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Equipping Adobe’s marketing team with Brand Portal

For nearly 40 years Adobe has presided as a global thought leader in creative software design. Through continuous innovation they have successfully transformed their collection of traditional software offerings into an immersive cloud-based SaaS ecosystem. As a trusted Adobe Solution Partner, Content Thread has established an ever-growing portfolio of successful CMS and DAM implementations utilizing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and the full suite of Adobe Experience Cloud services.

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Strategy
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Visual Design
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Services
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Implementation

Engaging an Industry Leader

Adobe’s Global Marketing Department employed AEM Assets 6.0 as a central hub to provide vendors and external stakeholders access to Adobe’s key marketing assets. These assets were then published to a custom AEM Sites solution for distribution to Adobe’s internal employees. Development support of the AEM Sites instance was minimal, and an unintuitive navigation interface hindered adoption company-wide. Adobe needed to improve the system’s user experience to encourage widespread usage of their Marketing Hub.

To avoid the UX challenges presented by their heavily customized instance of AEM Sites, Adobe chose to utilize their newly-minted product, AEM Assets Brand Portal. Brand Portal is a SaaS solution that provides marketing teams with a secure platform to efficiently distribute and contribute branded content. Administrators can control distribution of approved assets to external parties and internal business, and external users can contribute to Brand Portal and publish to AEM Assets without accessing the author environment.

Armed with a comprehensive knowledge of both products, Content Thread was poised to implement AEM Assets 6.5 and begin configuration of Brand Portal. Adobe was officially a Content Thread client, as well as a partner.

Orchestrating Migration

The project began with the migration of over 25,000 assets and their metadata to a new AEM instance. Changes in the metadata structure meant that multiple scripts had to be run against the entire DAM in order to update the tagging structure, allowing the filter and keyword search to deliver accurate results.

Custom Development

Multiple terabytes of content and associated metadata were successfully migrated to the new 6.5 structure, kicking off a period of extensive development to meet the Adobe Global Marketing Department’s business requirements, including:

  • Custom rendition enhancements to allow content authors ability to upload any file type to particular asset
  • Authoring UI overlay modifications
  • Authentication integrations with author instance for SSO, oAuth2 and additional 3rd party integrations
  • Asset metadata management enhancements and validation rules
  • Customized workflow tasks for Adobe specific use-cases
  • Complex user permission sets

A Lasting Partnership

In under twelve weeks, the new Marketing Hub was launched globally to Adobe’s vendors. Over 2000 Brand Portal user accounts were initially enabled, granting users across the globe secured access to Adobe’s key marketing assets. Adoption of the new system was a resounding success, and 1500 additional users were added in the two months following the launch. As user and author needs mature within the solution, Content Thread continues to support the ongoing development of enhancements to the user experience.

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