Share your experience using Wedia Digital eXperience Management

It's a powerful content management system – there's really no competitor in the market right now. The main use case is digital marketing. 

For example, if you have offers you want to publish immediately, and you want extended functionality like Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics on top of those offers, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is perfect. You can publish something in minutes. 

Adobe has other tools like Analytics, Target, Scene7, and now Centra (which is based on artificial intelligence). Integrating these products with your CMS gives you powerful digital marketing and customer journey analytics.

I haven't worked extensively with other content management systems like Sitecore, but from my experience with AEM, managing content is very user-friendly. 

I don't need to be a technical expert to change content, set up Target activities, or use those features in AEM. The whole environment is convenient and easy to use. For example, if you create a page in AEM and want to use it for analytics in Target, you just export it using options within AEM.

Area of improvement for Cloud Service:

For the last four years, I've been working on AEM as a Cloud Service. I feel the tool has all the features needed for production, but the problem is with skills. Depending on the skill level of the developers building the components within Adobe Experience Manager, you can have a very streamlined implementation or a very difficult one.

Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user faces issues in AEM as a Cloud Service. If I reach out to Adobe for something, they create a ticket, and then I might wait three to four days for a response. When I have issues, I want an immediate response. 

On AEM as a Cloud Service, this is the one thing I think Adobe needs to improve. They should resolve issues within a day so everything runs smoothly for the user.

Area of improvement for on-premises: 

For on-premises AEM, everything is managed by us, but since Adobe Experience Manager was not a very big market earlier (though it's growing now), there are limited clients. 

The cost of the tool is high, and maintenance is heavy – it's very costly. So, the developers working in AEM development might not always have the proper skills to develop the components. 

For example, in a normal website, we often see carousels which represent your website in a very dynamic way. Now, suppose you have two carousels on the page – one at the top and the next at the bottom. They have different purposes. If I'm a skilled developer, I'll create one component and serve both banners with the same component – a single, dynamic component. This makes it easy for content editors in the production environment to drag, drop, and change the content.

But, if I'm not an experienced developer or I don't have knowledge of AEM, I might create two components – one for the top and one for the bottom. Maintenance becomes heavy, and it's harder for the content team to understand which component to use.  A less experienced developer might create multiple components for the same function, increasing complexity and challenges.

Over the last three to four years, this lack of resources and skilled AM developers has created these kinds of issues.

I have been using it for nine years now. 

It's stable. From my understanding, especially with AEM as a Cloud Service, they've resolved those issues. When we were on AEM on-premises, if there was a bug, they'd do service pack installations to fix them. 

Now, since they're on AEM as a Cloud Service, Adobe just releases a new version, and it automatically upgrades in AEM Cloud.

It is an auto-scalable product. In my company, there are a lot of people. We have three developers, almost a hundred people changing content at runtime, and then admins like managers and product owners. 

The response time is long. Response time, plus the expected output I need should be clear. It shouldn't be like I raise a request, they send questions, I ask more questions, and it goes back and forth.

Neutral

We had something called 'Trader' – not an official product name, but a customized tool the company used. The problem was everything was in one place. 

For example, you might have product information in Salesforce, but in Trader, everything was in one place – product information, contacts, analytics. 

The company wanted a distributed environment: content in a different platform, frontend in a different platform, analytics, Adobe Target, Salesforce for product information, MuleSoft for integrations. They divided it across different products, and that migration is currently ongoing.

For AEM as a Cloud Service, Adobe sets everything up, so it's not time-consuming. You just raise a request with Adobe, and they'll create a program for you. If you have three projects, you'll have three programs. 

Under each program, they'll create multiple environments – dev, stage, production. In Adobe Experience Cloud, everything's connected. They have pipelines, a repository, and the admin console where you manage users. It's very easy. You set up a repository, commit your code, and run the pipeline.

For the last three years, it's been on the cloud. Some clients want to work on-premises, and others work on cloud, but I've been working on cloud for the past three years.

It is an expensive tool. 

Before using it, you should have some hands-on experience. Someone should show you a two-day demo of what a developer actually does, how exactly do we use it? 

If you understand how to use it, then it can be beneficial for development as well. Understanding how to use it allows to explain to clients the use cases where Experience Manager is effective.

It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer. With basic Java knowledge and about 15 days to a month of AEM training, including a week or two of hands-on experience, you should be good to go.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten, especially considering AEM as a Cloud Service. The best part is the seamless integration with other products. Everything is connected.  

In my current company, we just started using Adobe Target, and the integration with Experience Manager is very smooth. This, combined with how easy it is to manage digital marketing and publish content, is why I give it that rating. Development happens once, but maintenance is ongoing, and AEM makes maintenance simple.

I use the solution in my company for various purposes in areas like public websites, customer portals, self-service portals, employee intranet portals, corporate portals, and partner portals. The tool has multiple use cases. The tool also has digital e-commerce.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from security, easy functioning, and well-connected features. User management roles and permissions are super reliable. It is a highly scalable tool, specifically when the user has to face a scenario where the content handled grows in volume. Workflow is also a good feature of the tool. Recently, Liferay Objects was launched. Liferay Objects offers low code-no code capabilities, which are really good.

I have been using Liferay Digital Experience Platform for ten years. My company is a customer of the product.

It is a stable solution. Any product will have some bugs, but when our company opens up a ticket or raises our concerns with Liferay's support team, they solve it very quickly if we have the product's licensed version. The tool is extremely stable.

My company has 20 people who work on the product. I know that my company has around seven customers who use the tool.

I recommend the product depending on the use cases of the person who wants to buy it. If your use case is to develop a public site, customer portal, self-service, or intranet, I would say that you should go for the Liferay Digital Experience Platform. If your use cases are related to e-commerce, you need to evaluate your use cases against Liferay Digital Experience Platform, and you can use it if you find it to be a good fit. Otherwise, you should search for other platforms.

The solution's technical support is excellent. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase is easy.

The solution is deployed on the cloud and on an on-premises model. The product has its own cloud services. After the configuration of the cloud services tool is done in a certain environment, Liferay Digital Experience Platform can be installed on Liferay's cloud platform. Users can also get the tool as a bundle and install it on their preferred cloud, including AWS and Azure, or on an on-premises model.

From a deployment perspective, the tool is a great choice if you consider its quick time-to-market speed.

The product is neither cheap nor expensive. What Liferay Digital Experience Platform offers at its current price can be considered something that is worth the money.

I did not go for other products since the tool's open-source version was available. If I want to learn new features, I can easily try my luck using it to see if it offers enhanced security while getting to see how things work in the tool.

The integration capabilities of the product are super easy to use. I have integrated the tool with a lot of systems and other third-party solutions, and I have seen that it always works well. The integration part of the product is easy, efficient, and smooth.

Speaking about whether a beginner can easily learn to use it or not, I would say that it can be described as a moderately complex process for a new user.

Since it is a digital experience platform and new to digital e-commerce, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.