is not functional. etc...

On debugging found one of cause is difference in bundle missing or versions. This tool helps to show the difference by following three simple steps. In the results if you find any mismatch you will know the cause & take appropriate steps. Hope you might find this tool handy.

Adobe CQ at The Slate Group (Video)

2012-11-12T19:33:00.000Z

As a daily online magazine, Slate delivers timely analysis and commentary on current issues and today’s culture. By using Adobe CQ, Slate was able to able to implement more effective and simplified content delivery, and reduce the time it typically requires its bloggers to develop and publish a new post by 50%. The online magazine has also taken reader engagement to the next level, coordinated a more efficient interface, and simplified site administration.

Learn more about Slate’s efforts and results in this new video. And you can also check out their full story in our case study here.

New Adobe Certified Expert exams for Adobe CQ—Time to Study Up

2012-11-08T17:54:29.254Z

I’ve worked with many of you over the last several years and that’s why I am so excited to share this news with the community… For the first time, certification exams are now available for Adobe CQ.

We’ve just begun offering two Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) exams: CQ Component Developer and CQ Lead Developer.

The Component Developer certification exam is targeted at those with a year of Adobe CQ project experience with JCR, Sling, Felix, and CQ. So be sure to brush up on the JCR specification, Sling internals, and OSGi. We suggest, as part of your exam preparation, that you have attended the CQ Developer, CQ Advanced Developer, and CQ System Administrator classes. I look forward to seeing you all in my classroom soon, as you prepare to be certified!

The Lead Developer exam tests the ability to create an end-to-end design for Adobe CQ implementations, as well as an understanding of system deployment and architecture. So it’s time to double-check those architecture best practices. The Lead Developer certification requires that you have already passed the CQ Component Developer exam. We suggest you have also completed a minimum of one complex, or two medium-level, Adobe CQ implementation projects as preparation for this exam.

You can find the exam guides and preparation recommendations on our new Adobe Training site: training.adobe.com. Just select the Certification menu option from the top menu bar.

Watch this space, @CQDev and the Adobe Training site for announcements of a number of new Adobe CQ courses we plan to release in the near future.

Cheers,

Kathy Jo Nelson

Technical Instructor, Team Lead CQ5 Delivery

Pragmatic Responsive Design

2012-11-02T14:35:00.000Z

What’s better, a responsive or a dedicated site?

This is the kind of question that has been popping up in my inbox lately. Its not surprising considering that Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a very hot topic right now. Being a Sr. Product Manager for Adobe CQ, I thought it was time I chimed in on the issue of RWD, dedicated web sites and how they relate to the enterprise.

Personally, I don’t like the adversarial context that RWD vs. dedicated sites sets up. Both methods have their merits and a hybrid approach is definitely possible. I think before deciding on what approach is best, you have to answer some simple questions.

What’s the point?

It sounds inane, but you have to ask yourself what is the fundamental reason that visitors will use your site(s). Don’t gloss over this question with something like “users are looking for information”. Deeply understanding what your visitors are doing should be the main driver for the experience and thus the site design.

Consider how the content relates, how visitors will navigate, communicate, etc. Ask yourself (or better yet some real users): what is the first thing a user wants to do when the hit the site? What’s the second thing? Then what?

It doesn’t matter how quickly you developed it, how elegant the code is or what cool tricks you are using; if it doesn’t work for the visitor it is a fail. This leads to the next question:

Are mobile and desktop users the same?

To provide a good experience, you must acknowledge the mobileness of the visitor.

Many users (myself included) expect a different experience from the mobile site than from the desktop version.

It’s more than just a limitation in screen real estate (although that is important). Often visitors on a mobile device are following a different use case than the desktop user. They may be trying to find a store, share experiences or get more info on something they just saw. Geo-location, camera access, QRC readers, and gestures are part of the mobile experience, but not the desktop.

Consider also how they will use the site. Browsing information while in the comfort of my office is very different from standing in a department store while the kids have a meltdown because they are sold out of this year’s hot toy.

Building a single site that has completely different uses is extremely difficult, even with RWD.

What about performance?

This relates directly to usability. In its most basic configuration an RWD site sends all of the content to every device. The device browser then displays the appropriate layout. This means that all of the HTML, JavaScript, images etc. are pushed to every visitor regardless of whether they can use it.

Also, image resizing on the client side can be CPU and memory intensive – something that is in limited supply on most mobile devices. This can result in a long wait and a frustrated visitor. I’ve seen sites that border on user abuse when accessed through 3G.

This is where approaches such as “mobile first” come in. This philosophy (pioneered by Luke Wroblewski) starts with the design for the most basic mobile experience. Additional functionality is added in optimized layers that enhance the foundation. When followed closely, this leads to a very satisfying experience; however, it requires a lot of careful planning and discipline. In my opinion, it doesn’t address problems that arise when desktop and mobile use cases are different.

How will the site be built and maintained?

Finally lets look at the creation and upkeep of the site. In my experience this is the first real consideration of a web development project, no matter how lofty the talk about visitor experience.

In theory, this is also where we get the biggest gain from a RWD strategy. There is only one site to build and one set of content to maintain. This is can be true, but the site can get very complex when considering multiple display sizes, rotations, etc.

There is a line of thought that RWD sites are cheaper. This may be true for a new site. However, if the project is a retrofit of an existing site with lots of content adding RWD gets tricky. This often leads to poor performing sites and bad mobile experiences (mobile first assumes you are starting from scratch).

On the server side, dedicated sites may hold some additional advantages. Because there are two published instances it is possible to manage the traffic at a more fine-grained level. One cluster can be set up for the desktop site and another for mobile. If you have a wide disparity in the number of visitors coming to one site you can allocate more resources to that area.

A Hybrid Approach

Okay, so it sounds like I’m anti-RWD. I’m really not – RWD can provide some very valuable tools for improving a web site’s mobile experience. My point is that it is not a miracle cure. RWD brings its own issues and complexities that must be considered when coming up with a mobile strategy. At the same time, maintaining completely different websites, with different content is just not practical.

Fortunately it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. There is a middle ground - a way to have different (but great) mobile and desktop experiences and not have to maintain two sets of content. It’s a hybrid approach that can combine the best of both worlds.

The first thing to address is the different use cases between mobile and desktop users. This involves using separate templates that are created for the each experience. Both sites are designed using RWD concepts to compensate for different screen sizes, resolutions and native features.

The mobile site is built to be useful for phone as well as tablet users and it must take into account how they will use the site. Using RWD allows us to have very different navigation styles depending on the size and layout of the screen. A separate design can also address performance issues that are specific to mobile.

The desktop site can be a very different experience. It can take advantage of higher bandwidth and capabilities that most mobile devices don’t have (more memory, local storage, etc.)

By using device detection and redirection features you can point both your mobile and desktop visitors to a single location. That means you don’t have to give out weird mobile only URLs. At the same time it saves SEO costs.

So does that mean there is now two sets of content? No. The use of enterprise grade web content management tools such as Adobe CQ WCM and Adobe CQ Mobile can help manage multiple sites by taking advantage of multi-site rollout and content inheritance.

The majority of the content may be shared between the sites. Inheritance links the content across the sites so updates to one are rolled out to the other. Not all content needs to be inherited, so you can add additional features to either of the sites. This allows specific content when appropriate.

As a bonus analytics can be tailored to each of the sites giving much more accurate data. It will let us improve each of the experiences without the risk of affecting the other.

As you can see there are a lot of options. But, some careful planning will yield great results and keep mobile visitors engaged with your content.

Adobe CQ at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

2012-11-01T18:01:00.000Z

For more than 40 years, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has worked to improve the health of all Americans through public policy, action, and change. Looking for a way to enhance its web presence through a dynamic, easily managed website, RWJF engaged the services of Velir, a full-service web design and development agency—which turned to Adobe CQ, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, to meet the website challenges.

Mark Gregor, Velir’s CEO, says, “We are proud of our partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and wanted to make use of a full range of innovative web technologies to deliver engaging visitor experiences, while simplifying content creation for the Foundation’s staff and partners.”

RWJF wanted a way for its content contributors to easily create content, including text posts, video content, and social media exchanges while maintaining a consistent, high-quality brand presence. Adobe CQ simplified content creation and publishing with drag-and-drop page composition and easy ways to integrate customized news and social media feeds into branded templates.

The project resulted in a clean, modern design for RWJF’s website. Previously, much of the information from RWJF came in the form of lengthy, document-based reports. Now, contributors can use 40 interchangeable components to create unique web layouts, feeds, and data visualizations to convey ideas and information in new ways. With more dynamic content, web traffic has grown to 35,000 unique daily visitors.

Hope Woodhead, senior director of communications at RWJF, says, “Our improved web presence gives us a new set of tools to deliver valuable content into the hands of those who can help create the social change we are looking to achieve.”

To learn more, check out Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s full story here.

November Web Experience Management Wednesday Webinar: Mobile + Cloud

2012-10-31T15:59:00.000Z

Earlier this month, the latest in our series of monthly webinars focused on Web Experience Management explored the ability to meet mobile marketing challenges. We had a great turnout from the community and equally good conversation on the topic. You can check out our recap here to access the on-demand version.

Today, we’re sharing the details on our November webinar, taking place on Wednesday, Nov. 14, at 10am PT. And given the strong interest in mobile this past month, we’re planning to continue the conversation and expand the topic. Specifically, we’ll be focusing on how to accelerate time-to-market for mobile initiatives leveraging the cloud. Our experts, Gunnar Klauberg (@Aeroid) and Chris Nguyen (@ChrisNguyen), will explore the topic along with you, and provide a look at what Adobe CQ Cloud Manager and Adobe CQ Mobile have to offer in this regard.

We hope you’ll join us and add your perspective to the conversation. You can learn more and register here.

We’re anxious for the discussion in a few weeks. As a reminder, our goal is to make this an ongoing forum for best practices and conversation among the community and our resident experts. In that spirit, please do let us know if you have topics you’d like covered in an upcoming WEM Wednesday event.

Configuring the Adobe CQ Dispatcher

2012-10-29T16:00:00.000Z

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve created content that addresses several top questions related to the Adobe CQ Dispatcher. This is in response to questions we’ve heard from you, our community. I encourage you to give a read and also check out the more in-depth documentation I link to further below.

What is the Dispatcher

The Dispatcher is the Adobe caching and/or load balancing tool that helps realize a fast and dynamic Web authoring environment. For caching, the Dispatcher works as part of an HTTP server, such as Apache, with the aim of storing (or caching) as much of the static website content as possible and accessing the website's layout engine as infrequently as possible. In a load balancing role, the Dispatcher distributes user requests (load) across different clustered Adobe CQ instances (renders).

Customer Success Story: TV One

2012-10-25T22:05:00.000Z

Seen in 57 million U.S. homes, TV One is a rapidly growing cable network that delivers programming about the diverse experience of African-American life, history and culture. When the network recently rebranded its identity, TV One took the opportunity to focus on increasing engagement across a range of channels, include web and mobile sites.

The network turned to Adobe CQ, part of the Adobe Experience Manager solution, to help create a clear brand presence and boost audience engagement across channels through video, original content and social interactions.

Allison Rand, vice president of digital media at TV One, says, “A major reason we committed to an enterprise-level solution from Adobe is to be prepared for what’s to come in the television industry. Having Adobe CQ in place has prepared us to continuously improve our digital presence as the industry shifts, extend our brand across channels, drive new revenue opportunities, and best capture the attention of an increasingly selective audience.”

Now, even employees without expert technical knowledge can easily and quickly create content and upload video or other media. This leads to more frequent updates for optimal timing, with the cycles required to publish content reduced from hours to minutes. And Adobe CQ helps keep the look of the brand consistent across content and channels.

Thanks in part to more engaging content delivered across devices, TV One saw a 54% increase in page views, 48% increase in unique page views, and a 6% increase in time spent on the site.

To learn more, check out TV One’s full story here.

Web Experience Management Webinar Series – New On Demand on Mobile, Next Month it’s Mobile+Cloud

2012-10-23T10:00:00.000Z

Last week, we held the second in our ongoing series of Web Experience Management (WEM) Wednesday webinars. Two of Adobe’s digital marketing experts—along with the community—tackled the challenge of delivering optimal mobile experiences in today’s omnichannel world, cutting across devices, including smartphones and tablets.

For those who joined us, we hope you enjoyed the conversation with our Gunnar Klauberg (@Aeroid) and Mike Hodgson, as they discussed the need for organizations to design mobile experiences from the customer-in, rather than the system-out. They also shared a demo of Adobe CQ Mobile, and how it can help you to get up and running quickly and efficiently by re-using, customizing and synchronizing content between websites, mobile sites and apps.

If you didn’t make it to the live webinar, we’ve got you covered, as we’ve now posted an on-demand version you can catch here.

And given the strong interest in mobile, we’re also glad to share we’re planning to continue the conversation in next month’s live webinar. We hope you’ll join us as we explore extending mobile into the cloud. We’ll also give a peek into how organizations can kick off mobile intitiatives quickly with Adobe CQ Cloud Manager.

We’ll be sharing information on registration soon, so keep an eye out for details here and on Twitter (@AdobeWEM). In the meantime, though, mark your calendars for Wednesday, November 14, at 10am PT for the event.

