Introducing: The Universal Editor for Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is widely recognized as one of the market leaders in the enterprise CMS space and they don’t seem to be resting on their laurels. 

Last year they released Edge Delivery Services, which had a big impact for AEM customers to help deliver websites at top performance and also Project Helix (earlier referred to as Franklin) enabling marketers and content teams to use their favorite tools, such as Word, Excel, Google Docs, and Google Sheets with GDrive or Sharepoint, to create stunning, responsive websites with perfect lighthouse scores. 

Fast forward and Adobe unveiled the Universal Editor for AEM with Edge Delivery Services at Adobe Summit 2024 in late March. With Universal Editor, they’ve changed both how content creators and developers interact with the CMS.

As you might expect with a new component model there are migration challenges and the previous AEM components do not work with the Edge Delivery Services in the Universal Editor.

Adobe recommends using one authoring method; for most existing organisations shifting to the new world there are many changes to be made, this is similar to replatforming your website, if your organisation uses multi-sites then all sites must be migrated at once. 

Let’s look closer at why the Universal Editor matters and the implications for customers.

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What’s the real story about digital experience composition?

You might have noticed that there’s a new buzzword in town: Digital Experience Composition, also known as DXC. Several niche vendors are getting together around the term, sharing their somewhat similar definitions and also their messaging on how DXC can help you solve your digital problems. Or actually, for some of them only your web problems. 

If you follow the wider digital experience industry or like me have worked with CMS for decades, and sometimes try to decipher vendor marketing, you might think that Digital Experience Composition (DXC) is the new big thing. Perhaps even the new trend after headless? 

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A breakthrough for open source CMS?

By Janus Boye

Open source content management systems have made major progress in recent years. The systems have matured usual weaknesses such as usability, integration, lacking features and weak documentation has been addressed. In addition many large and complex organisations have adopted open source CMS and are now running busy sites on the platforms.

For buyers, a significant barrier to open source adoption has always been the lack of large competent implementation partners with open source CMS experience. In the past, open source CMS developers used to be mostly freelancers or boutique consultancies with less than 10 experienced developers. Very often these had low rates, but weak project management and a poor track record. Today most system integrators and digital agencies, even the large ones, have experience with open source CMS.

The increased adoption by viable implementation partners has been partially driven by the many government agencies that mandate the use of open source, often due to the systems’ strong support for standards. This has forced large digital agencies, e.g. LBi and Sapient to build skills with several open source systems. As a testament to this, LBi hosted an UK Umbraco meetup at their London offices earlier this month.

When looking for an implementation partner, consider specifically asking for open source, as many of the partners still promote commercial alternatives, e.g. Day Software or Sitecore, as those projects tend to be more profitable for them.

The marketplace for commercial and open source systems are equally crowded. A long list of open source projects will meet your requirements, have relevant references and a few available implementation partners.

To expand on our recent CMS Shortlist, here are the open source tools that we consider good candidates for your shortlist:

  • Drupal

  • eZ

  • Joomla

  • Plone

  • TYPO3

  • Umbraco

In certain regions you will find strong penetration of other viable open source systems such as Alfresco, Hippo, Jahia, Magnolia, SilverStripe, Squiz and even WordPress used as a CMS.

I still commonly get the question whether open source CMS comes with any major disadvantages. For a while my answer has been no. Open source tends to share some of the weaknesses found in commercial systems, but today there are no good reasons for automatically excluding open source from your CMS selection.

Smart practitioners have harmless URLs

I’m not that technical, but I’m frustrated that the problem with harmful URLs doesn’t seem to want to go away. Microsoft’s very own Jon Udell started 2008 with a very well written comment on .aspx considered harmful, but .aspx is still the standard default used in most SharePoint 2007-driven public websites.

Over at CMS Watch, I did follow up on Udells comment with a posting on Location matters: URLs should be short, meaningful and permanent.

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Swedish CMS-vendor EPiServer keeps growing – still without setting foot in the US

I’ve been tracking Swedish CMS vendor EPiServer since late 2005. Many milestones later the company has now expanded far outside beyond its home shores, but unlike other ambitious and growing vendors, they have so far resisted the usual European temptation to attempt venturing into the US market. Quite unlike local competitor Sitecore, which have built a very visible presence in the US over the last few years.

In recent news from EPiServer they announced the release of the second edition of EPiServer CMS 5 in early October 2008. CMS 5 R2 has several improvements for editors and also a few more business user reports. Moreover, in October, EPiServer World reached 5,000 registered members, which is quite impressive for a CMS vendor community.

As a Microsoft ASP .NET 3.0-based Web Content Management system, EPiServer CMS seems to have been able to successfully fight off the immense interest in SharePoint 2007, even for public websites. Now 2 years after the release of MOSS 2007, my impression is that even Microsoft has recognised that their portal product has some shortcomings, and until Microsoft significantly improves the product, there is still a large market for website vendors like EPiServer.

Still, if you are considering EPiServer CMS for your projects, I would recommend that you set aside adequate  time to select the right implementation partner, in particular if you are based outside Sweden, where competent help may be harder to find. Some European countries, like Austria and Switzerland, still don’t have any local EPiServer partners according to the listing of partners. If you are in a country without a local EPiServer office, interesting things have sometimes been known to happen when you talk to system integrators that have proposed EPiServer. Some might pull in help from HQ in Sweden, while others may work with another regional office.

Finally, I recommend taking a closer look at the detailed EPiServer evaluation in the Web CMS Report from CMS Watch.