Edge Delivery Services: the future of Adobe Experience Manager
AEM
Realize
Bart Thierens
CX Technical Consultant
In today's fast-paced market, businesses are under constant pressure to deliver engaging digital content in an efficient way. While customers continuously expect a more streamlined experience, the challenges of operating a high-performing web publishing environment keep rising. Slow load times, traffic spikes, and the threat of cyber-attacks can cripple a website’s ability to engage.
Providing fast and reliable web experiences is key to stay ahead of the competition. Having the right content delivered swiftly to visitors and prospects greatly increases the impact a brand or company can have.
Creation of content is the first part of the equation, delivering it swiftly is the other. Combining both often proves to be challenging.
Edge Delivery Services (EDS) is a new suite of powerful tools from Adobe which not only assists businesses with creating content more efficiently, but also provides tools for publishing and delivering content in a more fast and performant way.
Content delivery
Adobe uses the "Keeping It 100" approach when it comes to delivering content using EDS. This "100" refers to the infamous Lighthouse score. This metric has become the industry standard for measuring performance of Web-based experiences. A proper Lighthouse score attributes to the experience for visitors and greatly impacts your SEO-score. A performance score of 100 is the highest score and means the website is optimized and content is shown in a fast and efficient way. EDS guarantees this 100 score out of the box!
Of course, showing the content is not the only thing that matters. After all, content still needs to be transferred to visitors over the network. The “Edge” in EDS refers to the boundary of the Adobe network, as close to the end user as possible. In the case of public websites, this is typically a Content Delivery Network or CDN. EDS is CDN-centric by default. This means latency is kept to an absolute minimum, with end users retrieving content from a network node as close as possible to them.
Content authoring
Next to a brand-new way for delivering content, EDS is equipped with various methods for authoring the content itself. With Document-Based Authoring (or DBA), authors can fuel web pages with content using simple Microsoft Word/Excel or Google Docs/Spreadsheets documents. There's no more need for expert knowledge or training for a dedicated CMS solution (like e.g. the classic Adobe Experience Manager Sites CMS). Instead, authors can enjoy the familiarity of their office toolset and use building blocks to assemble web pages, according to a simple agreed-upon format. The documents as they are created in Microsoft Word or Google Docs become the actual pages on your website. DBA will take care of transforming heading levels and basic text properties (e.g. bold, italics, links, lists) to corresponding HTML markup.
Now, where do these documents get stored? Well, Microsoft SharePoint or Google Drive appear to have all the necessary capabilities! Think about access permissions, versioning, collaborative editing, comments, tagging, etc. The only thing authors need is access to a Microsoft SharePoint or Google Drive environment to get started. The website information architecture simply follows the folder structure created in the shared storage environment.
Next to Document-Based Authoring, EDS also allows for content to live in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as Content Blocks. This means one can use the broad capabilities of the AEM enterprise CMS (e.g. workflows, the Multi-Site Manager, Content Fragments, translation, Launches, etc.), while still taking advantage of blazing-fast content delivery through the Adobe edge network. WYSIWYG authoring of the content however does not happen in the traditional AEM Page Editor, but rather in the new Universal Editor.
Universal Editor allows authors to manage web pages in a visual way, providing in-context editing and preview capabilities.
Architecture
When adopting Edge Delivery Services, you are buying into an Adobe managed ecosystem to a certain level: content managed through Document-Based Authoring and/or WYSIWYG Authoring, delivered through the Adobe edge network. Rendering itself happens using so-called JavaScript Blocks, requiring no AEM-specific expertise.
However, as your content management needs become more complex or you require more flexibility, it is good to know that Universal Editor can also work independently from Edge Delivery Services: organizations can choose to go for a more decoupled architecture, in which AEM works in full headless mode. The advantage of this approach is that the architecture is more composable by nature, allowing you to e.g. swap your CMS more easily down the road. It also means you do not need to use the Adobe rendering pipeline, but rather take full control over content delivery by providing your own front-end rendering application. Typical frameworks in that regard include Next.js or Astro.
The illustration below shows the different ways of managing and delivering content using the new Adobe suite of tools.
Notice that these various authoring options can co-exist within a single website, since in most cases one size does not fit all. It's important to align your content delivery strategy with your content management strategy, to make sure you tackle your content management use cases in an optimal way. With our CX Technology Advisory service, we can assist you with choosing the most appropriate solution for your business needs.
Adobe provides a more detailed architecture overview for Edge Delivery Services on Github.
Integrations
As one would expect, Adobe is continously expanding EDS use cases across the Adobe ecosystem. One example is digital forms. Want to set up web forms to gather feedback from your visitors or to digitize a data intake process? One of the standout features of EDS is its capability to integrate with AEM Forms. This service allows organizations to efficiently deliver interactive and dynamic forms across various devices and platforms while maintaining maximal Lighthouse score. Edge Delivery Services for AEM Forms enhances user experience with responsive designs and fast load times, leading to high conversion rates due to improved performance and user experience. Businesses can see tangible benefits in customer engagement. Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides valuable insights into how users interact with forms, allowing for ongoing optimization based on real-world data. Paired with comprehensive analytics, organizations can track user behavior, identify bottlenecks, and refine the form experience to further drive conversions. Furthermore, anyone can create forms for anyone, regardless of technical expertise, making form creation highly accessible. Edge Delivery Services for AEM Forms can also be integrated with your back-end systems, simplifying data collection and processing. With features like pre-fill capabilities, secure data handling, and support for digital signatures, Edge Delivery Services for AEM Forms reduces manual tasks, driving operational efficiency while delivering an exceptional user experience.
Apart from streamlining form management, EDS also excels in the efficient management and distribution of digital assets. EDS provide businesses with a powerful way to deliver images, videos, documents, and other media with optimal speed and quality. By leveraging Adobe's CDN network, EDS ensures that assets are delivered with minimal latency, maintaining high performance across different devices and locations. What sets assets delivered by EDS apart in this regard, is its focus on intelligent optimization. With automatic image resizing, assets are delivered in the best possible quality without sacrificing performance. Additionally, you can rest assured that Core Web Vitals remain optimized, leading to better page performance metrics and improved SEO rankings. Furthermore, the platform offers built-in analytics, so organizations can track how assets impact engagement and conversions, making data-driven decisions to enhance content effectiveness.
License model
Edge Delivery Services is available as a capability of AEM as a Cloud Service. If you are an AEM as a Cloud Service customer, you can start using it today. The same volume-based license model applies, based on the number of Content Requests being consumed.
In a nutshell
With Edge Delivery Services, Adobe brings a collection of next-generation tools to the long-standing Adobe Experience Manager suite. These tools are focused on flexibility, providing solutions across a wide range of use cases. Its technical underpinnings are built on top of a modern JavaScript transformation and rendering pipeline, requiring minimal expertise in traditional AEM components like Sling or JCR. This means developers can get up to speed more quickly and get solutions to market much faster. Moreover, the new architecture is focused on deliver lightning-fast experiences to customers, improving conversion rates and engagement.
EDS can help businesses solve todays content management and delivery struggles by providing a comprehensive set of tools to author, publish and deliver web experiences. Moreover, it is a solution that can integrate well with your existing Adobe ecosystem.
If you are interested to learn how you can start using EDS in your existing AEM infrastructure or if you are new to the Adobe ecosystem and want to further explore this toolchain, don’t hesitate to contact us 😊