We look forward to continuing the discussion in a few weeks. Again, our goal is to make this an ongoing forum for best practices and conversation among the community and our resident experts. With that in mind, please holler at us if you have topics you’d like covered in an upcoming WEM Wednesday event.

Customer Story: ghd Services

2012-10-12T19:48:00.000Z

Widely used and evangelized by leading hair stylists, ghd delivers the products of choice for hair professionals and for easy use at home. Over the years, the company has generated a strong following of loyal, and in many cases, celebrity customers. And most recently, ghd has tapped into the power of its online channel to better engage hair stylists and consumers everywhere, at any time.

Stuart Spiegel, chief marketing officer of ghd, says, “We wanted to go beyond traditional eCommerce not only to market our products online, but also to create a place where consumers and stylists could congregate - a community that could both serve and benefit from searches related to hair fashion and trends as well as our products.”

Integral to achieving its goal was implementing two applications selected by Tacit, ghd’s creative and technology partner. Tacit chose hybris B2C Commerce and the Adobe Web Experience Management solution, including Adobe CQ Web Content Management and Digital Asset Management. The aim was to match the iconic branding of ghd products with a destination website that would compel hair stylists and consumers to make regular visits. It had to be stylish and deliver all the necessary functionality to ensure online commercial success.

Stuart says, “With Adobe and hybris solutions, we are creating relevant content and developing a site that engages professional stylists directly, enabling them to effectively convey information about our products and brand with their customers.”

In the future, ghd plans to add rich content and new site functionality, including a salon locator service to further connect consumers with the stylists and products they want.

To learn more, check out ghd’s full story here.

Adobe CQ Cloud Update – It’s All about Choice

2012-10-05T15:20:00.000Z

From the initial beta announcement of Adobe CQ Cloud Manager this March at our U.S. Digital Marketing Summit to our general availability news in May and continuing through to today, the CQ Cloud engineering team has been working tirelessly to deliver critical features on a continual basis. The goal is to provide marketers, such as yourself, with a best-in-class solution to take digital campaigns to market in less time and with fewer resources. It’s been our aim, as it remains today, to take the painful and insanely technical details out of the marketing campaign process; to enable you take control of what’s most important to you: creativity and business innovation.

October Web Experience Management Wednesday Webinar: Mobile First, and Second and Third

2012-10-02T16:51:00.000Z

Last month, we kicked off a new monthly webinar series focused on Web Experience Management. The head of our business, Kevin Cochrane, introduced the series in this post. And our first webinar focused on tackling the challenge of delivering engaging experiences consistently in today’s multichannel world. It was a great kickoff to the series—thoughtful conversation and a great turnout by the community. You can check out our recap here to access the on-demand version.

adaptTo() 2012: my top 5

2012-10-02T07:15:00.000Z

As previously posted on this blog, adaptTo() 2012 was hosted last week in Berlin by pro!vision and Adobe. As any participant may have appreciated more certain aspects rather than others, I have my personal top 5:

the technical level of sessions and speakers
the informal style of the conference
the great participation from all attendees
the special guest: Apache Jackrabbit Oak
the forecast for adaptTo() 2013

1. Top notch sessions and speakers
It has certainly been a top level conference from a content perspective; it provided 24 sessions delivered by a good mix of technical roles; and the most outstanding participation came from many of the core community members of the Apache Sling and Apache Jackrabbit projects. Among the most appreciated talks: "Use of OSGi technology in Apache Sling" by Felix, "Efficient content structures and queries in CRX" by Marcel, "Apache Jackrabbit Oak" by Jukka and Michael and "CQ5 Mobile in a Real Life Project" by Alexander, Sebastian and Bert-Ulrich.

Slides from all the sessions can be downloaded from the event website; session recordings will come shortly.

2. Informal location
Supermarkt Berlin revealed itself as a very nice location for an informal developer conference such as adaptTo(); although some minor aspects could be improved, it provided my favorite un-conference feature: big windows, many big windows, and directly on a lively street.
Look at some of the best shoots.

Update: the official photo stream

3. Active participation
As previously noted, adaptTo() was already sold out well before its date, and the excitement from the developer community was confirmed in Berlin by a very active on site participation. The main conference room was packed throughout the 3 days, most of the sessions generated a good number of questions and many participants were so kind to provide very effective feedback on the various aspect of the conference.

4. Oakathon
During the entire week and also throughout the 3 'public' days we were delighted by the special participation of the Apache Jackrabbit Oak community, which organized one of their recurrent Oakathons in conjunction with the rest of the conference. This culminated in the very well received presentation: "Apache Jackrabbit Oak" delivered by Jukka and Michael, and in a series of good steps forward for the project, presented in this report from Michael.

5. Next Year
And yes, I heard so many times people mentioning "next year" that I only regret we cannot already provide here a registration link for adaptTo() 2013...
More seriously, engines have not stopped; your organizers are already planning the next edition, to keep supporting the great interest and improve on the suggestions, to become even harder, better, faster, stronger.

A lot of good stuff has still to come; stay tuned and keep having fun with Apache Sling... and friends!

Paolo Mottadelli, Adobe Technical Marketing. @paolomoz

Online Marketing, Social and the Teams Who Do It

2012-09-28T16:26:00.000Z

Three years ago, we were talking about mobile and the mobile web. As if it was something separate from the Web. It was. Briefly. Now we talk about the Web and it is mobile. The discussion has moved on to mobile first and what that means.

History repeats itself. Today we talk about social and the social web. My prediction is that in three years we will just talk about the Web and of course it is social. So lets look at our marketing history over the past ten years or so - the evolution of online marketing, the emergence of social, and the teams who do it. Where we’ve been. In hopes of understanding where we (as marketers) are going. All together now – this is social.

Opening page without content-finder

2012-09-25T19:01:00.000Z

The content-finder is a great tool that makes life easier for the content authors.

But sometimes you have a situation whereby you don't really need the content-finder for a set of pages and want to open the page without the content-finder.

I will explain in this blogpost how to disable the content-finder for certain pages.

Web Experience Management Webinar Series – On Demand on Multichannel, Next Month on Mobile

2012-09-17T16:22:00.000Z

Last week, we kicked off our Web Experience Management (WEM) Wednesday webinar series with two of Adobe’s digital marketing experts and the community tackling the challenge of delivering engaging experiences consistently in today’s multichannel world. We hope you enjoyed the conversation with Loni Stark (@lonistark) and Cedric Heusler (@keepthebyte), as they guided discussion on the ins and outs of providing the right data, from the right channel, at the right time to your target audience.And not to worry if you missed it live, we’ve posted an on-demand version that you can catch here.

Grant access to OSGi-console to other users

2012-09-13T16:18:00.000Z

I recently got the question how can you add other users to access the OSGi console, so that you don't need to use always the admin-account.

This is a valid question when you don't want to expose the admin-account/password to a lot of people.

Adobe named a Leader in Gartner’s Web Content Management Magic Quadrant

2012-09-12T01:13:00.000Z

We are living in exciting times when it comes to technology. The pace of change is so incredible that you can almost take it for granted unless you pause, catch a breath and reflect. Over the course of just this past month, I’ve talked to a retailer that realizes it needs to double the amount of business it’s driving through the online channel or rapidly lose relevance and market share. Every bank I talk to is trying to grapple with understanding how to improve the mobile experience to help them attract Gen Ys and keep their existing customer base loyal.

adaptTo() 2012: event preview

2012-09-11T09:31:00.000Z

Some weeks ago I posted my first article about adaptTo() 2012.
I am really excited now to share this update, for a couple of reasons:

To let the community know adaptTo() 2012 is sold out;
To let you know we have a terrific agenda and to share the details of it;

But let's start with a bit of background.

adaptTo() is a technical meetup focused on the technical stack of Apache Sling including Apache Jackrabbit and Apache Felix and is intended for all developers using this stack or parts of it. Additionally, a few sessions will also be specifically focused on Adobe CQ, which is based on the stack.
It is at its second edition and it will take place in Berlin on September 26-28.
Further details are available on the official website of the event.

So first: adaptTo() 2012 is already sold out, with a doubled number (100+) of registrations since 2011. This is the result of the good word-of-mouth, for which we thank you. We look forward to seeing many of you there.

And this year's agenda looks really amazing!
+ 3 full days of sessions and social events;
+ more than 25 speakers from the Apache Sling, Apache Jackrabbit and Adobe CQ5 developer communities;
+ all levels of expertise are covered: from the beginner to the core project developer;
Check it out in detail on the event site.

For those who are not attending: sign up to the adaptTo() community to get a notification when all the session recordings and the technical material will be posted and made available!
And I'll plan to post here again after the event to share my perspective on the proceedings and outcomes.

Paolo Mottadelli, Adobe Technical Marketing - @paolomoz

OSGi config 101

2012-09-08T12:54:00.000Z

This blogpost is about setting up the OSGi-config nodes in your repository, instead of doing manual changes via the Felix-console.

So why not via the Felix-console? Well of course that is possible, but someone has to execute those steps on the different environments.

When the OSGi-config nodes are inside a package you can easily deploy that, and the config changes are applied automatically.

Digital Asset Management: a centerpiece of your marketing and publishing strategy

2012-09-07T16:53:00.000Z

Content is King. So why don't we always treat it that way?

In many organizations, the digital assets used to produce content are scattered amongst organizational and technology silos. Marketers, creative professionals and publishers team up to produce amazing content, however digital assets are treated as a bystander instead of a critical participant. They’re handled carelessly and often misplaced. As a result, “the King" has no single home. It is a nomad. Nobody can find the right stuff when they need it.

How to find the runmodes of a CQ5 instance

2012-09-06T12:33:00.000Z

Here a small blogpost around how to find out the runmodes of a CQ5 instance via the Felix console.

In your start-script of your CQ5 instance you can extend the runmodes of your CQ5 instance like this:

::* runmode(s)
set CQ_RUNMODE=author,localhost,europe

What I never could find is the option to check whether cq really picked up this change.

Well here is how to do it:

Go to your Felix console (/system/console).
Click on "Configuration Status" (/system/config)

Now check on the right-hand side of your screen for this image:

WEM Wednesday Webinars are here!

2012-08-29T20:33:35.624Z

I’m writing to personally introduce and invite you to join us for our new Web Experience Management (WEM) Wednesday webinar series, which we’ll be kicking off on, of course, an upcoming Wednesday—Sept. 12.

WEM Wednesday webinars (yes…WWW) is a monthly live series, and will be a platform to share and discuss best practices on all things Web Experience Management. In addition, the Adobe team will share new innovations in our own core Web Content Management offering, Adobe CQ.

Mobile Websites, Native Apps or Hybrid Apps?

2012-08-28T16:53:00.000Z

Surprisingly, many companies still don’t have a mobile presence.

IAB counted 45% of the 2012 Fortune 500 list without one (June 2012) and Magus found 80% of the FTSE100 missing out (Feb 2012). The relative lack of depth of mobile content and options to transact with big brands is another issue. After a couple generations of touch phones with more than manageable screen sizes, it’s a growing surprise to me every time such numbers are published.

How Hiring a ‘Cleaning Service’ Can Save Your Marketing-IT Marriage

2012-08-20T11:47:24.093Z

When my wife and I initially moved in together, we had just gotten engaged and things were completely smitten between us…birds chirping, violin playing – you get the picture. It was the first time either of us had lived with someone and trying to be pragmatic about the situation, we decided we would have a division of labor when it came to doing chores. She would cook and manage the kitchen (she is an amazing cook) and I would do the laundry, fold the clothes, and take out the trash. When it came to cleaning the house, though, we, as a unit, would work to maintain a clean living environment.

Three Steps to Building Community

2012-08-16T16:39:15.886Z

The Internet makes it easy for consumers to search for the products they want and compare on features and price. As a result, companies are often on a hamster wheel: acquiring customers as quickly as possible to replace ones that are constantly leaving.

To succeed in this environment, organizations need to focus on and invest in connecting with their customers and creating a community.

Marketing Campaigns: Consistency, Collaboration and the “Click”

2012-07-31T15:43:50.580Z

Launching a multi-channel marketing campaign is no easy task. Marketers must rapidly create and repurpose content for various web properties including landing pages, websites, microsites, and emails. The campaign content will inevitably pass through multiple hands while the campaign team collaborates to discover new and interesting ways to engage with customers. Marketers are also challenged to track the performance of their campaigns, which must be continuously optimized to increase customer acquisition and engagement. Managing the content and data associated with a campaign can be quite the challenge. Before your next campaign, it is worthwhile to think about your approach to Consistency and Collaboration before the ultimate step: Getting the user to “Click”.

Consistency

Ensure content consistency across e-mail, landing pages, and websites.

If a customer encounters a marketing campaign with inconsistent messaging and content across e-mail, landing pages and websites it will poorly impact his or her web experience. As we develop campaigns, the core message and brand strength will likely be diluted as we copy, paste and manually migrate content from a digital asset management system to an external website, to a social network, to an e-mail marketing platform…and the list goes on. After dealing with so many touchpoints, are you certain users will experience the content and message you expected? The ability to coordinate an organization’s most valuable content among multiple platforms will save time and avoid creating content that is inconsistent with your brand.

Collaboration

Take advantage of workflows, version control, and tagging and search capabilities and collaborate to create the best digital marketing campaign possible.

