Adobe unveils web management service for mid-sized businesses

The Adobe ecosystem is growing more intertwined today, with announcements offering closer integration between its cloud-based creative and marketing tools and an expansion of its website management service.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites is the company’s web content management solution in its Marketing Cloud, which VB Insight has rated as “the leader to beat” in that category (and we’re certainly not alone in that assessment).

AEM is launching managed services for responsive websites for mid-sized companies and departments in enterprises. The service, which was previously available to large organizations, provides hosting and a team of experts for provisioning, testing, backup, upgrading, and 24/7 monitoring.

There’s also a new software-as-a-service, through AEM’s digital asset management system Assets, so that mid-sized companies can manage and deliver their images and videos to marketing channels from the cloud. Together, these new services offer more options for such companies to scale up and down.

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Additionally, AEM can also now add e-commerce hotspots to video, complementing a previously released capability for still images. A viewer can, say, click on an actor’s shoes in a video clip and buy the same kind in an overlay window right on the same screen. Marketers call this “shopping the look.”

To create print-ready brochures more quickly, AEM is also more tightly integrated with Adobe InDesign so that product information — like clothing size or color — can be directly connected with layouts and media assets.

A new version of Creative Cloud for enterprises, available in the next few months, will now have its “asset management foundation” based on the one in AEM.

Adobe says this means that everyone in the design-to-marketing workflow, from users of Photoshop in Creative Cloud to users of email marketing tools in the Marketing Cloud, will have access to the same versions of the same assets.

User actions on streaming video, as content or in ads, can also be monitored more closely now — every ten seconds — when it is deployed from Adobe Primetime, the company’s multiscreen TV platform. Adobe says this increased frequency means marketers can better understand how the second screen material is working in parallel to a TV show or event.