My Quick Takeaways from Adobe Summit 2019


The Adobe Summit took place at the Venetian/Palazzo in Las Vegas March 24-28 this year. It was a grand success with 17,000 attendees and keynotes/appearances from Shantanu Narayen (Adobe), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Reese Witherspoon (Actress), Drew Brees (New Orleans Saints), Mindy Kaling (The Office), Pam Oliver (Fox), Huber Joly (Best Buy) and many others.

I attended as many sessions (mostly labs) as I could cram into my schedule and made brief appearances at the TEKsystems booth during the breaks between sessions. What follows is a list of features and learnings that I found noteworthy. Not all of the following were unveiled in 2019. However, the point was either reinforced for me at the Summit or the feature is new enough to warrant attention.

Treat this list as a stream of consciousness. A cleaned up version of my rough notes. Food for thought, rather than an exquisitely researched paper. Whew! I feel like I'm off the hook now for any -- as in many, I'm sure -- errors that might have crept in below. But sharing is caring. So here goes.
  • General Topics
    • Account-Based Experience (ABX) is the result of Adobe's emerging partnership with Microsoft and LinkedIn
    • ServiceNow integration for customer service
    • Open data initiative (ODI) in partnership with SAP
  • Performance Optimization
    • When considering a shared data store, your options are file, S3 and cloud. File being the least robust. Adobe can provide you with scripts for migrating away from a file-based shared data store
    • Remember to leverage binary-less replication for performance optimization during the publish process
    • Leverage the PDF Rasterizer tool for making PDF images print more consistently
  • When importing assets in bulk, consider the following
    • Consider removing sub-asset generation and page extraction
    • Disable XMP writeback 
    • Set max parallel jobs to half of the available processors
    • Offload jobs to worker instances
    • Disable tika for mime types that don’t require full-text search
    • Disable DAM update workflow
    • Don't use AEM Desktop App
  • Image Renditions
    • Renditions can be generated statically during the DAM Asset Update workflow using the 
    • Renditions can also be generated dynamically using the Named Image Transform Servlet. This is preferred unless there's a need to store certain renditions in the DAM for searching and page authoring
  • Upgrades
    • SP includes enhancements for current releases
    • CFP is usually for older versions
    • SP/CFP cannot be uninstalled so take backups to allow for rollbacks
    • Use validate package feature
    • Don’t use CRX QuickStart install folder to install, always use the Package Manager
  • Your content can be exported as JSON for headless implementations or for external consumers using one of the following approaches (try to extend core components or use them as a model/example since they are already capable of exporting JSON)
    • Assets HTTP API (supports CRUD)
      • Provides limited control over the exported JSON. Everything in the folder will be exported
      • Doesn't respond to the "tidy" selector in the JSON URL
      • Allows the author to set the content order (switch to list view, use handles on right to move items up or down)
      • Assets API does not automatically reflect changes in DAM but there is a tool in ACS Commons to fix this issue
    • Content Services
      • Assets API only works for assets, i.e. everything under content/dam but Content Services can get anything including content under sites 
    • Custom Sling Model Exporter (for complex scenarios not handled adequately by one of the above two options)
  • SPA Editor
    • /content/.../page-name.model.tidy.json to see JSON model for the entire page which can then be consumed by a front-end framework/SPA for rendering 
    • Note that when selecting a content fragment asset to drag and drop on to a page, it is not obvious which fragments to select unless the fragments are named to reflect the underlying content fragment model (e.g. event fragment)
    • To create/modify content fragment models, go to tools/assets/...
    • Server-side rendering (SSR) for the SPA Editor is in 6.5 SP1
    • The colon prefix in JSON is for reserved words 
  • User Management
    • Do not use an email address as username if people might switch domains when they move across the company internally
    • Manage asset rights carefully otherwise, if a user leaves the company his/her assets can no longer be accessed
  • Adobe Sensei
    • Smart image cropping
    • Smart video cropping is coming soon
    • Smart tagging (you might require subscriptions to Adobe Stock since smart tagging works by comparing the image to be tagged with images in the Adobe Stock compendium)
    • You need an average of 50 images to train Sensei on how to auto-tag a new category of images, e.g. for a new car model you just rolled out
  • Miscellaneous
    • Layout container is aka responsive grid
    • Note that experience fragments can only be based on editable templates and are not stored in the DAM as assets (CFs are though)
    • Connected/remote DAM (must be on AMS) config is for syncing assets but each user/author has to login the first time with own creds to access the connected DAM
Thanks for reading. Please like or comment, especially if you found this blog post helpful or found an error or inaccuracy in any of what I wrote above.

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