Chances are, marketers work with multiple content teams to execute a marketing campaign. It’s important those teams can work together in an efficient, organized and cost-effective way. Taking advantage of the existing digital assets within an organization can expedite the speed of a campaign. From web copy to images, a successful campaign is typically built from a combination of useful digital assets. Many of those assets can be repurposed from previous campaigns, while other assets are completely new. In either case, all the assets need to work together in concert to build brand and create emotional connections with customers that drive higher levels of engagement.

The “Click”

Once your content house is in order, leveraging data from multiple sources can give a significant uplift to marketing campaigns. With the right data, marketers can segment and target audiences dynamically and personalize content much more efficiently. Moving beyond basic analytics, marketers can integrate data from multiple sources to gain deeper insights into user behavior aspects, such as search, location, shopping cart, and browsing history.

A great example is F+W Media. F+W Media is a publishing company that increased traffic from its email campaigns and realized a 350 percent increase in revenue per email year over year. An integrated approach to analytics and optimization was the powerful force behind their transformation. You can read more about their journey here.

As marketers look to improve the execution of marketing campaigns, a deeper integration among their organization’s marketing platforms is an avenue for a performance boost. The opportunity to jointly leverage digital assets, web content, analytics, and personalization tools can accelerate a marketing campaign and dramatically increase ROI. Instead of using a set of disconnected point solutions, marketers can and should leverage an interconnected web experience platform to drive more powerful brand experiences and demand responses.

Elliot Sedegah

Product Marketing, Adobe CQ

@esedegah

How to upload an image via Sling POST servlet

2012-07-25T13:25:00.000Z

This week I was asked to provide an example how to upload an image into the CQ5 DAM via the Sling POST Servlet.

I my previous example I showed you how to create multiple pages via the Sling POST Servlet.

Is mobile so different?

2012-07-24T16:54:41.400Z

When I read a recent article by SapientNitro’s Tatjana Dallmann-Krieger on mobile brand experiences (Note: article in German) I wondered what made her recommendation for mobile so special? Don’t get me wrong, her points are all valid: Relevance, Usability, Design, Performance, Fun. And more than often, I personally wish people would avoid technical gimmicks and pay a bit more attention to these.

Any effective communication needs to be relevant, understandable, timely, and pleasant. Many would know this from preparing a presentation, for example, rather than designing a mobile experience. If you took the time and prepared your slides correctly, you would research the topic, map out your audience’s needs, organize your ideas, test the concept, draft your communication structure, design slides, and rehearse. This is a proven way to influence and drive some action, e.g. a sale.

Interestingly a presentation and a mobile experience are very similar. You get the chance of more or less exclusive attention with your audience for a short amount of time, which you could lose pretty quickly. In mobile you have the additional challenge that politeness does not apply. In presentations it’s not uncommon to walk out after 30 seconds. Lost attention can be regained, but in mobile there are many possible mistakes leading to terminal abandonment of the communication scheme by the customer.

The uniqueness in designing effective mobile experiences doesn’t lie in “reduction”. Stressing the presentation analogy, great presentations often are completely minimized: less text, less information, more audience, more relevance. Yet, we have quite different kinds of “performances” in mobile and stage presentations, both the app’s and the presenter’s effective use of resources to influence are key but only unique by way of the medium used. I would call this “technique”, for which design needs to be aware.

So what is it? What makes mobile experience design so unique? I think Tatjana has a great point when she writes, “By no other way does the brand message gets so close to the audience then by the mobile device accompanying their owners around the clock throughout the day.”

When you think of a mobile experience as a constant companion, it will allow customers to remember you as an aid for certain situations in your daily life. The brand/app that is there quickly when needed and is humble enough to not waste precious time on the go will be well remembered. In this setting, it’s totally okay to leave a shopping basket half-filled or a transaction incomplete. It’s a mobile reality that I have to switch attention abruptly. A great experience allows customers to pick up where they left off and for the context to be personal. This personal context is the coherency of the brand in the customer’s multi-device world, allowing me to connect to it and continue from all my devices.

Today, none of the other devices in this multi-device world are as important as mobile, because its ubiquitous and personal nature is unique and key to brand experiences.

Gunnar Klauberg / @Aeroid
Product Marketing, Adobe CQ and Web Experience Management Mobile

How to find long running queries.

2012-07-24T08:02:32.261Z

Inefficient JCR queries can often be the cause of poor performance. So how do you find queries that take too long to execute?

In CQ 5.5 you can login to Felix Console. Then go to JMX tab and click on QueryStat MBean.

In older versions of CQ you can enable additional logging as described in the Knowledge Base article How to debug JCR Queries.

Once you have query logging you can sort this log file using querylog.jar to find queries with longest execution time. Bellow is an examle of how to use this.

Monitoring Replication Queue Status in an automated fashion

2012-07-23T05:38:18.054Z

While monitoring any CQ instance,it is necessary to track the status of replication queues to check if replication queue is blocked or not, or to check if the size of queue is within a certain range.One can manually monitor replication and reverse replication queues by looking at their respective status pages. Details are available here.

Monitoring events in an automated fashion

2012-07-23T04:32:51.242Z

One good way of understanding functioning of CQ is via event monitoring. Events are fired in CQ for various operations like rendition creation, replication etc. This can be monitored from:

http://<server>:<port>/system/console/slingevent

It provides following data

Total Processed Jobs
Queued Jobs
Failed Jobs
Average Processing Time
Average Waiting Time

With this data, one can easily calculate performance of workflow processing, rendition generation speed, page activation speed etc.

CQ5 DAM H.264 video output on Mac OS X Lion

2012-07-21T08:58:00.000Z

In a follow-up on Sneh Arora's article on integrating ffmpeg with CQ DAM for RedHat, this article describes how to configure an out of the box CQ5.5 installation with Digital Asset Management (DAM) to transcode source video to H.264 high quality video on Mac OS X, that can be displayed in Safari browsers and on iPhone/iPad/Apple TV devices.

Unit testing the Email notification

2012-07-20T01:37:00.000Z

I frequently encounter the question about Unit testing the Email notification & in support while debugging time is spent waiting for a mail to arrive. In CQ, Email notification happens during "Subscription to page events", "Subscription to forum events", "Perform a step in a workflow" Or "Any custom implementation". Also based on envirnoment you might use "local Mail server", "free smtp server" etc... When you move on to next assignment the envirnoment differs. In this article I am sharing one of the mail utility developed and you might find this helpful.

Creating Relevant Customer Experiences with Adobe CQ

2012-07-17T16:11:00.489Z

Last October, Philips launched their Male Grooming platform across six countries. This launch was an evolution in their communication strategy from being product centric to consumer needs based. This was a shift from showcasing male grooming products and body shavers to facilitating discussion on self-expression and developing a community around male grooming. Their new sites include fresh blog content, “how to” information for creating your favorite look, and even an app that allows you to take a photo with your webcam and try on different styles. And, of course, information on the tools that make it all possible when you are ready to make a purchase decision.

adaptTo(): a community event on Apache Sling, Apache Jackrabbit, and friends

2012-07-10T21:28:00.000Z

In late September 2012 Berlin will become the global heart beat for developers working on the Adobe CQ technical stack. pro!vision and Adobe are working jointly to set up a pure technical event for developers that will be focused on Apache Sling, Apache Jackrabbit, Apache Felix and more specifically on Adobe CQ: adaptTo(), Berlin. September 26-28 2012.

The name of this event is already appealing itself: adaptTo(), which comes from the very well known "adaptability of the objects to other classes" for which the Apache Sling project is famous.

The announced venue is cool: SUPERMARKT (no typos, it's German!) used to be a real supermarket before being adapted (some assonance here?) to a cool place for conferences and meetups.

adaptTo() is at its second edition, after a very successful kickoff in 2011, when a bunch of Apache Sling, Apache Jackrabbit and Adobe CQ developers met and shared their knowledge presenting top notch topics to the community.
This year .adaptTo() will be a great opportunity for both the most experienced developers and for those who want more to get started with these technologies, as some introductory sessions will be covered as well as very advanced sessions, too. Yet-to-come features will also be shared.

The number of community members that will take active part to this event is going to be amazing. A clear evidence of a unique opportunity to get in touch for the open community.
Anyone is encouraged to contribute with compelling content they want to share with the community.

Sign up. Registrations will be closed when the availability limit is reached.
Ask for more information .
Post a session proposal.

Paolo Mottadelli, Adobe Technical Marketing. @paolomoz

Example of an optionsProvider

2012-07-10T19:00:00.000Z

This blogpost gives an example on how to implement an 'optionsProvider' via a JavaScript function.

An optionProvider is used in dialogs where you want to have comboboxes with values. With the optionsProvider you can maintain the options in one file/function instead of copying the options to multiple places.

Determine the right CRX bundle cache size for your application

2012-07-09T11:35:00.000Z

CRX Bundle Cache caches bundles, consisting of a node with all its properties. It is used by all bundle based Persistence Managers. The default size of this cache is set to 8 MB which is a part of allocated JVM heap. If an item is not found in the cache, it is read from the persistence layer.

CMSwire Tweet Jam Recap

2012-06-28T17:30:23.553Z

Our own Lars Trieloff recently joined CMSwire's Tweet Jam along with a host of industry voices to discuss social business in 2012. You can see the results of their engaging and insightful conversation below!

Defaults in your CQ5 component

2012-06-24T11:32:00.000Z

When you have read my post around default components in your parsys then if you take it a step futher you want to have also defaults at component level.

In this post I will take the Text & Image component and will make the following changes when you drag this component onto your page:

There is already a default text
An image is already pre-filled

Both items (text and image) can be changed by the author after the component is placed on a page.

How to get default components in your parsys

2012-06-23T08:57:00.000Z

This blogpost will cover a frequently asked question : "how can I default components in my parsys?". This is often in the use case that you want to present to the author already a pre-defined structure, but still want to have the flexibility to move or delete the components.

Integrating FFmpeg with CQ DAM

2012-06-18T20:31:48.176Z

Communiqué Digital Asset Management (CQ DAM) provides enterprise-wide sharing and distribution of an organization’s key digital assets. Users across an organization can store, manage, and access digital assets such as images, graphics, audio, video, and documents through a Web interface (or a CIFS or WebDAV folder). As soon as an asset is uploaded to DAM, a number of asynchronous workflows get triggered in the background which extract metadata information from the asset and generated renditions of different size/format/resolution for the uploaded image. For any video asset, 3 image renditions and 3 video renditions get generated by default .CQ DAM relies on ffmpeg executable for producing video renditions of the uploaded file. This executable is not shipped along with CQ and user needs to install it manually on his system. The following section covers installation of ffmpeg on Red Hat Server.

HTTP Header Base Authentication in CQ5.5

2012-06-13T15:14:00.000Z

HTTP header based authentication is used when an organization is authenticating the user from third party security solution, for example, SiteMinder.

Basic CQ5 code examples

2012-06-10T07:14:00.000Z

In this blogpost I will go through some sample code that you can use in your components, all samples are available out of the box.

So there is no need to write custom code in OSGi bundles for these samples.

Make sure you have this line at the beginning of your component:

<%@include file="/libs/foundation/global.jsp" %>

This global.jsp defines a set of global taglibs and makes a number of objects available that you can use via <cq:defineObjects/>. Documentation of the standard taglibs can be found here.

How To: Have your Dialog form fields write to arbitrary nodes

2012-06-06T14:48:45.351Z

Recently I had a customer ask me to help them create a user profile page made up of multiple components with their individual dialogs e.g. address component, name component etc. However; they needed all the content to be written to a single "profile" node in the repository. The solution is fairly simple.

Configure your widget to write to a node (other than the current node)

In this case the "phone" field in the contact component dialog needed to write to the profile node. To do this,

1. Create your "phone" widget node as usual.

2. Set the value for the "name" property to "../profile/phone".

Configure your widget to load data from a node (other than the current node)

1. Create a node of type nt:unstructured under your widget node and call it "listeners".

2. Add a property called "loadcontent" to your listener node and set it's value to a function that retrieves content from another node and sets it to the field. e.g.

function(){this.setValue(CQ.Util.eval(CQ.HTTP.get(CQ.shared.HTTP.getPath()+'/jcr:content/profile/phone.infinity.json')).phone);}

That's it! The field in your dialog will now read and write it's content from a "profile" node that is a sibling of the current node. Of course you can also use absolute paths if you need every instance of your component to read or write to a specific node in the repository.

Adobe CQ DAM is named a “Strong Performer” in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management For Customer Experience, Q2 2012

2012-06-01T16:48:12.135Z

In the complex world of Digital Asset Management (DAM), there are literally hundreds of vendors from which to choose. Marketing organizations are often prompted with the problem, “Which digital asset management system should I choose for my organization?” The answer is almost always, “It depends”. But independent analysts such as Forrester can help marketing organizations create a short-list of DAM systems to evaluate for their customer experience solution.

Get the social edge with CQ

2012-05-31T16:47:21.805Z

If you are a Web developer or marketer looking to make your digital properties “social ready”, look no further. Adobe recently announced and made available a set of plugins that will help you quickly get onto the social bandwagon. These plugins work with CQ 5.5 with Social Communities.

Enabling Facebook and Twitter login

The Social Login and Personalization plugin enables organizations to provide a Facebook or Twitter login option on owned digital properties, and then personalize the user experience based on profile information. You can also combine profile information with data from additional sources, such as a customer relationship management system or a website profile, to create a unified view of the customer.

