Empower Content Creators with these Overlooked Features of Adobe Experience Manager 6.5

Marketing teams are competing to deliver more meaningful experiences to their customers while decreasing their time to market. To do this, they’ve got to be more efficient with their time and resources.

With the onset of COVID-19 related layoffs, hiring freezes, and furloughs, marketing teams and budgets are shrinking. Of the six largest marketing agencies in the world:

• Three have implemented layoffs

• Five have frozen hiring

• Five have made compensation adjustments

Companies outside of the agency space are following suit. According to a Bellwether report, 82% of marketers expected to keep or increase staffing levels during Q4 of 2019. Just one quarter later, only 69% shared the same sentiment; a net decrease of 13%. With the impacts of COVID-19 still rolling in, many analysts expect numbers to continue to decline.

This decrease in the marketing workforce has placed a heavier burden on remaining marketers. Fortunately, there are some recent additions to commonly used tool sets that help reduce this burden. In this blog, we’ll cover some of the enhancements in the latest release of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM 6.5) that may help.

360 Video Support

What is it:

360-degree videos are exactly what they sound like; a 360-degree visual experience captured with an omnidirectional camera capable of recording multiple views at the same time. Along with the time controls of a standard video, viewers of 360 Video have control of the viewing angle.

Why it’s important:

As extended reality (XR) continues to grow in popularity, marketers are increasingly trying to reach target customers with XR experiences. Unfortunately, most XR experiences require some type of third party hardware. This can be difficult and costly to deploy to average users. While 360 video isn’t a true XR experience, it is a good precursor that will help most casual users explore and view a deeper experience than that of standard or HD video.

Smart Crop

What is it:

The new Smart Crop feature allows content authors to automate the process of cropping images and videos. Smart Crop uses Adobe’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, Sensei, to automatically crop images and videos to the focal point of the media. The cropped media is saved as a rendition that can be used on appropriately sized devices to draw users to the point of interest of the media.

Why it’s important:

Before Smart Crop, content authors had to use third party tools or crop manually in order to provide a responsive image or video to users. This created sub-optimal experiences and more work for content authors. Now, authors can save time and deliver responsive experiences to users across all channels.

UI Updates – Select All

What is it:

A Select All option has (finally!) been added to the Sites UI. This allows content authors to select all assets without having to individually select one at a time.

Why it’s important:

This is a pretty small feature in comparison to the others, but it is important because of the time savings it will provide to authors. Imagine having to update the properties of a dozen pages and having to select each one. Now imagine having to do the same for 100.

While it seems like a basic feature to implement, Adobe’s use of lazy loading has prevented it in previous versions of AEM. The new feature will attempt the operation on all assets and not just what is loaded.

Adobe Stock Integration

What is it:

As part of the greater Adobe Creative Cloud integration, AEM is now able to integrate with Adobe Stock. This allows content authors to access Adobe’s Stock subscription service, which provides content authors access to 90+ million photos, videos, and other creative assets for use within their site.

Why it’s important:

This new integration will save content authors time and context switches as they are now able to tie their existing Adobe Stock service directly into AEM. Selected assets can be licensed and saved directly in Adobe DAM for immediate use.

Conclusion

In summary, there are many powerful new features of Adobe Experience Manager 6.5, but these four are often overlooked and can provide marketers with even more ability to rapidly release content and provide rich user experiences.

• Marketing Tools
• COVID 19