Want to know how and what are the appropriate ways to deliver relevant experiences for your customers on Digital Media? Want to develop an understanding on the same? So, here is the below Webinar by Aniruddha Joshi, Sr Solution Consultant, Adobe, to clear all your doubts on the same.
Q & A During Webinar With Aniruddha Joshi
Q- If a site has been created using WordPress, how can AEM be useful in that scenario? If a content management system like WordPress is already being used then how we can use it?
A- Obviously if you are using a tool like WordPress then the experience manager does not play a lot of role. But there are other tools that you could look at. So for example as I said targeted experiences could be delivered through various mechanisms and one of the ways is to…let’s say when it comes to personalization for example, you might use something like a target which actually integrates with WordPress as well. So on your WordPress site you would have some sections which you want to personalize, there is a mechanism to put adobe target code. As an example and let’s say, if I’m coming from north which is Delhi then you give the experience which is relevant to the person coming from north of India whereas if I’m coming from south of India then you give a different experiences, that is also possible, so there are various tools. Obviously experience manager will not help in creating that experience for WordPress site. It is more from delivering that experience online with our tools. And I use experience manager as just you know a mechanism to show you how things could be done. There could be various ways of doing it.
Q- How does a tool like AEM detect information like you know gender for example? Or so, how would AEM detect gender for someone if it is not been, you know, manually entered by the visitor?
A- Correct, we don’t. So the way it works is let’s say if you have a login section to your site, the personalization that I showed you was in context of a login section, so where a person actually logs in there could be various mechanisms that you would have your users registered. Typically these days’ sites collects the information about you know, minimum information let’s say email address, name and gender if it’s an ecommerce site. If you have collected that kind of information, you would use if for personalization. There could be other ways as well so let’s say for example, if I have a tendency to browse certain sections of the site more often, right, so for example if I browse only the men’s section of the site probably the male related experiences make more sense towards me. So that is how you would, that would be another way of detecting what the user interests are, unless, obviously if you have to have a 100% assurance that the person, who is visiting the site is male then you have to ask him that information through the login process or the registration process and that could be used as a way to personalization.
Q- You had mentioned about, you did not touch upon personalization through email. And I think, that is a question which has come earlier before even you talked about, So would you through some light Aniruddha on, how personalization can be achieved on email as a media?
A- So personalization through email, basically let’s say, one of the examples that I usually give is to some of our customers travel and hospitality based, and you would have noticed in India as well, it so happens, that if you let’s say book for or search for Mumbai-Delhi as a sector, right, and you kind of don’t buy, you just drop off. You will be retargeted, that is one way, you will obviously be retargeted into different areas, but with the analytics what information is available is, who this person was and what did he searched for. So if I’m a regular visitor, you obviously will have my cookie, you will have my email id, you will know all that information about me. You know, who dropped off. Once you have that drop of information, you would use that for personalization in your email. So you will send the personalized emails saying that you know, Mumbai-Delhi sector rate have gone down or something like that, some offer you might want to give. So that is one way of looking at it. The other way could be, you know something about the user, so there are tools within the adobe’s pack as well, so for example adobe campaign, is one of the tools that we have, where you have the profile information about the users. So based upon that profile and based upon some kind of a scoring mechanism you would be able to give, which offers to give to different set of users and adobe campaign is very good at this kind of segments the audience and then gives the personalized emails for those audiences, so that also is one of the ways of looking at it. Those are the two things that I can think of but if there is any specific scenario that you are looking for definitely I’ll be able to, you know, so answer that as well.
Q- Are all top 5 Indian languages being supported by AEM? So within among Indian languages does AEM support various languages?
A- Yes, it supports, I mean. This is all web UI, It’s all the web related thing. So it supports Indian languages as well so that is not an issue. Infect one of our biggest customers, the biggest deals last year with that we worked with was a vernacular newspaper in the south. Let me not take name, so here, as I’m not supposed to. But it was a vernacular newspaper in south and it is one of the biggest news papers in the south and they are kind of using the same platform that I showed you today, to deliver personalized language content.
Q- If someone has a wordpress based site, is it possible for them to port that on AEM? Is that you know compliant like port or will they have to rework everything?
A- Well the mother wood statement would be saying Yes. I don’t want to do that. Well it depends on the scenario, it is quite possible. So AEM, the way AEM works is, it can ingest content from different sources as well. So let’s say, whatever content is there in wordpress, either we write some plugin to get that content using various mechanisms that are there within AEM to get that content and store it into AEM and then build a site on the Experience manager or there could be mechanisms where you would transfer xml files between the two systems and get the data into AEM. So the answer is yes, it is done but it is very situation dependent. What situation you are in. So although I’m saying yes, it could be as easy as you know, just transferring the entire data or it could be as difficult as that only certain sections of the page needs to be transferred. So depending upon the situation, we can take a look at how to take that data out of wordpress and get it into AEM.