Refer to this new documentation article for more information about installing and using Social Login and Personalization.

Turbocharge social sharing

Using plugins in CQ Social Communities, you can strengthen the connection between your digital properties and social networks by empowering users to share content.

The following social plugins are now available:

Facebook Activity Feed
Facebook Comments
Facebook Facepile
Facebook Like Button
Facebook Live Stream
Facebook Send Button
Twitter Follow Button
Twitter Search
Twitter Share Button

For more information about installing and using these social plugins, refer to this new documentation article.

Happy sharing!

Samartha Vashishtha

@samarthav

P.S. If you haven’t yet check out our videos on the new social logins and plugins capabilities, swing over to our YouTube channel here.

CMSwire Tweet Jam with Gunnar Klauberg

2012-05-30T16:52:46.529Z

Our Gunnar Klauberg recently participated in CMSwire's May Tweet Jam, focusing on the mobile experience. If you missed it live, you can find his thoughts, along with those of other leaders in the space, embedded in the recap below.

CQ5 and XMLHTTP (IE only)

2012-05-26T08:52:00.000Z

This week we stumbled across an IE-browser issue whereby the solution was simple, but to get to the solution took us a lot of time.

Hopefully this post will save someone to go through the same path to find the solution :-).

Do you have a Mobile Campaign?

2012-05-22T20:37:56.788Z

Have you ever tried to answer this question: “Do you have a mobile campaign?” It may not be as easy to answer as it seems. Assuming you know what is planned and going on with your site, think twice before you say “no”. Sure you may have decided against a mobile app or a mobile site for various reasons:

· Mobile is not relevant to your audience

· No budget for dedicated mobile efforts

· No mobile use case

· Desktop site is good enough

· Current system doesn’t support mobile optimization

Adobe CQ Cloud Manager and Adobe CQ Cloud – Enabling Faster Time-to-Market For Digital Marketers

2012-05-15T06:00:00.000Z

Tired of waiting weeks or even months to kick-start your marketing campaign? Sick of the competition launching things faster than you can say: IT resource provisioning? If this is you, read on. Really.

In today’s competitive digital landscape, marketers, such as yourself, are faced with a dichotomy between the demands of the business and those of their customers. As global competition increases and online channels continue to transcend the way we do business, marketing organizations are moving from a ‘cost-center’ to a revenue-generating department. Rather than simply being the demand engine within the enterprise, the digital marketer must now react, deliver, and execute more effectively and efficiently than ever before. Even more so, on the customer side, marketers must provide multichannel experiences across the web, applications, social, mobile, etc. They must concern themselves with the management of multiple brands, languages, and devices all while going to market faster than the competition. It is for these very reasons that marketers are now wishing for… no wait, they are demanding for a way to leapfrog many of the steps that are associated with launching and managing a marketing campaign initiative.

Introducing Adobe Web Experience Management for Personalized Shopping Experiences

2012-05-15T03:11:28.688Z

Today, Adobe announced the availability of Adobe CQ eCommerce, part of Adobe Web Experience Management (WEM). This product innovation empowers marketers to differentiate their brands from the competition with personalized shopping experiences.

CQ eCommerce accelerates the integration of Adobe WEM with commerce systems so marketers can:

Connecting Social Networks and Owned Sites with Adobe CQ Social Communities

2012-05-14T21:24:38.223Z

Today we announced CQ5.5 Social Communities empowering marketers to bridge the gap between their social media efforts and owned sites through Facebook and Twitter logins, content targeting and personalization and plugin capabilities.

With Facebook hitting almost a billion users and their IPO poised to be the most anticipated tech-IPO in recent memory, marketers are wondering how they can make use of Facebook's power to reach their own goals. And with Twitter increasingly becoming the #2 traffic source after search, the question in the room is - how can we better leverage social media to connect to our customers, and to drive traffic and conversions?

Don’t hit the panic button yet – create a new landing page in 3 quick steps

2012-05-14T20:47:10.271Z

The Challenge: You are in the midst of launching a new demand generation campaign. Your current task is to use several different landing pages, each with a unique look and feel, to capture as many leads as possible.

Time is an issue: The campaign must start by Friday, and today is Monday. Fortunately, you already have the latest design package from your digital agency, which includes an HTML file, CSS (design, colors, etc), and a bit of JavaScript (to handle the registration form and a few other goodies). You'd like to use the newly designed landing pages in your web content management system, however your internal IT team doesn’t have the resources to create new templates for you. What are your options?

Customer Showcase: Intersil Corporation

2012-05-14T15:47:59.725Z

At Intersil Corporation, a global leader in designing and manufacturing high-performance semiconductors, Robert Reneau—the company’s senior web business manager—views sophisticated online experiences as vital to supporting customer success. “We need to help save engineers time during every step in the design-through-chip purchasing process,” he explains.

Syncing images from the Creative Cloud to CQ5

2012-05-11T17:56:00.000Z

This blogpost will explain how to sync images from your creative-cloud account to your CQ5.5 instance.

When you have an account in the creative cloud then you have 20GB of space available to store your images.

You can configure CQ5 in such a way that images from the creative cloud will be synced with the CQ5 DAM. Like with uploading files into the DAM new renditions will be created and be available for the author.

Extend CQ blogs with source code syntax highlighting

2012-04-30T19:49:00.000Z

Since re-launching the Experience Delivers blog on CQ 5.5, we have been busy authoring lots of posts - both non-technical and technical. In the developer track, I've noticed that there are a lot of instances where we are providing source code. We all know that posting source code in a blog entry can be a little tricky. It needs to be readable and more importantly ... copy & paste-able :)

Of course, I see this as an opportunity to learn more about CQ. I decided to create a custom component called the Syntax Highlighter.

Creating multiple pages in one REST call

2012-04-27T08:50:00.000Z

This week a question came up on how to create multiple content-pages with one REST-call in Adobe CQ5.

Of course you first reaction is "great question", but how is that going to work?

The solution is a very nice, very simple one and shows how powerful REST is.

Populate hidden form field with dynamic values

2012-04-26T09:48:00.000Z

In the form components you have a wide range of components that you can use inside the form.

This example explains how to dynamically render a property or value from the content-page in your Hidden Field.

3 Simple Ways To Make Your Marketing Videos More Relevant

2012-04-26T08:00:00.000Z

We’ve all heard the amazing stats about the growth of online video consumption – the average person spends 16 hours watching videos online and, in fact, video has been identified as one of the top strategic trends for marketers according to Gartner. A few years ago, most video consumption was predominantly on YouTube or entertainment sites. But a scan of today’s websites will reveal that videos are consumed in a wide variety of marketing sites including retail, high tech, financial services and travel to name a few.

Customer Story: Royal Philips

2012-04-24T08:00:00.000Z

Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands (Philips) aims to make an impact on customers’ lives. Willem Schungel, digital campaign manager for Philips, recently talked about how the company is using Adobe Web Experience Management, including Adobe CQ Social Communities, to develop cohesive marketing campaigns with social media for stronger impact and increased engagement.

CMSwire TweetJam Recap

2012-04-19T16:40:00.000Z

Yesterday, our own Greg Klebus (@gklebus) participated in the latest Tweet Jam hosted by CMSWire. Focusing on Digital Asset Management (DAM), it was an insightful and entertaining conversation between several knowledgeable authorities.

CMSWire posed, and the panel and larger community responded to and discussed, a half-dozen questions – including about the core elements of a DAM strategy, what few things make a DAM solution successful, and the single biggest opportunity around DAM in 2012. Check out the full recap below.

We look forward to the next spirited Tweet Jam conversation from CMSWire, and to keeping in touch here and on Twitter @AdobeWEM in the meantime.

Make It Personal

2012-04-19T13:52:00.000Z

Different individuals deserve different experiences. Not a novel idea, but digital marketers continue to face the challenge of how to execute this concept today.

With enhanced Adobe Digital Marketing Suite integrations, the latest release of Adobe Scene7 lends way to a sigh of relief, allowing businesses to easily scale and deliver more relevant and personalized experiences to consumers. As an integral part of Adobe’s Web Experience Management solution, digital marketers can add Scene7 marketing banners into page templates through a simple drag-and-drop configuration. Leveraging comprehensive visitor data from Adobe Test&Target and Adobe CQ, Scene7 will dynamically assemble the right content combination for the visitor on demand.

Additionally, marketers and merchandisers can deliver relevant banners within the site search experience. The new integrated workflow with Adobe Search&Promote streamlines dynamic content assembly based on promotional business rules. You now have a quick and easy way to customize and deliver the most relevant marketing offers on search and navigation pages in real time.

Lastly, take advantage of the new HTML5 and Flash viewers, which expand your ability to provide unique, differentiated rich experiences across all channels. These include auto-play image slide shows; auto-spin capabilities; and embedded video content in interactive catalogs and brochures. And of course, we’ll give you that smart URL to deliver the right content, in the right viewing format for the screen or device.

This release also offers enhanced video streaming for desktop and Android, and enhanced internationalization support. Click here for complete details of the latest Adobe Scene7 release.

Embed video in your online catalog seamlessly with the latest Scene7 release

Event Handling in CQ

2012-04-18T10:24:00.000Z

Event handling can be done in a lot of different ways within CQ, that all have their cost, their impact, and their benefits.

5 ways of doing so are detailed here :
- At the JCR level with observation
- At the Sling level with event handlers and jobs
- At the CQ level with workflows & launchers
- Particular case of scheduled events
- Particular case of POST to the repository

Sanity checks for Adobe CQ5 installations

2012-04-17T14:39:00.000Z

In this blogpost I give an overview of some basic checks you can do after you have done a (production) installation of CQ5.x . The checks can mostly be done via the browser, and will give you very quickly an rough idea whether you are almost done, or still need to start.

Customer Showcase: Swiss Federal Railways

2012-04-16T16:55:42.028Z

Traveling by train is by far the most popular mode of transportation in Switzerland. Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) transports nearly one million passengers every day. SBB adopted Adobe Web Experience Management (WEM), part of our Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, to develop a customer-focused travel planning destination.

Patrick Comboeuf, director of e-business for SBB, discussed how Adobe technology enabled the company to unite dispersed systems saying, “Adobe CQ has given us a highly professional platform to cater to all the needs we previously had to fulfill with more than a dozen separate systems.” The solution improved content authoring for SBB’s website, which includes more than 13,000 pages in four languages.

The power of the List component

2012-04-16T13:09:00.000Z

In this blogpost I will demonstrate the power of the List component in combination with Sling.

Almost every time when you have the requirement "to show a list of ..." you can use the List component. The list component saves you the hassle of writing the plumbing code around getting a list of pages, looping and pagination.

Installing CQ5 from the command line

2012-04-14T11:55:00.000Z

This blogpost will cover how to install and run Adobe CQ5.6 entirely from the command-line.

In case you want to automate the installation process, or just when you feel more comfortable from the command-line.

I am using Windows in the examples, but there are also start/stop scripts for Linux-based.

In all cases make sure you use the supported Java-version, CQ5.6 recommends to use Java 7.

Workflows in the sidekick

2012-04-11T14:40:00.000Z

This blogpost will explain how to show/hide workflows in the sidekick.

When you open the sidekick and go to the workflow tab you see a number of default workflows you can use.

Page Activity Report

2012-04-10T20:18:00.000Z

If you want to see who did what at what day, you can use the "Page Activity Report", this is located at this location : http://<server:port>/etc/reports/auditreport.html.

The report offers you a great source of information on how the system is used, and you have a lot of freedom on defining your reports. Via the column-headers you can filter / aggregate and group on the values of the columns.

Customer Showcase: The Slate Group

2012-04-10T19:10:10.971Z

Not long ago Technology Director Dan Check of Slate—an extremely popular daily, online magazine that offers analysis and commentary on current issues and today’s culture—sat down with us and discussed how The Slate Group is using Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, including Adobe CQ and Adobe SiteCatalyst, to revitalize Slate.com with more effective and simplified content delivery. Check talked about how Adobe solutions empowered Slate to respond rapidly to new content and monetization opportunities saying, “Adobe CQ gives us a competitive advantage to leverage new content opportunities and introduce new features to market quickly to capture sponsor dollars.”

Check also told us that Adobe CQ decreased the time it typically requires for a Slate blogger to develop and publish a new post by 50%. Slate developed a personalized component that empowers content creators to search for images through the Getty Images photo collection and drag and drop them into the Adobe CQ Digital Asset Management system for use in articles and promotions throughout the site—greatly enhancing the quality and impact of digital content.

According to Check, Adobe CQ also enables customers to enjoy engaging content across tablets and devices saying, “Moving to Adobe CQ has radically simplified the process of providing variations on our format for consumers on different platforms. We can handle external syndication requests much faster, and can also allow people to subscribe to our content on Kindle, Google reader, and iOS and Android mobile apps.” To learn more about The Slate Group and its use of Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, read the full story here.

Stop wasting money re-creating marketing photos, images and video assets

2012-04-05T17:00:00.000Z

Many of our customers have expressed the same concern: managing digital assets are painful. Digital assets are difficult to find, share, and repurpose. The hidden costs of managing digital assets are painfully evident every time we encounter a trove of images, audio, video clips, animations, and other rich media assets. In many cases, marketing funds are wasted because it was easier to re-create an asset from scratch rather than to leverage something your organization already owns. This problem is slowing your marketing organization to a crawl and burning cash at an increasing rate. On the bright side, these costs can be contained. A large pharmaceutical organization saved $14 million from asset reuse and low cost sourcing.

