Editor's Note:  See below for special commentary by Cary Sherburne

Integration of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite and Adobe Experience Manager Creates Unified Design and Publishing Process

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Adobe today announced the integration of its digital publishing platform, Adobe® Digital Publishing Suite (DPS), and Web experience management solution, Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. This new integration, in combination with Adobe Analytics, enables publishers and brands to create, deliver and measure experiences across content-rich apps, like digital magazines, and the Web using one set of assets. As a result, organizations can accelerate application authoring, reduce publishing costs across channels, and deliver a consistent brand experience and content marketing strategy on the Web and mobile devices. With DPS customers using Adobe Creative Cloud to create stand-out apps, today’s announcement underlines the new connections the company is forging between its unrivaled content creation technologies and industry defining digital marketing solutions.

The mobile mandate has never been clearer. According to a recent Forbes Insights report commissioned by Adobe, which surveyed top-level marketing executives in large organizations, 78 percent of enterprises with customer-facing apps have seen a year-over-year increase in the size of their mobile app audiences, and more than two-thirds said the number of end users for internal apps has also grown. Despite this, publishers and brands have struggled to effectively and efficiently publish content-centric apps—such as digital magazines, sales tools, and annual reports—that can be viewed online or offline using tablets and smartphones. Cross-channel digital publishing remains expensive and time-consuming, is the domain of only select experts in the organization, and requires assets that live in silos separated from those used for Web publishing.

Now, the combination of DPS and Experience Manager allows organizations to deliver relevant, timely branded content by:

Authoring compelling app content faster—using Adobe Experience Manager’s intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, content and creative assets can now be seamlessly added to responsive HTML templates, which are then synced with DPS. Templates are uploaded as articles into an existing .folio within DPS for publishing to tablets, smartphones and the Web. Responsive templates automatically size to different mobile screen sizes allowing organizations to design once and streamline content publication to multiple devices and the Web.

Decreasing publishing costs across channels—creative teams, production staff and business managers can now leverage approved creative assets for delivery into content-centric apps, reducing dependence on Web production and design staff. They can ensure more timely delivery of content with greater control over mobile brand experiences as well as the ability to quickly update content as needed.

Maintaining a consistent brand and user experience—production staff can ensure brand consistency across Web and content-centric apps by using approved, versioned assets that are centrally located and managed through Experience Manager’s Digital Asset Management.

Lord Abbett, a U.S.-based money management firm, is utilizing DPS and Experience Manager to create a media-rich app to distribute information about market trends and analysis to customers and employees. In addition, Condé Nast uses the combination of Adobe technologies to accelerate production of its iconic Vanity Fair title for the iPhone. And CMO.com by Adobe—a website offering news, expertise and insights for senior marketing executives—is using DPS and Experience Manager to develop special editions of its content for tablets and smartphones, extending the reach of its content to a wider audience. Organizations and publishers can now get the best of both worlds, using DPS in combination with Adobe InDesign to create highly designed, pixel-perfect content or an Adobe Experience Manager template-based workflow for rapid delivery of beautifully designed apps.

In addition to the new integration with Experience Manager, DPS also offers full app measurement capabilities from Adobe Analytics, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. The combination of DPS and Adobe Marketing Cloud allows publishers and businesses to create, deliver and measure rich-content mobile apps, ensuring the most impactful content reaches the right audience.

Quotes
Nick Bogaty, head of digital publishing, Adobe

“DPS and Adobe Experience Manager make it significantly easier for publishers and brands to produce consistent, rich content for customers on mobile and the Web. Delivering interactive magazines for mobile devices and content for the Web used to require separate assets, teams and time. That’s now a thing of the past. The combination of our tools will arm savvy CMOs with a tremendous advantage, helping save time and money and providing a competitive brand advantage.”

Steve Reilly, director of digital communications, Lord Abbett

“At Lord Abbett, we continually look for ways to connect with our customers and employees, no matter what mobile device they’re using. By leveraging DPS and Adobe Experience Manager, anyone on our content creation team can now develop and deploy content across all of our properties. What’s more, we are able to manage our digital assets seamlessly—ensuring a unified look and feel, while simplifying workflow and gaining production efficiencies.”

Emily Smith, director of operations for corporate editorial, Condé Nast

“Adobe DPS is the go-to solution for publishing our magazine apps on mobile devices. The integration of Adobe Experience Manager not only enables us deliver a consistent Vanity Fair experience on multiple platforms, we have advanced our on-sale date by five days.”

Commentary by Cary Sherburne

This integration is a really exciting addition to Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.  Our readers will recall that we have been covering the evolution of this important application since its inception, and Adobe continues to improve its ease of use and utility.  Both DPS and AEM have been available for some time, with AEM being part of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud suite of solutions.  It is the integration of the two that is new.

In our Adobe Creative Cloud webinar that was conducted on February 26^th, our panelists pointed out that the ability for printers to convert printed materials, whether annual reports, brochures or other content, into interactive versions for phones and tablets as a value-added service is a “wide open field,” and not that difficult to do.

This latest integration makes that even easier by streamlining content development and management and enabling accelerated authoring with the ability to more easily repurpose content across channels.  Historically, building an app was expensive and time consuming, and according to Dave Dickson, Adobe’s Senior Product Marketing Manager for Digital Publishing Suite, could have taken up to six months and required programming skills. Now with the capabilities inherent in Digital Publishing Suite married with templates and content libraries from Adobe Experience Manager, this process is faster, less expensive, and puts the ability to create content and apps within easier reach of a broader array of personnel across the organization, while still ensuring brand integrity and regulatory compliance.

With Adobe Experience Manager’s drag-and-drop interface, content and creative assets can now be seamlessly added to responsive HTML templates that are branded and pre-approved and that automatically adjust to the device upon which they are being viewed. Templates are then synched with DPS for publishing.

Vanity Fair reports this integration has resulted in an advance in on-sale date of five days for its publication, a significant time-to-market improvement in a highly competitive marketplace.  But you don’t have to be a large publisher to offer these capabilities to customers. Tools like the ones made available through the DPS/AEM integration put these capabilities within reach of companies of all sizes. 

We encourage print service providers to take a close look at their businesses to see how this integration might fit into the mix and allow them to provide a set of brand-new services that can generate new revenue streams in a print environment that continues to contract. It’s a great way to add value to print, and an even better way to differentiate yourself in a market that is all too often highly commoditized.

As always, we would love to hear your stories as you experiment with new customer offerings such as the ones made possible by today’s announcement.