Interface’s Digital Sales and Marketing Challenges

Easily shared content with the latest design and product specifications is of paramount importance to Interface’s business. It was time to move off their legacy content management system (CMS). During the four years prior to this major move, C\T supported and implemented Adobe Experience Manager assets (AEM 6.5 and moved to AEM as a Cloud Service); thus, enabling Interface’s global marketing and sales teams to distribute assets via Adobe Brand Portal.

With a struggling, legacy content management system no longer able to support Interface’s dynamic, expanding use cases and having recently invested in the Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) e-commerce platform, Interface was looking for a more comprehensive content management solution to deliver multi-language content pages and support content publication to SFCC. Adobe Experience Manager proved to be the logical choice—given the Adobe platform’s best-in-class capabilities along with a powerful digital asset management (DAM) platform that was already delivering Interface content externally. Now was the most opportune time to leverage that DAM for enterprise-wide content delivery to Interface’s new web experience (AEM Sites) and to SFCC product detail pages.

C\T’s Tech Solution

Good news: Interface selected AEM as their platform of choice and they now had SFCC. Disappointing news: there was no available integration with SFCC. More broadly, Interface needed a way to create, distribute, and publish content while supporting the team’s well-defined, brand-oriented user experience with AEM—all while having SFCC to deliver the product detail pages and serve as the commerce engine.

With Interface’s objectives in sight, C\T provided strategy, project planning, architecture, multi-language applications, implementation, collaboration workflows, and AEM testing. Our solution integrated AEM with SFCC and delivered content-driven experiences for over four hundred product lines. With the Interface team now able to leverage out-of-the-box AEM components while having the flexibility to develop custom components to meet the new Interface user experience (UX) designs, we have empowered the global authoring team with reusable, drag-and-drop components for a flexible, quick way to author pages. This newly developed autonomy enables Interface Marketing to control layout and content of pages within the website while adhering to brand guidelines—without depending on Interface IT for making any changes (a time-consuming, inefficient drawback of their legacy content management system thankfully removed).

Now, let’s focus on the genesis of C\T’s Salesforce + AEM Connector. Our development team was tasked with creating an integration between AEM and SFCC, as there is no native connector available between the two platforms. We treated AEM as a content delivery service and pushed assets metadata with Dynamic Media URLs and HTML content snippets for product detail pages (PDPs), from AEM to SFCC, using SFCC Application Programming Interface (API). C\T developed a custom replication service to publish HTML content snippets to SFCC. We also developed an integration to automatically create PDPs in AEM for any newly added product in SFCC. Content authors can now use AEM components to author HTML snippets they want to publish back to SFCC. Connection problems solved.

New Tech-Enabled Interface Efficiencies:

• Centralized repository for all AEM and SFCC content
• Centralized control of components, page templates, and editing
• No longer dependent on Interface IT support for website changes
• Custom data workflows from AEM To SFCC