Why "Social" will become irrelevant and more important than ever at the same time

2012-04-03T15:59:56.388Z

How can something become irrelevant and more important at the same time? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? In the case of the Social Web, it is not.

With the web being in its third decade of existence, it is clear how it has fundamentally changed the way we live, learn, communicate and do business. It is easier to imagine a world without cash than a world without the web - and it won't be too long, till web-based solutions completely replace cash. The all-permeating nature of the web is strongly tied to the way we access it. By being available on our mobile devices, on smartphones and tablets we can take it wherever we are and it is becoming a more and more important aspect of our lifes.

Mobile conversations

2012-03-29T23:01:00.000Z

The new definition of mobile conversations will put new requirements on content accessibility and “conversation optimization” (hoping we all remember Cluetrain Manifesto thesis #1).

We have seen a few attempts to reintroduce “voice” into mobile. It seems to be a contradiction, as it is the technology that was born around voice conversations. With Siri things are getting a bit more serious than those early voice commands and address book lookups that brought us short moments of angst of being misunderstood and calling our boss on the weekend, or worse. We now can interact with services and content available outside of mobile phones with a still somewhat limited conversation. But this additional accessibility of the mobile device is now promising to go beyond just initiating calls.

Using the multifield in your cq5 component

2012-03-28T09:20:00.000Z

Here a small example how to use a multifield inside your component or in your OSGi-component.

When you have created a dialog with a multifield and you have entered some values, you see that the value itself is stored as a String-array.

eCommerce: the latest addition to the CQ arsenal

2012-03-26T15:21:00.000Z

As people leave Salt Lake City after an exciting week at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit 2012, I am sure that many will reflect on the disruptive concepts and technologies that were discussed there.

The meaning of the digital self for both individuals, as well as brands.
The role of Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite in the quest for digital marketers to achieve what Biz Stone calls the true promise of the web where the digital self and the real self converge.

During the first keynote talk delivered by Brad Rencher, Adobe's vision is clear. Adobe CQ is the hub for a targeted, context-aware, social and optimized web experience. Having a fully integrated solution of optimized content and big data provides an unparalleled environment for digital marketers to take control of their brand's digital self.

The announcement of the newest release of Adobe CQ (5.5), the latest addition to the Digital Marketing Suite, lays the foundation for this fully integrated solution. The day 1 Keynote showcased integrations with Test&Target, SiteCatalyst, Scene7, and Search&Promote for retail. As well as some "in the works" integrations with Auditude, AudienceManager, and Efficient Frontier for media. As mentioned before, providing an unparalleled platform to enable organizations to fully realize their digital potential.

Adobe Summit Day 2: Biz Stone, the Future, and Great Times

2012-03-23T10:24:00.000Z

We’re back to recap what was an awesome Day 2 of the Digital Marketing Summit (if you missed it, check out our post on Day 1 here).

Biz Stone, co-creator of Twitter, got the second day of Summit started with a bang as he sat down for a colorful and honest conversation with our own SVP of Global Marketing, Ann Lewnes. As any of the thousands of live attendees would tell you, Biz delivered with his thoughtful and sometimes hilarious responses as he and Ann covered his philosophies, history and future.

Test Entry to test image wrapping

2012-03-22T20:19:11.510Z

blah blah balh

Your web platform made fast and easy!

2012-03-22T17:10:00.000Z

In an era where enterprises are facing ever-growing competition, digital marketers are demanding to accelerate their go-to-market strategy to build their brand, while creating demand and increasing reach for their products. As marketers, you’ve all been there: Great marketing campaign idea. Check. Social Community. Check. Implementation time…hmm. That’s where it falls flat. How many times have marketing initiatives been held up due to the time it takes to negotiate and buy software? Provision IT resources? Download, install and configure? Fellow marketers, wait no more! Adobe is bringing it all together with a new technology, that combines the best Web platform and modern cloud computing. Introducing Adobe CQ Cloud Manager, designed to help marketers accelerate time to market and provide competitive differentiation in today’s ever-changing digital landscape.

Adobe Summit Day 1: Adobe CQ 5.5, the Digital Self, and Arianna Huffington

2012-03-22T06:34:00.000Z

The first day of the 2012 Adobe Digital Marketing Summit brought us some amazing keynote speakers, the unveiling of several new Digital Marketing Suite products, including Adobe CQ 5.5, as well as strong breakout sessions in the Web Experience Management (WEM) track and others. The 4000 marketers, advertisers and publishers here in Salt Lake City were also treated to a great performance during the Summit bash by Foster the People.

Kicking it all off was our SVP of the Digital Marketing business, Brad Rencher. As Brad walked through the concept of the ‘digital self,’ a persona created by your preferences and activities, he painted a picture of the (near) future – a future where deep personalization in your everyday online experience is expected and commonplace.

The plan for getting there? This was the first of the day’s several opportunities to hear about the role of our WEM solution and CQ 5.5. The day’s early addresses were rooted firmly in how Adobe is working to deliver the future of digital marketing. Plus, we discovered that our CEO, Shantanu Narayen, is a Cal alum with a son attending Stanford – you see, anything is possible. ;-)

For attendees, perhaps one of the most valuable times of the day were the track sessions, including one focused on WEM. For example, our VP of enterprise technology, David Nuescheler, provided his well-known top ten ‘must-haves’ for Web Content Management. The tweets were flying fast and furious during David’s session—quite a bit of excitement. We caught this pic of David in action:

Taking Web Experience Management to Another Level

2012-03-21T08:42:00.000Z

Today, marketing is all about driving revenue and setting strategic direction for the company, in addition to building brand. Customer expectations are sky high. They want relevant information when and where they need it, plain and simple

For digital marketers this means the need, or rather mandate, to personalize each experience, think mobile first, and have a measurable web strategy. It means partnering effectively with IT to select a platform that enables decreased time to web and empowers marketers to drive continuous optimization of the customer experience and ultimately conversion rates.

Today we announced Adobe CQ 5.5, a major release that is at the heart of our Web Experience Management (WEM) solution, part of the Digital Marketing Suite. Adobe CQ now includes deep integrations with leading web analytics products in the Suite like SiteCatalyst, Test&Target, Scene7 and Search&Promote.

CQ Developer Tricks

2012-02-03T20:56:00.000Z

While working with Adobe CQ5 every now and then you discover some new tricks or options, here the list that I use daily:

Remove #cf/
Don’t want to see/wait for the content-finder while refereshing pages, just remove #cf/ in your url.

?debug=layout
Shows you all details of the components used on your page

?debugConsole=true
Runs Firebug Lite inside your browser

?wcmmode=(edit|preview|design|disabled)
This parameter sets your WcmMode in the specified mode, makes testing for a particular WcmMode easier .

?debugClientLibs=true
Writes out all Clientlib categories as separate files (check your HTML-source).

CTRL+SHIFT+U
In combination with ?debugClientLibs=true will show you timing information of your page

http://server/libs/cq/ui/content/dumplibs.html
Shows you all information around the clientlibs used in your CQ5-environment.

If you have other tricks, let me know and I will add them to the list…

Getting to Know the Externalizer

2012-02-01T15:45:00.000Z

In this post I want to highlight the beauty of the Externalizer that is still unknown to a lot of developers.

Sometimes in your CQ5 application you want to get hold of the external url of a particular page, for example if you want to specify the url in your opengraph meta tag.

<meta property="og:url" content="http://mywebsite/myniceurl/mynicepage.html"/>

What you see quite often is this pattern:

<%
String externalUrl = myPage.getPath() + ".html";
%>
<meta property="og:url" content="<%= externalUrl %>"/>

This will result in something like :

<meta property="og:url" content="/content/myinternalpath/myinternalpage.html"/>

This method doesn’t respect settings like, vanity-urls, resource mappings, aliases, external host addresses.

What you should use is the Externalizer, that has methods like .absoluteLink() and .relativeLink().

<%
Externalizer externalizer = bindings.getSling().getService(Externalizer.class);

String externalUrl = externalizer.absoluteLink((SlingHttpServletRequest)request,
request.getScheme(), currentPage.getPath());
%>

This now results in the nice external url you want to share with your customers:

<meta property="og:url" content="http://mywebsite/myniceurl/mynicepage.html"/>

A very easy way to test this while being in development is to set an alias (Advanced-tab on Page properties) on your page. You will see now that the alias is used in the external url, while your path remains the same.

2012: Year of Personalization for the Marketer

2012-01-11T23:00:00.000Z

Yesterday I spent a lively 45 minutes pummeling my keyboard for a very good cause. I was adding my perspective to a multitude of perspectives on the state of Customer Experience Management (CXM) in 2011 and the future of it in 2012 at CMSWire’s Tweet Jam (#cxmchat). Although it is a topic most debated among marketers, technologists and experience strategists, the innovation and understanding around it, I am convinced, impacts all of humankind.

Think about it, how many times are we all subjected to bad customer experience in our personal lives? Imagine each of these turning into a utopian interaction that inspires delight. Ah, the improvement to quality of life.

Outcomes from the Tweet Jam? Here’s my take and some of the perspectives I provided:

Customer Showcase: Singapore Tourism Board

2011-12-15T10:42:00.000Z

The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) wanted to develop marketing and brand experiences that resonated emotionally with potential visitors to the country. With that in mind, STB, along with development partner XM, looked to our Web Experience Management (WEM) and Adobe Digital Marketing Suite solutions to provide rich, interactive online experiences that engage potential visitors and help to boost tourism. Since the web is the leading source for travelers planning their own vacations, STB developed YourSingapore.com – Experience, an inventive, informative platform that offers useful information about vacationing in the country. The website achieved five million unique visitors as of December 2010—representing a gain of three times the amount of traffic compared to STB’s previous online presence.

Customer Showcase: Hyatt

2011-12-08T10:43:00.000Z

With more than 450 hotels, resorts and vacation properties worldwide, Hyatt is a global leader in the hospitality industry. Having a strong web presence plays an important role in giving customers valuable information and resources for travel and leisure. To make the web experience more dynamic and personal, Hyatt is leveraging ourWeb Experience Management solution and Digital Marketing Suite to accelerate creating and delivering rich, relevant experiences to customers using a range of mobile devices, as well as desktops. By continually updating websites worldwide with the latest content, the hospitality leader gives customers easy access to the information they need—booking details, schedules for local events, weather, and other information—to plan their ideal vacations.

Dynamic Routing of "Thank You" Pages

2011-11-27T12:00:00.000Z

In CQ you have the form functionality available that allows you to create a form on a page, for each form you can specify a "thank you" page that will be displayed when the form is submitted.

In this blogpost I will explain how you conditionally can route to different thank you pages depending on the values entered by the user.

Custom apparel website, Customizo, dramatically reduces bounce rates by 95% and lifts conversion by 400% in just four weeks

2011-11-21T21:59:00.000Z

Social shopping is where it’s at these days – more consumers are seeking second opinions from their social network before a purchase. But what about giving consumers a way to create and customize items together before they buy? Enter Customizo, an innovator in the custom, logoed apparel industry. Customizo offers a customer-centric online Design Studio so that anyone from individuals and affinity groups, to sports teams and large businesses, can use their logos and proprietary designs to design their own apparel and accessories. Through the Design Studio, users share creations among their group and collaboratively edit, review, vote on, and finalize a design.

Customizo uses Adobe Scene7 dynamic media solutions and Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium software to create this unique design platform and has recently seen online user engagement metrics soar. Within a month of its new website going live the company had dramatically decreased bounce rates by 95% and increased conversion rates by 400%.

“Using Scene7 to improve the way customers design, preview, and complete their orders, we saw more online conversions in just two weeks than in the 18 months on our old website with our previous, more manual, solution and processes,” explains Ryan Saunders, the President of Customizo. “Adobe has helped our business become more nimble.”

Continue reading about Customizo’s success here: www.omniture.com/go/41984

WCM Leadership

2011-11-15T10:47:00.000Z

On Nov. 10, Gartner, Inc. positioned Adobe in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2011 “Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management” research report (see our press release here). Our completeness of vision and ability to execute were noted by the firm, which looked at 20 different vendors for the report. From an Adobe perspective, the research centered on CQ5, now part of our Web Experience Management (WEM) solution.

The evaluation criteria for a vendor’s ability to execute included product/service, overall viability, sales execution/pricing, market responsiveness and track record, marketing execution, customer experience, and operations. Criteria for completeness of vision included market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, offering strategy, business model, vertical/industry strategy, innovation, and geographic strategy. We believe this recognition, combined with our previous placement as a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For Online Customer Experience, Q3 ’11”, is strong confirmation of our overall WEM and Digital Marketing vision.

Put your customers in the driver’s seat with customization

2011-11-09T13:55:00.000Z

Henry Ford advocated his “one size fits all” strategy on Model T production when he said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”*

Eighty-nine years later, companies are embracing the idea that each customer is unique and deserves relevant, personalized experiences and product options. What’s driving this? We are living in what Forrester Research calls the Age of the Customer, where consumers are empowered with technology to obsess over their desires, and the successful companies obsess over those too. In this recent webinar, Forrester pairs up with Adobe customer - leading U.K. automobile manufacturer - Renault to discuss embracing customer obsession with customization and vivid digital experiences. Renault even shares successful tactics of its own.

