This is Impressive: A Microsoft Guy at #AdobeSummit
As my practice at Slalom is evolving, so am I. I am spreading my wings outside of the tight Microsoft Office 365 stack and into other products and stacks in the Digital Experience Management arena like Sitecore, Drupal and Adobe. I had the wonderful opportunity to attend this year’s Adobe Summit. I was excited to learn something new, and I wasn’t let down.
Adobe is all about the experience, it is their mantra. This rang true throughout the week, across the sessions and demos: experience is king. This feeds through to their products, from the interfaces for content creators to the final output, and even across this conference! I felt this conference was more media rich and more creative than the ones I’ve gone to in the past. It made the week more engaging.
Among the wide array of things I discovered was how feature rich their cloud platform is and it’s amazing capabilities:
I’ll dive into a few of the capabilities of the Adobe Cloud that I found most intriguing and impactful (in order of awesomeness):
Adobe Sensei
Sensei is their AI for images.
It’s an intelligent image recognition service which provides real value to creators by saving them time and taking out some real tedious grunt work. Here’s some examples of what I saw it can do:
It can automatically crop an image, and not just based on dimensions, but based on the interest of the image. Once your designer finishes with an image and uploads it, Sensei can auto-crop it to fit into each size necessary for your seamless cross-channel experiences.
Sensei can automatically determine the image quality, and based on that perform automated workflows to help streamline the content creation process. If the image quality is low, it will reject it and notify the content creator. If it’s good, tag it, crop it, and upload it to your Digital Asset Management (DAM) system and make it available to marketers in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).
Sensei has some impressive image recognition capabilities. In a demo, they had a hand drawn sketch of a movie poster with some animals on it, took a picture of it, then uploaded to Photoshop. Once there, Sensei translated the sketch of a few animals into actual photos of the animals, all in the right position, it then compiled the images in the same manner of the hand sketch. From there they created a movie poster. Since it was all in Photoshop and in the cloud, using their user profile data and personalization capabilities (via Adobe Target), Sensei could then redesign the movie poster, to fit each primary audience type, and channel, as needed. It was really impressive to see, and for some reason I didn’t take a photo. Trust me, impressive.
Sensei also works with AEM by providing dynamic page layouts based on the users’ personalization data it knows about the user. AEM can change its layout of some widgets on a page, not just the content, but the layout, and what widgets to show, based on personalization.
Sensei is fairly new and really impressive. We’ll need to keep a close eye on this!
Adobe I/O
To leverage Sensei and the many other services in the Adobe cloud, developers will need to get to know the updated Adobe I/O. This is Adobe’s entry point to accessing everything from the Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud to the Cloud Platform. It reminds me of the Microsoft Graph, which is great. We need a single point of entry to any cloud platform this robust.
You can read more about Adobe I/O from the Summit at https://medium.com/adobe-io/adobe-i-o-at-adobe-summit-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-product-and-platform-offerings-for-c7bfd6196569
Experience Data Model (XDM)
Underlying their cloud is their data model, the Experience Data Model, XDM. This data model normalizes the data used by all of their services into a common model. As you build up user profiles, products, pages, etc. the XDM keeps things uniform and consistent. XDM is a standardized extensible scheme for representing all experience data to enable immediate semantic understanding of cross channel data.
If you’re going to do anything in the Adobe cloud, you’ll need to know and understand the XDM. Fortunately it’s open source: https://github.com/adobe/xdm.
Launch, by Adobe
Yea, that’s the full legal name… Launch, by Adobe… Naming aside, Launch is kind of a no brainer, and glad Adobe thought of it. As large websites manage many different hooks and services monitoring their website, with countless tags embedded on each page, Launch seeks to streamline this while improving performance of the site.
Launch does the heavy lifting, once, on each page, and then provides the necessary information to each of your tags, like Google Analytics, Facebook pixel, DoubleClick, etc. It’s also all configuration based, no code needed, and partners provide their integrations as add-ons for your site, so no more needing to embed Javascript on your site manually!
Microsoft
I know, I know, I can’t go one article without highlighting Microsoft, but they were there! Microsoft and Adobe have a growing relationship, with integrations in Office 365 and providing hosted services in China on Azure. It’s nice to see everyone playing nicely.
Onto More Adobe
Though the Adobe space is all new for me, here at Slalom, we have a deep partnership with Adobe, specializing in Experience Manager. There was a large team from Slalom at the Adobe Summit, all experts in their own rights. It was also great to connect and network among my peers in this new space. I look forward to continuing down the Adobe road!