Q- Can you share example of a site which is responsive and an example of a site which is adaptive then we talk about mobile presence. For people to understand the difference. Any URL, you can refer to which people can see?
A- I showed you the example in my demo but if you look at chevy.com Chevrolet site, that is build on AEM, adobe experience manager and it has a responsive kind of content so if you looked at chevy.com, even I think the India site as well works on Adobe Experience Manger. If you go to either US site, it definitely does. I have personally checked out the site on tablets and the mobile devices, it works quite awesome. So that’s an example of a very responsive kind of site that they have built. And in a car industry where experience is everything, you kind of have to build a responsive site. So that is an example of chevy.com. Whereas, I think McDonald is one of the sites I think, which is adaptive design. I’m not so sure, but McDonald is I think having an adaptive design. That is one the examples that I have.
Q- one of the ways to take care of personalization and having consistent experience, having mobile presences using a tool like this. But I’m sure, in absence of tool, people make lot of mistakes, which they don’t realize you know unless they check into a tool like this. What are the common mistakes people make when they are not using a tool and which are present too then even without using a tool they would be doing a great job. There are always constraints without using a tool they can’t do everything. But some of the common mistakes people make which I think if you can refer that would be very useful even if people are not going to use the tool.
A- Very difficult question to answer. Well if you looking at things like if you going to go with completely manual kind of a process, then there are things like, every time you want to update the content, it is a lengthy process. One of the ways that I can think of, lets if you are not using a tool let’s say, I don’t know if wordpress has any workflow mechanism for approval etc. but there are various mistakes that happen when there are hands between marketing and IT. Marketing might want a page to be delivered in a particular way, but someone who is actually coding that page is doing it a little bit differently and that page gets uploaded. If you are having some workflow mechanisms, some controls over that site, then it is much more easier to manage. The second area is you know the mobiles are completely managed as a stylo. That means, you, whenever the content is updated, let’s say, if you are doing a product launch and I give this example all the time. Very great hotel brand in India, so they created, they have added a new property within their folio and the site was updated, the website was updated, but one of my colleagues was searching for that property on a mobile and it was not available. So, that is a typical mistake that happens right. You always tend to forget to update or may not be forgeted or you know just takes time to update that mobile site if it is managed separately as a stylo/cylo. So those are the things I can think of, there are various other aspects, I mean applications as well. How many code bases are you going to maintain, so if you are going to have a different device and some cases that might be required as well. Native applications to be build for different devices. So for example you build a application for iphone, you build application for android, there are various code bases, that you have to maintain for different versions and in some cases, it might be required, I don’t deny that, but in some cases it might be easy to just maintain one code base and one common place where the content is updated and just sync it back to all the devices. You don’t have to spend lot of money managing separate stylos again, within the mobile itself. So those are the few of the things that I can think of, one of the areas that I have personally seen is that people, the assets are scattered. So no one knows where that asset went finally. So those are the another sort of areas that I can think of where people tend to do mistakes and you just don’t find the right content.
Q- What kind of information can be picked from cookies. You know, what kind of personal information can be extracted from a cookie?
A- Well, unless you put it in there, cookie does not keep any information as such. It’s just a text blog cart that you put in the browser you to identify. So cookie does not give you information as such, but if you are managing site, let’s say if you are managing an ecommerce site for example, then if I have browsed the men’s section of my e- commerce site often then you might want to add some point, you might want to mark that cookie saying that, you know, this person is interested in the men’s section of the ecommerce site and probably it makes sense to give more targeted experience towards men’s. Or it could be on a, let’s say, I go to flipkart often right, so and everyone I believe here does, I mean lot of people purchase online today. If there are certain sections of the site that you are interested in probably they will bubble up in your journey and the reason is that some information about you is being captured. Cookie as I said par se it does not give you any personal information, it just, whatever the site wants to capture, it will store it in a cookie and surface it as and when required.
Q- How does the licensing works and can you share any cost range jacket?