Product customization can be a powerful differentiator and represents an opportunity to deliver greater value, build loyalty and develop one-to-one customer relationships.

“Roll over, Henry Ford. Today, you can have any color you want, as long as it’s the one you want.” — James Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, 2000

*Source: Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work, Garden City Publishing, 1922

Do you need a _______ Strategy? AWE your customers to Find Out

2011-11-02T10:51:00.000Z

Last week, Ben Watson and I participated in a Tweet Jam organized by CMSWire. You can read about it here. The theme was the 3 C’s of Customer Experience, which were called out as Content, Community, and Commerce. Very quickly in the jam, everyone asserted that the most important C was missing – Customer (and Context was also cited as an important missing C).

It was a pretty obvious mistake, but it is unfortunately too common when we come at things from a technology first perspect (something I’ve blogged about before). We frame initiatives around the key technologies rather than around the business goal. Make no mistake, it’s impossible to consider almost any business initiative without assessing the role of technology to support it, but the technology needs to come second.

The #FutureofDigital is Marketable

2011-10-25T09:54:00.000Z

Last month in a story regarding the “Making Measurement Make Sense” initiative, Bob Liodice told Ad Age, “Digital, which we always thought was going to be the most measurable medium, turned out to be the least measurable…It’s bad for the digital industry because marketers are gun shy from not understanding the rate of return”.

Improving Customer Experience - Where to Start

2011-10-04T22:00:00.000Z

When you are looking to improve customer experience, it can be challenging to figure out where to start. Some advocate deep organizational analysis and gaining executive commitment. Others encourage developing detailed customer journey maps. Others, including me, advocate finding an area of customer frustration and focusing there.

All of these approaches are valid, but require you to basically start with a blank slate. This might lead to some delays in getting things done. Late in 2010, we (Adobe) commissioned Forrester to perform an independent research study for us on customer experience. The study included both organizations in both B2B and B2C environments.

Do You Under-Invest In Advocacy?

2011-09-20T09:46:00.000Z

Often when business people talk about the social media phenomenum, they seem to be focused on the risk of brand damage. People bring up stories like “United Breaks Guitars” (purposely not linked here due to the focus of the article) and cite how much more likely people are to share bad experiences than good ones. As a result, there is a tendency to focus on social “listening” activities to making sure that brand damage is not occurring.

While I am a fan of “listening”, I think focusing primarily on ”brand protection” is a mistake and a missed opportunity. Steven Webster pointed out an interesting quote from Bill Bernbach, one of advertising’s greatest thinkers and the father of the “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagen, and the AVIS “We are number 2, so we try harder” campaign.

Coming to a Screen Near You

2011-09-15T13:35:00.000Z

With the explosion of the mobile and tablet market, mobility is top of mind. Customers want to stay connected with their favorite brands and companies wherever they are and have come to expect a consistent experience at their fingertips, regardless of the device they are using. For businesses, managing and delivering optimized content to meet their customers’ expectations across multiple devices was difficult, manual and time consuming…until now.

The latest release of Adobe Scene7 automates the delivery of rich media with the consumer’s device in mind. The new Universal Viewer dramatically simplifies the deployment of optimized viewing for each screen with drag-and-drop configuration. Delivering interactive experiences across desktops, smartphones, and tablets is now as easy as including a single universal Scene7 URL tied to a particular media asset. The URL has built-in device intelligence to automatically serve image or video content in the right viewer and the right format. Since mobile touch gestures as well as mouse-driven interactivity are supported with one single URL, the implementation of each URL previously required to optimize for each device is eliminated.

After all, different screens deserve different experiences.

This release also offers increased support for video content creation and instantaneous playback as well as HTML5. Click here for complete details of the latest Adobe Scene7 release.

Little Things Make Big Differences in Customer Experience

2011-09-07T10:07:00.000Z

I was reviewing the articles I shared in my last post and others looking for common themes and ideas and a few just keep cropping up. While being systematic and consistently delivering great experiences is hard, little things, and even small changes can make a big difference in how customers perceive your company (and you if you are on the front lines).

How Far "Embed" Will you Go with your Media?

2011-08-05T15:11:00.000Z

Niche Modern wants to go far with all kinds of media--rich, social, earned. No wonder-- whenever the lighting designer and manufacturer gets published mentions by fans, bloggers, or trade journalists, its site traffic inevitably spikes. That's big for a small start-up like Niche Modern, which has limited marketing budget.

With an eye to courting bloggers and journalists, Niche Modern makes it easy and compelling for publishers to showcase its visually stunning lighting products.

Niche Modern provides third-party publishers with code that allows them to embed a dynamic viewing experience of its content directly on their sites. For example, Better Living Through Design embedded this Niche Modern mixed media viewer on its blog to great result.

Thus, blog visitors not only see Niche Modern's entire product image set, as intended, but they can zoom and pan on each lighting product, plus, see alternative, in-context images of the lighting wonders applied to a variety of setting, from open kitchens to intimate dining rooms. There's also a slider mechanism that users can click to see the full range of the product thumbnails.

What's great about the embed feature is it reduces the risk of bloggers mucking up the brand, as the entire Niche Modern branded experience is seamlessly lifted to a third-party site. This means Niche Modern can extend to any site the up-market positioning it has worked hard to build, ensuring their products are showcased in their best light with all the viewing tools that spur prolonged gazing, admiration and engagement.

The benefits add up quickly: The more sites that are linking to Niche Modern, the higher its search rankings will become.

The other big win of course is that businesses with few marketing dollars no longer have to pay loads of money to build awareness. Imagine how much Niche Modern would have had to spend to get the same number of people to pay attention through advertising, versus reaching them through blogs and other social media outlets.

perceptionspromisesandpositioning

2011-07-27T08:27:00.000Z

This past week, I went back in time (not just because I was going to a Huey Lewis concert) and revisited a marketing classic–Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Jack Trout and Al Ries. The book is in the Top 100 business books of all time and Trout & Ries (together and independently) published other books taking a look at the issue as the markets changed or from different perspectives (like differentiation, simplicity, etc.).

I went back to those books (which I always liked since they are about looking for simple, obvious ways to differentiate) because of some reminders of what customer experience is all about. While lots of different definitions exist, both Forrester and Gartner (not to say that Forrester and Gartner are THE experts in customer experience, but its interesting that they both have similar definitions) define cutomer experience around “perceptions.”

Forrester: ” “How customers perceive their interactions with a firm”
Gartner: “The customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.”

I am not going to dissect these definitions, but the keyword is perceptions. And that got me thinking about positioning. Because perceptions are intangible. They are feelings and reactions that exist in the mind of the customer–just like the idea behind positioning.

Ries and Trout say, “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of a prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.” I would add that creating the position in the prospect’s mind, you then have to deliver a product or service that is consistent with that position.

When you look at it that way, its clear that customer experience really starts for your company by defining a differentiated positioning. Therefore, positioning is aligned creating a brand promise. When I talk of brand I am speaking broadly–what your company stands for and exists to do for customers. Your brand promise needs to be based on differentiated positioning (Adobe has a great one, IMO, which is “changing the world through digital experiences.” I think that communicates very simply want Adobe is all about).

You also need to communicate it consistently (and get others to tell your story), since it takes repetition for people to believe your story, as this picture from the Edelman Trust Barometer illustrates:

Interruptions along Customer Journeys

2011-06-01T14:46:00.000Z

I’ve been talking a lot about customer journeys, moments of truth, and context lately. This weekend, I went back and revisited some information I had read on these topics in the past, much of it is still relevant today (and possibly even moreso).

In June of 2009, David Court and several of his collegues published a paper in the McKinsey Quarterly called “The Consumer Decision Journey.” In the paper, they talk about how the customer journey has changed as customers have become more knowleldge and empowered due to technology. There are lots of interesting points and its definitely worth a read.

One thing in particular caught my eye in relation to customer experience, moments of truth, and context. And that is shown in this figure from the report:

The Impact of Context

2011-05-18T14:56:00.000Z

One of the things I’ve talked about alot in this blog is the importance of putting yourself in your customer’s shoes to identify potential Moments of Truth. A big part of this is understanding the context of your customers at specific points in time. With the continued growth of mobile, this is becoming critical for many organizations, particularly consumer-facing.

On May 3, Gartner just released a new report titled, “Why CEOs in Consumer-Facing Organizations Can’t Afford to Ignore How Context Will Affect Sales”, by William Clark and Hung LeHong. (Note: If you are not a Gartner subscriber, you can purchase the report for $95). The findings are jaw dropping.

Using Technology to Create Moments of Truth

2011-05-04T15:07:00.000Z

As I write this post, I’m sitting in an airport waiting to fly to Chicago. At this point, my flight is now delayed by two hours and I’m not having a lot of fun. Looking on the bright side, I do have time to catch up on some work and hopefully I’ll get on the flight in a little bit. On the other hand, right now I’m wondering what is going on. The weather seems nice (at least here in Raleigh), and I did not hear about any bad storms (although to be honest I did not check the weather in other parts of the country).

This situation has me thinking about customer experience and the role of technology in it. While becoming a customer centric organization requires leadership and processes, technology can help grease the wheels . Given my situation, the airline (it happens to be American) can’t personally find each passenger in the terminal and provide personally delivered information and updates, but they could do something s differently. Some ideas that come to mind for me:

From coffee table to mobile tablet – browsing your favorite catalogs just got easier

2011-04-19T13:44:00.000Z

When Montgomery Ward sent out its first catalog in 1872, I am sure no one at the time imagined that one day people would be flipping pages of multiple catalogs from one single portable device. But here we are nearly a century-and-a-half later and that is exactly what the latest release of Adobe Scene7 is making possible.

Scene7 eCatalogs are now optimized for rich viewing experiences across multiple screens, allowing companies to quickly and easily transform print catalogs into dynamic and interactive experiences that reach shoppers on-the-go. Companies already publishing online catalogs with Scene7 can leverage existing eCatalog assets and seamlessly deliver them to iPads and iPhones. With support for multi-touch and gesture interactions, such as pinch to zoom in/out, double tap to zoom in/out, swipe to turn pages, mobile-optimized eCatalog viewers also respond to device rotation to swap between single page, portrait orientation and double page, landscape orientation spreads. These features enable businesses to scale existing rich, immersive experiences to more screens.

Some other highlights of this latest release include:

Tighter Adobe Test&Target integration to optimize relevance and conversion

Improved content synchronization capabilities between Adobe Scene7 and Adobe Test&Target™ enable customers of both solutions to quickly and easily transfer Scene7 images, templates, videos, recuts and Dynamic Banner assets to Test&Target to perform tests and reveal the most compelling and relevant content and executions for conversion lift.

Deeper Creative Suite 5 integration to further streamline desktop-to-Web workflows

A new Scene7 Creative Suite Extension for Flash Professional allows upload, preview and customization of Flash projects to Scene7 directly within Flash Professional, enabling a seamless, efficient workflow for creating Scene7 Dynamic Banners. The new "publish" capability in Scene7 Creative Suite Extension further enables users to publish assets, already uploaded to Scene7, to live image servers directly from within the Creative Suite 5 application.

With this tighter integration, companies can continually optimize their digital experiences in real-time without going back to the desktop to build new variations of creative, enabling customers to extend testing by eliminating high production time and costs.

Open Viewer Platform for Flash SDK to create innovative customer experiences with custom viewers

Companies can achieve flexibility and creativity to extensively customize Scene7 Flash viewers and uniquely brand viewer look-and-feel and interactivity with a new Flash component-based framework. Additionally, reusable performance-optimized components lower the overall cost of viewer development and accelerate custom development.

Video search engine optimization and libraries to maximize discoverability

To improve video discoverability, Scene7 now automatically generates and updates a sitemap/mRSS of the videos for submission to search engines, ensuring that companies are able to maximize the ROI on their video investments. Additionally, companies can create video libraries that consolidate videos in one central location within their site or as a separate microsite, establishing a destination where consumers can go to find valuable video searchable by title, description, keywords, category and related videos.

Kevin Cochrane Q&A

2011-03-11T10:24:00.000Z

Kevin Cochrane, Adobe VP of Enterprise Marketing, recently took the time to share his perspective on the recently-announced CQ5 and the impact it can make in every facet of your online business strategy.

One of the top challenges facing brands today is finding a way to deliver an engaging experience across the entire lifecycle of a customer’s journey. One goal of the new CQ5 is helping businesses reach new audiences and convert them into brand ambassadors. This is accomplished by providing a single comprehensive platform for initial outreach through social networking, monitoring immersive experiences, and providing follow up measurement — allowing CQ5 to assist brands along every step of the way as they navigate the digital space.

CQ5’s innate flexibility allows the platform to appeal to the different aspects of your organization: as Kevin details in the video, the platform has been designed to appeal to both the marketing side of a business to enhance the customer experience, as well as the IT side to assist with organization, planning, and reporting. As a former marketing executive and one of the chief architects of CQ5, Kevin’s perspective is uniquely suited to explaining the best uses of the platform.

The new CQ5 has been designed from the ground up to help you build your brand, even in a crowded marketplace. Overall, CQ5’s purpose is clear: Optimize your digital initiatives, both internal and customer-facing, to take full advantage of your online channels: making them work for you and ultimately providing the best possible customer experience.

