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Content teams know the frustration intimately. Monday morning starts with updating product descriptions in Shopify, switches to publishing blog posts in WordPress, then moves to campaign pages in Adobe Experience Manager. Each platform demands different skills, separate logins, and disconnected workflows. By lunch, three hours have disappeared into context switching rather than creating compelling content.

Managing content across disparate systems (e.g., AEM, e-commerce platforms, WordPress) creates operational nightmares. One global fashion retailer's content team spent excessive time navigating interfaces instead of content creation and strategy, requiring lengthy platform-specific training for new hires.

Over a year after the initial release, Adobe's Universal Editor has evolved into a unified editing layer for diverse platforms like WordPress, headless CMS, and traditional AEM, allowing teams to manage content through a single interface.

Solving the multi-platform content chaos is just one aspect. In this update, I’ll also share how the Universal Editor is removing the infamous learning curve tax associated with most CMS projects and how it is different when it comes enterprise control. I’ve also included some implementation considerations based on my experience and will wrap up with some recommendations for your implementation.

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.