PILLARS OF PERFORMANCE
Building and maintaining a high-performing Adobe Experience Manager platform.
Achieving fluidity in brand experiences starts with building a high-performing web content management (WCM) system. Top brands around the globe are already using Adobe Experience Manager as their omnichannel WCM technology to deliver great customer experience on a range of touchpoints beyond desktop and mobile, including social media, IoT, point-of-sale, and in-venue screens. You too can differentiate your brand by transforming your Adobe Experience Manager into a WCM powerhouse.
of a high-performing Adobe Experience Manager1
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56%Orders
T-Mobile’s sales are off the hook, and the value of customer orders has increased +56% with the help of Experience Manager Sites.
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+30%Traffic
MasterCard credits design simplicity for engaging audiences and improving website traffic by 30% in just two weeks.
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+20%CTR
Philips’ ability to test and optimize their web pages led to a 20% improvement in customer click-through rates.
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1. Discovery
& DesignDefine, assess, and design for business and technical requirements, mapped to the solution implementation roadmap and business goals.
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2. Implementation
& Go-live readinessCode to create a reusable platform. Follow checklists, rope in experts to test system performance and load readiness.
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3. Platform
value realizationFor greater on-going success, pay attention to change management and on-going health check of your WCM platform.
Discovery &
Discovery
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Review
all solution-related digital goals, priorities, and objectives through interviews and exploratory sessions with key users and stakeholders to assure validity of the proposed solution.
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Plan
technical architecture based on your unique business requirements.
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Define
the technical requirements of the implementation to help minimize future issues during the implementation phase.
Architecture and design
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Create
a comprehensive system architecture and design, aligned to requirements gathered in the discovery session.
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Review and validate
the solution architecture, design and development process, and launch readiness to optimize the deployment - with timely advice and recommendations from an expert.
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Revalidate
the requirements and prioritizations while creating the blueprint for the implementation phase.
Doing it right
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Design for
platform scalability.Never miss on receiving and deploying critical hotfixes, service packs, feature packs, and most importantly, the latest features of the new version.
Customize carefully: You can customize as much as necessary, but it is recommended you do it as little as possible.
Follow the REST (Representational State Transfer) principles2: This is the foundational building block of an Experience Manager architecture.
Manage configurations well: This provides a predictable environment for easy diagnosis, making the framework flexible, easy to scale and replicate.
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Define and design
the information architecture.Ensure effective content organization, governance, scalability, usability, and user experience.
Content modelling is a critical aspect. Choose the right deployment model, tailored to your project's specific requirements.
Provision for future needs. Implement keeping the Multi Site Manager (MSM) solution in mind.
Keep the taxonomy simple and consider search and navigation requirements.
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Design for measurable
non-functional requirements.Scope and define the non-functional requirements to get the application hardware sizing, design, and the overall enterprise platform architecture right.
Size it well. Design for the traffic you want to have, not what you currently have. Use Adobe's sizing calculators3 to choose the right architecture matching your specific needs.
Test with production like data and for futuristic peak load. Focus on dynamic content (queries, integrations, un-cached content).
Secure it. Make sure the Experience Manager security checklist4 is followed. Define access control protocols, backup and restore, disaster recovery, and switchover strategy.
Implementation &
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Create a reusable platform
consisting templates, components, and services to be used by more than one brand or business unit to create independent websites or microsites.
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Use Agile methodology
to increase project control, reduce risks, enhance flexibility to iterate and change at any stage, and for predictable and on-time project completion, and faster ROI.
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Build the skills
needed to effectively use the capabilities of the Experience Manager platform with Adobe’s role-based and solution capability based training programs5.
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Ensure thorough maintenance and monitoring
for successful roll-out, continued effectiveness and uninterrupted availability of your Experience Manager application.
Doing it right
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Implementation
Replicate production for local environment for predictive deployment and testing, and complete coverage.
Leverage the already available Adobe tools, such as Core Components6 by Adobe instead of reinventing the wheel. You can also use ACS Common tools and features7 that offer some of the most common features almost every implementation needs.
Define the quality plan meticulously. Have quality gates defined early in the game. Define measurable goals and roles and responsibilities. Start with a well-defined Definition of Done (DoD).
Standardize usage of tools: Enforce standards in an automated manner as much as possible so that developers don’t have to spend additional time to implement standards manually.
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Go-live readiness
Define a thorough maintenance process.
To ensure the performance optimization of the Experience Manager repository, meticulously configure the maintenance process.
Configure maintenance tasks for Project/Tasks/Workflow/Revision cleanup, and configure Tar optimization and Garbage collection.
Structure logs. Log everything. Putting enough debug logs allows easy troubleshooting on the production environments.
Have a working backup and restore procedure to ensure continuity and seamlessness of experiences. It's important to backup and restore8 repository content in Experience Manager.
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Monitor to optimize application performance and prevent workflow failures.
Effectively manage and prevent workflow failures.
Key metrics to monitor include: logs for errors or warnings, replication queues, running or failing workflows, query performance, response time, sling job queues, cached versus non-cached request ratio, and 40x/50x errors.
Platform value
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Find greater success
Pay attention to change management and on-going evaluation and diagnostic review of your Experience Manager platform.
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Prepare for an on-going training9 and enablement strategy
focused on driving efficient adoption of your Experience Manager solution. Ready your people and business for success.
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Have an expert assess
the on-going effectiveness and flexibility of the application to ensure scale and readiness in supporting dynamic business goals and any future system upgrades.
Doing it right
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Set up a monitoring and alert system post-implementation as well to ensure platform continuity and high performance.
Apply recommended hot-fixes and services packs documented publically. The list is available here10.
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Perform security and performance tests periodically, ideally with each feature or bug-fix the application development team is releasing to production.
Periodically test the backup and restore strategy to prevent any data loss and ensure continuity and seamlessness of experiences.
Want to increase your Adobe Experience Manager performance?
We can help.
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Adobe Customer Solutions
We offer the oversight and expertise your organization needs to build, manage and maintain a high-performing Adobe Experience Manager platform. Our global learning teams and consultants expertly deliver on outcome-based, scalable strategies that realize the value of Adobe solutions and beyond.
To learn more about how our consulting and learning services can be tailored to your needs, contact us.