Check out Kevin Cochrane’s Q&A video below for more details, and don’t hesitate to leave a comment or reach us through our Twitter account at @AdobeCEM.

View Kevin's entire Q&A here.

David Nuescheler on the new CQ5

2011-02-25T10:35:00.000Z

The ‘Experience Delivers’ blog presents a Q&A session with David Nuescheler, VP of Day Products and Technology at Adobe. Watch this interview below to get his perspective on the most recent additions and advancements to the platform and what users are saying about it. He’ll also provide a sneak peek at what’s to come this year for Adobe in the Enterprise, so tune in now!

View David's entire Q&A here.

The Beauty of Simplicity

2011-02-23T16:26:00.000Z

Often, when hearing about compelling user experiences, people immediately associate it with flashy productions with lots of visible bells and whistles. And that’s a problem.

Compelling interfaces are ones that make things easier for the user and that they enjoy using. And if you have an audience that does not spend the bulk of their time in your application, simplicity is beautiful.

Let’s consider an example that we use here at Adobe for sharing information with our board members. We call it Board Bridge. The need is clear. We needed a way to share material for board meetings and other information with our board members. The information is highly sensitive. The old way of doing things was to provide the members with the information at meetings or via email and use human measures to manage security (putting the burden on the board members themselves to manage confidential information). We did extend this with some electronic capabilities, such as password protection or using Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management, but each board member had their own way of doing things.

Remember, that Adobe is not their day job. In working with them, we created a solution that is simple and compelling. Here is the primary interface:

Customer First, Technology Second

2011-02-09T16:31:00.000Z

There has been lots of talk in this blog about the importance of customer or user centric design. And its sounds like a really easy, logical approach to take. So what gets in the way of it?

Technology.

There is an ongoing arms race not just in hardware, but in software as companies seek to add more and more features and capabilities to their solution stacks. The focus is on more and more features rather than taking a step back and asking “Why do we (or our customers) need this?” Its all about the advancing technology, not necessarily improving the experience.

Additionally, IT projects (regardless of the level of involvment by business) frequently take on technology monikors. Things are called a “collaboration initiative” or a “social initiatve” or a “BPM initiative.” Its technology first and customer second.

IT Leaders Discuss Wins, Challenges in Customer Experience Survey

2011-01-27T10:45:00.000Z

CIOs and IT professionals are eager to provide tools that enhance the customer experience on mobile platforms, and want to provide customers with guided collaborative experiences, according to a recent survey conducted by the CIO Magazine Custom Solutions Group and Adobe.

We have been talking about 2011 being the year where customer experience management really takes off, and the study shows that there have been significant gains. But IT and CIO respondents also revealed challenges they hope to overcome, saying there hasn’t been a unifying platform that manages interactions with the customer across different functional areas, despite the massive investment in platforms for inventory and supply chain management, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management. And technical limitations have prevented them from creating user interfaces that are dynamic, personalized and easy to use.

2011 Will be the Year of CEM

2011-01-21T10:46:00.000Z

In our last post, we promised to take a look at some of the many 2011 predictions around customer experience management, and we thought we’d start with a really comprehensive one from CustomerThink CEO Bob Thompson.

Regarding CEM, Bob gets right to the point: “I believe that 2011 will be the year when focusing on the customer experience will hit the mainstream. The practice of Customer Experience Management (CEM) is maturing and we won’t have the bad economy as a convenient excuse to hunker down much longer.”

At Adobe we couldn’t agree more. As our own Rob Tarkoff wrote from Enterprise 2.0 last year, “Adobe has been leading the charge in providing solutions that enable enterprises to improve customer relationships through highly personalized, engaging interactions in areas such as self-service, assisted service, social and content management. In industry as a whole, there is now a general acceptance and belief that effective online customer experiences will lead to reduced costs, increased loyalty, and ultimately increased conversion.”

In his recent post, Bob offers an insightful look at the customer experience, rightly pointing out that CEM stretches back to the days long before computing via a 30-year-old example from Scandinavian Airlines. He talks about how to build a business case for CEM for those watching the bottom line and ROI, and he concludes with three major suggested phases for a successful CEM journey. You can see Bob’s whole article here. It’s a great read.

Looking to the future, Adobe believes that the enterprise will see the continued emergence of unified sets of customer experience and content management tools that are designed from the outside-in – addressing the way end users work. And we’ve got some exciting news in the digital marketing space so keep an eye out.

Socialize Your Rich Media to Drive Sales

2010-06-09T15:13:00.000Z

Even as every brand, big or small, tries to figure out social media, there are plenty of reasons to embrace it sooner than later. For online retailers, especially, the payoff can be great. Visitors who spend the most time on Facebook spend more in online shopping, with the top 20% spending $67 on average during the first quarter, according to online researcher comScore. Internet users who did not visit Facebook at all spent an average of $27 during the quarter. To boot, with Nielsen crowning social networking sites as the world's most popular destinations today, marketers must keep experimenting in this area.

As people spend more and more time in social media, smart etailers are creating opportunities for both fans and casual browsers to share their latest and greatest merchandise. To inspire social sharing and pass-alongs, the presentation has to be compelling. And what is more compelling than rich media?

Merchants should "switch on" their rich media assets and make it easy for anyone to post and share them in emails, blogs, Facebook and YouTube. If YouTube videos can go viral, so can any other form of rich media. Just keep in mind that viral isn't an end, but a means to build awareness and drive your traffic to consummate a purchase on your commerce site.

This year, ecommerce players will be deploying additional social and rich media tactics to improve customer experience--that's more than any other tactic including those in the areas of personalization and mobile, according to an annual Adobe Scene7 survey. In the area of rich media, interactive catalogue was the most- planned feature globally. (For more on the top planned ecommerce deployments in 2010, download the Adobe Scene7 survey).

One of the more innovative executions marrying interactive rich media and social media comes courtesy of Soft Surroundings, which targets busy women with stylish, comfortable apparel and home furnishing. With roots in the mail-order catalogue business, Soft Surroundings understands multichannel marketing. It knows that its loyal shoppers enjoy the catalogue experience, so it brought its interactive catalogue to Facebook. Shoppers can flip through each page to browse and savor the season's fabulous, richly-hued resort wear, while losing themselves in luxurious yet comfortable loungewear. If moved to buy, they can click right through to the Soft Surroundings website to complete their order.

We think Soft Surroundings' approach is a winner compared to other executions, where a Facebook 'Shop' page is often merely a collection of static images that click through to the commerce website. By presenting its offerings in a living, interactive catalogue that tells a coherent merchandising story, Soft Surroundings has gingerly landed itself at the head of the online competition.

Is Your House Protected? How Under Armour Safeguards Its Brand

2010-06-07T15:14:00.000Z

In our third installment to unearth more learnings from the Adobe Scene7 Customer Experience Live Event, we turn our attention to Under Armour, a global manufacturer of athletic footwear, apparel and accessories.

For me, one of the takeaways from the Under Armour story is the importance of brand integrity, and how to protect it.

In just 14 years, Under Armour has become a credible player in the performance apparel and footwear business, challenging the most venerable names in the industry. Built on the back of innovative products and an aspirational brand story, Under Armour knows the value of a brand that incites passion and the importance of protecting that brand experience. As Under Armour racks up growth year after year, it continues to expand its sales channels. It has a growing direct-to-consumer business that it operates through its website and various retail outlets throughout the world. It also continues to sign up more retailers that resell its merchandise. As its sales channels expand, how does Under Armour safeguard its brand integrity to ensure consistency across all channels, throughout the world?

Under Armour has addressed this tricky area of brand management by using a solution that supports its retail partners in how they market and merchandise the company's products. It invests the time and resources to create great assets that tell the Under Armour story, then serves those assets from a single repository to all its retail partners. Whether they're video vignettes about an inspiring athlete, or a 3D rendering of a baseball cleat, these creative assets give shape to the brand and underlie Under Armour's winning merchandising story. And merchandising is a big deal for this company. Because it sells differentiated, high-performance athletic gear, many of its products are technical, so it needs to syndicate to its retail partners those smart merchandising assets that really sell the product story.

Serving creative assets from a single repository means no muddling or misuse of key assets, and also puts the marketing team on the same page with each other and the company's partners. That's especially important for a company like Under Armour that employs a deep matrix of marketers spanning retail, corporate marketing, ecommerce, and so forth. There are assigned owners for each type of content, and housing creative assets in a single-repository imposes order and reduces chaos, as what lives in the repository is the final word on what is official and sanctioned.

Brand equity takes years and decades to build, so protecting that investment should be a top priority of every brand-driven business. I encourage you to view an exclusive Adobe Scene7 webcast to get an inside look into a world-class company that deftly maintains control of its brand in the face of accelerated growth from all sides. I think you will come away enlightened. I did.

Besting the In-Store Experience

2010-05-13T15:19:00.000Z

As promised, I am sharing in a blog series some insights culled from our Customer Experience Live Event held last month.

One of our featured customers, Michigan-based Summit Sports, gave us much food for thought, challenging itself with the mission of delivering a "better than an in-store experience." That's a tall order when you consider all the advantages a retail environment offers, where salespeople are standing by and shoppers can try the merchandise on for size. Add to this the fact that Summit is selling highly technical products like skis and snowboards that easily cost north of $1,000, and it becomes an even tougher proposition to convince shoppers to buy online.

Amid what it calls a "notoriously stubborn" conversion rate, Summit last year decided to overhaul its 13 online properties. The metrics it achieved as a result were nothing short of stellar: it grew conversion 11% and nearly doubled its online revenue. Among its revamp initiatives, Summit sharpened its focus on search engine optimization, added breadth to its product narratives, and amped up the site's rich viewing capabilities to enable shoppers to see everything granularly, right down to the stitching. It standardized on the product specs so that when you can compare one product against another, you're actually comparing apples and oranges. For each of its product categories, it offered supplementary content links, including buying guides, sizing guides and videos.

Impressively, Summit captured 1,400 product review videos in just three days to yield more than 3,000 videos that now live on its sites. The videos offer both breadth and depth: You can view a clip about how to mount ski bindings, or drill deeper and watch someone review a specific brand of ski. The best part is, these videos aren't big dollar investments. Summit didn't hire professional video producers to crank out them out; they did it all themselves. And the results are effective--the videos retained a grittiness that lended them authenticity, which for the free-spirited ski and snowboard crowds, imparts more credibility than would a slick and polished video.

I invite you to view an exclusive presentation Summit Sports delivered at the Scene7 customer event. I think you'll come away that given some clever and rich content, online shopping can best the in-store experience.

Mix & Match to Make More

2010-04-14T15:21:00.000Z

Empower your shoppers to create their own personal style! Enable users to customize their "own look" by allowing them to mix & match items to make their own outfits. Not only do your customers become "design experts" with respect to more of your products, mix & match tools can increase average order size as users become more involved with creating their different combinations.

Also, community merchandising has tremendous potential to engage brand loyal shoppers by not only allowing them to design, but also share their own custom outfits as well as rate outfits designed by others. The side benefit - helping you reduce the need for retailer-driven merchandising. According to the Adobe Scene7 2010 Customer Experience in the New Decade Survey, the use mix & match features had one of the highest increases in deployment from 2009 to 2010. (Download 2010 Survey to read more).

A Scene7 customer mixing it up this season is JCPenney with its 2010 swimwear collection. Jcp.com brings the mix & match concept to life with an interactive browsing experience that allows shoppers to scroll through this season's portfolio of swimwear separates and piece together different tops and bottoms from the various collections by either scrolling or dragging tops and bottoms to create different ensembles. The center combination appears prominently where shoppers can click to enlarge the view and see both the back and front of the swimsuit, delivering a rich and engaging experience vital for making the plunge to purchase!

From Shoes to Shirts, Bigger is Always Better

2010-02-07T12:36:00.000Z

Last week we revealed the importance of minimizing the number of clicks shoppers have to endure to get to their desired product. This week, we'd like to stress the importance of delivering a full-screen viewing experience to your customers to get them one step closer to a purchase decision. From television sets to movie screens, the trend today clearly illustrates that people want more visual stimulation. This trend is just as prevalent online. Consumers are looking for that same "larger than life" experience in their online shopping and when they don't get it, they look for it somewhere else.

In our recently conducted viewer study, entitled "What Shoppers Want", we discovered that across the board, in each age bracket and across both genders, shoppers want to be provided as much visual information in as large a viewing format as possible. People appreciate the ability to interactively zoom to deeper detail levels in order to truly examine products, and full-screen viewing with interactive zoom and pan is the preferred format because it enables even better examination of products.

One Scene7 customer that has embraced this concept "to the extreme" is Nike. Nike's website takes full-screen viewing to the nth degree, enabling eager shoppers to click on a product of interest and populate the entire screen with images of that product. Clicking to zoom reveals deeper levels of detail, and the small guide in the upper right corner of the screen enables full-screen dynamic pan and zoom, revealing the product details and delivering an incredibly realistic view that might otherwise only come from an in-store shopping experience!

Learn more about the merchandising tricks that will turn your browsers into buyers.Download the report.

No-Click Tricks to Better Merchandising

2010-02-03T12:37:00.000Z

In our recently conducted viewer study, entitled "What Shoppers Want", we were able to identify best practices for online visual merchandising that validate current eCommerce trends.