A- So, I’m a technologist as you could have seen that I know the product a lot, don’t work on the licensing aspects but I can tell you a few things. They way CQ is licensed is on a JVM instance kind of working. So when you are actually delivering a project on CQ5, or rather AEM is what we call it. Sorry I referred to an older name of the product. It was called as CQ5 earlier and when you delivering projects on AEM, there are two areas, there is a publish side of things and there is an authoring side of things. What I showed you was an authoring side of things. So you would at least minimum need two instances and those are what we charge. We don’t charge anything for the development side of things. Meaning if you are developing something for CQ5 you can build lot of components. Drag and drop things that I showed you. You could build your own mechanisms to drag and drop etc. So if you are developing something like that, there is no license fee as such for the development instance and if you are running it of your laptop, but only the publish and the servers which are actually going to deliver those are charged. From the price range perspective I think, marketing teams and the sales team would be better equipped to answer that question and there are various options as well available, various modules that I spoke about earlier so let’s defer that price thing related aspects to the sales team. If you have interest, you can just email us and we will be able to give you that information.
Q- If you have a mobile adaptive site, someone has mentioned that m version of the site is hurting their SEO performance. Is there any relationship between, you know, creating a mobile version and that is impacting your SEO performance or should people take care of some aspects when they are building an adaptive or responsive site when it comes to SEO and by SEO I think both aspects are important one is SEO on mobile and second is will mobile come in a way to impact their rankings, SEO rankings on laptop or desktop?
A- Well this is a new to me, I would like to understand, why the SEO performance is going down with the m.version of site. I don’t know why would that happen. I can’t think of a way, why would that happen. But to answer the SEO related aspects of things in AEM. What we do is most of the pages that are there, these are Meta tags and the tagging that is available within the AEM as well. And the components, when we develop for AEM, we take care that things like titles of the pages, the URLs so if you observed my demo carefully, you will see that URLs were very good. I mean, if I was looking at a certain product, then the product name was in the URL. So those are the aspects we really take care. I don’t know if that is one of the or those are the things that are hurting your SEO performance. I don’t know what could be the answer.
Q- Does the app development section of AEM develops the app from scratch and converts it into an apk file?
A- Well, in the interest of time actually I build the app very quickly. Usually the demo takes over an hour or two to actually run through. Yes, what happens is, there are two things that you should keep in mind. So, what I used or what I demonstrated today if you saw the terminal screen then some green characters flowing on the screen, that was something which I call phone gap CLI. The phone gap was the application that I used. What it does, this creates an application for, at least in the demo that I showed today, it creates an application for IOS and installs it in the IOS stimulator, so it actually creates that executable as well. So if I had an Android stimulator, it would have created an apk file for android. Now there is also what you can check out, and I mean, this is free so you just go ahead and check it out. There is something called as phone gap build. If you just google for phone gap build, you would be able to figure out, you will reach the site called phone gap, and what it allows you to do is, if you have HTML and JavaScript files and if you want to package them as a application, mobile application, just create that structure of html and JavaScript files, css files, whatever you want to do and go to phone gap and upload your zip file over there. It will give you different flavours of the applications. So if you want it for blackberry, it will kind of give you blackberry, if you want to have it on an IOS, it will give you an IOS. So it will build out an apk file for the content that you have, you are doing. And within the AEM platform as well, we have that integration, so I kind of downloaded the zip file and created an ios application for it. But within the platform itself, you can directly integrate with phone gap, which is our cloud service. Right, so it is a cloud service that is available. Directly you can integrate with phone gap and build your applications directly on the phone gap interface and just get the apk file from there. So that’s how I would answer it. I hope, I answered it correctly, or I answered your question. It allows you to build multiple applications for multiple devices.
Q- Is AEM completely cloud base enabled?
A- AEM is available as multiple options, whether you can choose, whether you want to deliver it on cloud or you want to deliver it on premise. So it’s available on premise as well as on cloud.
Q- If someone wants to you know, use a product like AEM, is it advisable to launch, you know, new products and services across all digital platforms at one go or is it possible to do, you know one by one. You know, not looking into all digital platforms, but periodically? What would you advise?
A- Very good question actually. Very good question. So, there are…what I would say, typically what I have seen at least in India and whatever customers I mean. When it comes to multiple channels, they would either go for a responsive kind of a design so they cater to the mobile audiences as well within that site. But I have also seen some customers who just want to do the first the desktop version, and then go to the mobile version, so that also is one of
the options. Totally depends on the situation. The platform does not restrict you in any way. Platform is very flexible. Platform allows you to do it in multiple ways that you would think. I have also seen some customers who just take few sections of the site, so they will not even go the entire thing so they will just say migrate if it’s a hotel brand, let’s say they will migrate only the properties section of it where as booking engine still remains on their original site. So those are the kind of flexibilities are also there. It depends on the situation what you would choose. I would, if you ask me personally, sometimes it makes sense to you know, split your project into smaller tasks and may be address one area at a time or go the responsive way if it suits you.
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