In Day 2 of Adobe Summit, I saw some great innovations and new features in the AEM Assets platform which together solve the most difficult challenges of Digital Asset Management.

Bringing AI to DAM

Today’s general session highlighted a new capability which I believe is as much of a revelationary step forward in Digital Asset Management as the original DAM tools. The smart tagging and metadata mining available with the conjunction of AEM Assets and Adobe Sensei enables marketers to finally manage Assets at scale.

We all know if the classic DAM problem: We spent all this time implementing a DAM and only to have it end up as a dumping ground of assets. The organizational discipline and architecture required to ensure terabytes of assets are all properly tagged, identified and organized is often just too much to maintain, especially for organizations who do not have assets as their central focus.

Every marketer wants to have their own Getty images at their fingertips, but Getty has spent years building the platform and process to enable their seamless experience.

The integration of AEM Assets and Adobe Sensei allows any organization to create a DAM with meaningful and searchable metadata by automatically tagging assets with appropriate metadata. This drastically reduces the effort for asset maintenance teams while increasing the utility and search-ability of the assets.

AEM Rockstar 2018 - Sharing Assets Between AEM Assets Instances

Later in the day I had the honor to judge the second annual AEM Rockstar. We had a chance to hear ideas and practical tips from the best and brightest in the AEM Community. One presentation particularly piqued my interest as it addressed a struggle I’ve dealt with on several projects: syndicating assets between DAM instances.

This is a common problem because almost no one had just one DAM. Most organizations have an Enterprise DAM, which holds the assets for the overall enterprise including digital marketing, print marketing, company brand assets and even internal assets. These assets ideally will be shared with Web or Digital DAMs which only contain the subset of assets required for use in the particular platforms. This is tough enough if there are multiple Asset Management tools in place, but even for organizations using just AEM Assets, sharing assets between instances is not seamless.

Brett Birschbach from HS2 Solutions presented a solution for this problem where AEM Assets can reference to Assets stored in another AEM Assets instance. This enables a Web DAM to reference assets from a remote Enterprise DAM. Brett has also opened a pull request to include this feature in ACS AEM Commons, so soon it should be available to all of the users of AEM.

For his submission, Brett was crowned the AEM Rockstar for 2018 and awarded a VR headset.

Adobe has been aggressively rolling out new features and functions to enable all of us to become experience makers. Together with community support, we are building the future of experience delivery and Digital Asset Management.