In a nutshell? Shoppers want an easy, quick way to browse--with as few clicks and as little scrolling as possible when searching for the right product. But when making a purchase (to really add to cart), all shoppers want to be provided as much visual information in as large a viewing format as possible--including interactive zoom that enables shoppers to dynamically pan and zoom to deeper levels of details. Offering fly-over, click-driven browsing combined with full-screen interactive zoom is the ideal best practice.

One Scene7 customer who does a particularly good job at following these best practices is Halfords, a leading retailer of car parts, car enhancements and bicycles operating out of the United Kingdom.

Halfords delivers detailed product descriptions complete with alternate images (front, back and sides of product). Users can click on any of the images and then by just moving their mouse curser over the main image, another image automatically "flies out" with a single level of zoom to reveal a closer look at the product -- without clicking. To take an even deeper look, users can click on the "View Larger" button to view a separate product window that delivers even greater zoom levels of detail, where users can interactively examine more and more details on any area of the image.

For more about this study, download the report.

Delve Into the Details with Guided Zoom

2009-07-28T12:40:00.000Z

An online shopper clicking on zoom is the equivalent of an in-store shopper picking up an item to take a closer look. That's generally when a sales associate steps in to offer assistance, point out key features, and basically helps to guide the shopping experience. You can accomplish a very similar scenario on your website by adding zoom targets to your product's images and incorporating text tips as well. Here are some great examples:

TravelSmith
This site uses large thumbnail images in its viewer to recommend specific areas on the larger image where shoppers can zoom to see specific product details.

ExOfficio
In a pop-up zoom viewer, this site adds merchandising copy beneath each thumbnail target to describe a feature, giving the user more information prior to clicking on any target.

Telescope.com
This site incorporates a similar approach as the first two mentioned above, but with an embedded zoom viewer. Also, the thumbnails and text appear as an overlay directly onto the product image itself.

Zoom targets with rollover text can be especially helpful when trying to point out multiple products in a single lifestyle shot. For example:

Liberty Hardware
This site uses one single image to point out items in the collection such as the towel holder, towel ring, robe hook, and toilet paper holder. Rollover text indicates each specific SKU number. Shoppers can also interactively pan the entire image themselves by simply moving the image with their mouse and clicking on the zoom controls. This is a great way to use lifestyle room scenes that show off each fixture in a collection.

Use Dynamic Imaging to Reduce Workload

2009-07-06T13:50:00.000Z

What are you doing this weekend? Will you be sitting at your computer creating multiple versions and various dimensions of the same image for your website? Why not take the weekend off and have this monotonous task done for you with a dynamically driven imaging system?

Did you know that multiple derivative images (a must-have for any successful ecommerce site) can be created based on a single high-resolution image? Rather than manually creating several images—for example, a thumbnail and an enlarged-view image—you can take a single master image, and have all modified images generated as you request them, on the fly. Most Adobe Scene7 customers begin with this basic (but effective) feature when they first start out using rich media and then slowly add more automation as they grow comfortable with the solution.

The nice thing about a feature like Dynamic Imaging is that beyond the obvious benefits, it enables you to make universal changes (almost like a “search and replace” function in a program like Microsoft Word) and quickly affect the size and formatting of an image “type” throughout your website or application. You can leverage a collection of size and formatting attributes to streamline your web production and make your job MUCH easier.

Have a look at some examples of customers who’ve had great success using Scene7’s Dynamic Imaging.

Anthropologie, an innovative specialty retailer & wholesaler, has recognized a 3X reduction in staffing & production costs after rolling out Scene7’s Dynamic Imaging solution to create and deploy all imagery and online catalogs for its e-commerce website.

Moosejaw, a multi-channel outdoor sporting goods retailer, was able to save 60% in time and cost savings by adding dynamic zoom, re-sizing and color swatching across all images on their e-commerce website. Before Scene7, Moosejaw had at least a three-step process for preparing images—which included getting an image from the supplier and creating at least 3 different sizes per color, and per product, which resulted in about 15,000 different image variations every 6 months. Because Scene7 can dynamically generate every variation from a single master image, Moosejaw was able to cut the number of images they needed to create to less than 5,000 images - netting tremendous savings across the board.

Learn more about Image Sizing and Image Presets in Adobe Scene7.

Flag critical information on your images

2009-06-22T12:42:00.000Z

It's been proven that shoppers' eyes are drawn first to images, so that's the best place to put important information. But you certainly don’t want to be updating your graphic files every time you want to change the text. By using dynamic overlays to flag important messages — such as "New" or "On sale" or "Offered in multiple colors"— you can increase response, click through, and conversion rates.

Let’s look at some examples:

House of Fraser, an International department store group known for delivering a robust online shopping experience, employs flagging to bring attention to items on the site that are "New" or "Exclusive." They do this so that shoppers can learn as much as possible about a product right on the category or browse pages – without having to drill down to a product page level or even the shopping cart. When a product is no longer new or exclusive, it's easy to update the graphic by removing the overlay. It keeps the site fresh and customers looking for the telltale flags.

The Home Shopping Network does a great job at tying overlays to inventory levels and showing that on the product pages. Depending on the level, a different overlay will appear such as "Almost sold out" or "On wait list" or "Sold out.” Elevating such real-time details can instill a sense of urgency that encourages shoppers to act quickly and that, in turn, elevates HSN’s ROI.

Click here if you’d like to learn more about Adobe Scene7 and applying dynamic templates to your site.

Show and tell, ASAP

2009-06-01T12:44:00.000Z

Why should shoppers have to navigate all the way down to product detail pages to find key information? By making details available sooner rather than later, you can improve the overall shopping experience. Add more information in your category and search result pages, including details like price, available colors and sizes, alternative views, special offers, and even an ‘Add to cart’ button. For example:

Lands' End
This site requires minimal clicking. By just mousing over any image, alternative views for pricing, special offers, and color options are immediately displayed. When you click on a color swatch, the alternative views change to that color. When you click through to the product page, the color remains the same as what you were just viewing on the category page.

We conducted a survey earlier this year and the results only confirm that Lands’ End is following “best practices” in the way that they merchandise their inventory. Of those who responded to our survey, the following tactics were found very effective/effective:

Alternative images – 99%
Color swatching / colorizing – 97%
Lifestyle imagery / photos – 95%
Quick looks & rollover views – 93%
Visual filtering & advanced search – 93%

Models in Motion

2009-05-13T13:53:00.000Z

Make your site come to life by using animations to show off your merchandise. Show how the material moves, how the fabric flows, and how the fashion fits in a world beyond two dimensions. In the examples below, shoppers see models walk onto a webpage, twirl and show off their garments.

David's Bridal
David's Bridal has made it their mission to make weddings spectacular and they've started with their website. The excitement of shopping for your big day is brought to life through animations presented right on the category page. Shoppers can click to watch the models twirl their bridal gowns – offering a complete 360 degree view of the dress. David’s is creating a precedent by making wedding day planning a simple click instead of an exhausting trip.

StellaMcCartney.com
This revolutionary designer has taken "cutting edge" to the next level by bringing her designs to life online through video. Get a glimpse at a playful model as she dons Stella’s designs beautifully and flirts with the video camera (all the while tempting us mercilessly with the fabulous apparel). "Shop by Look" can be your guilty pleasure too as you watch this season’s wondrous wares come alive on the back of a winsome beauty. Once the video portion of your entertainment has ended, you may interactively click on the model to see the front, back and zoom views on any particular piece. Add items to your cart individually or pick up the entire outfit you’ve been coveting.

This cutting edge technique can be used to sell other products. It’s all based on industry standard Flash technology, already installed on over 98% of computers worldwide.

Plasmas to Pacifiers...Does rich media apply?

2009-05-08T14:00:00.000Z

In my blog last week, I included some of the findings from our recent survey – and improved customer experiences remains a key 2009 trend. The intention to invest is broad based, with both retailers and manufacturers upping their investments in visual merchandising - across content production, tools and technology. The intensified focus on the online retail experience reflects not just the desire of multi-channel retailers to increase online market share, but also their awareness that many of their consumers use their web sites for researching offline purchases. Philips is one of the best examples I’ve seen of a global manufacturer who is successfully offering an experience that supports the selling of product through both direct and in-direct selling channels. In talking to their executives, their major investments in a best-in-class online customer experience is also heavily driven by the fact that 45% of their customers’ offline purchases are now influenced by online searches conducted prior to entering any store, thereby making Philips’ web sites in 56 countries, critical to the success of its global multi-channel strategy. Philips was also able to prove that by enriching and simplifying the online shopping experience, page views per visit across all of their web properties jumped 15 percent, customer satisfaction and brand advocacy spiked and click through rocketed to an industry-leading 7%. This team is really executing on a great vision.

So, the question is, do all online products need rich media to make them successfully saleable? Do you need a dynamic zoom view of a baby bottle?

We believe that the customer experience should ideally be intuitive and visually relevant for different product categories on an e-commerce site. Not every product requires a video or alternative view or even 360-degree spin. Clearly Philips, a manufacturer of everything from shaving equipment to electronics would also agree - as depending on the product category, the site dynamically shows different visual merchandising techniques. At the baseline, however, a single high quality image – ideally with zoom – is typically core across all product lines, which then, based on the product type, can scale up to extra views, Flash animations, product finders, videos and the like. There is obviously no “one-size-fits-all” answer (even within a given website), but I am not sure I’ve run across a site yet that would not benefit from enhanced customer experience around at least a portion of their product offerings.

If you have an interesting story, learning, or perspective to share on the relative applicability of rich media to different product categories, please comment on what you’ve experienced…

Up, down, turn around, with 360-degree spin

2009-04-23T14:02:00.000Z

When customers explore your product at retail, they touch it, turn it, and examine it closely from every angle. Why not provide the same experience to online shoppers? With 360-degree spin, you can do that and more. Multiple, detailed images can be integrated into a viewer to provide a seamless spinning view of your product. Shoppers can zoom to view high-resolution images for ultimate detail. And, best of all, you can use “hot spots” to point out special features or guide shoppers to product details related to specific angles – as if a sales representative were right there with them viewing the product!

DSW.com is a great example of a site using 360-degree spin effectively. They display nearly every shoe using this dynamic technology, offering automatic as well as manual spin so that shoppers can experience the full range of interactivity. In addition to viewing shoes on the product page in an embedded view, shoppers can launch a full screen and a larger view to see the product in even greater detail – including the top, sole, and all sides of the shoe.

Another great example is UnderArmour.com because spin is integrated with the rest of the dynamic viewing – including alternative views, colors, and hot spots for technical specifications – in an embedded full page product view.

Click here if you are interested in learning more about Adobe Scene7 and applying 360-degree spin on your site.

Click to view = Quick to buy

2009-03-07T14:05:00.000Z

Since not all action happens on the product page, it is key to think about every place where visual information can be used to improve the customer experience and stimulate purchase. QuickViews or QuickLooks in the browse or category pages are great examples of providing shoppers with all the necessary product information prior to clicking to the product detail page. QuickViews don’t necessarily mean small views or views with limited information either. The best examples are ones that have complete information – nearly as comprehensive as the product detail page itself – including rich media viewing such as colors, zoom for details, alternative views, and importantly, an "add to cart" option. QuickViews should also show critical information such as pricing, sale price and special offers so there is no need for shoppers to click further except to buy.

Here are some great examples:

Anthropologie
With an innovative modal layer "QuickShop" feature, shoppers enjoy seamless access to the same information that’s provided on product detail pages – even zoom. And the browse view still shows all color options as swatches so shoppers who don’t click on the QuickShop still know that an item is available in other colors.

Moosejaw
This site shows you that "QuickViews" doesn’t necessarily mean small views. And not only are they offered on the browse and category pages, but also on the product detail pages on the up-sell and cross-sell items.

Click here if you want to learn more about Adobe Scene7 and applying dynamic imaging to your site.

Show off Your Product From Every Angle

2009-02-12T14:07:00.000Z

If you are not in a position to get a video strategy live for 2009 – what should you do? Well, there are still plenty of basics to get in place that will improve conversions. At the risk of repeating my myself, the age old adage – a picture is worth a thousand words – holds true here again. But since online shoppers want to see a product from multiple angles, or perhaps see the item in context so they can visualize how it would fit into their lifestyle, the more pictures the better. And, every image should be zoomable so people can get a closer look at the details. But how do you provide all this functionality within a cohesive, integrated interface?

Here are a few options:

Shane Co.
Shane Co.'s alternative views are displayed both on the product page and in a large popup zoom viewer. This makes it very easy to see the different images and easily zoom in on all of the views.

JD Sports
JD Sports provides great alternative views on the product page. The images become the focal point of the page with embedded full screen zoom.

SHOEBACCA.com
This site also does a nice job on the embedded only alternative views using a slider for the zoom feature. And, all alternative views are shown on clickable thumbnails rather than being triggered by a text link.

Telescope.com
Telescope.com shows it all. Not only do shoppers get alternative views, recommended zoom views, or hotspots as we like to refer to them, all views are available through an embedded viewer or through a larger modal layer view.

I mentioned this when talking about zoom, and it applies to alternative views as well… you can never provide your customers too much visual detail.

Click here if you want to learn more about Adobe Scene7 and applying alternative views to your site.