Musings on the Human Condition

  AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) is Adobe's software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), which provides clients with a CMS platform (Sites), Digital Asset Management (DAM, or simply Assets), and Forms. It was released a few years ago with several upsides and a few downsides. In the intervening years, Adobe has continued to build on the pros while the cons continue to dwindle. Some fairly large companies have been enticed with licensing discounts and package deals to embrace CS and migrate their AEM instances to it. We have helped a few of our clients with this journey and some are now live on CS. This post briefly describes the key steps involved in such a migration. Assess Current State The migration from on-premise (data center) or cloud-hosted to CS is not a lift-and-shift. Significant refactoring is required in order to make your AEM implementation ready for CS. Additionally, it's a great opportunity to modernize and clear off technical debt.  A

This year's Summit was as good as ever! As usual, there were hundreds of sessions covering every imaginable topic. However, there were a few themes that were new this year and deserve special mention. Generative AI Adobe's implementation of GenAI comes in the form of their Firefly toolkit (currently in beta) that takes in a textual description of an image and generates artificial images that match the provided description. For example, you could ask Firefly to create a "flat design logo for a towing company featuring a tow truck using grey and orange and primary colors". And Firefly will produce several images to choose from and tweak. You can customize things like the aspect ratio, content type (photo, graphic, or art), styles, color and tone, lighting, and composition to create truly custom and unique content. Additionally, Firefly can also generate text effects.  Features under development include vector recoloring, text to brush (create custom Photoshop brushes)

As we head into 2023, there are three key pillars that ought to be part of every client's digital marketing strategy, described here in the context of the Adobe stack.  In other words, these are the most likely three initiatives Adobe clients are likely to be embarking on 2023. First-Party (1P) Data As browsers and devices begin to restrict third-party data, companies need to ramp up their 1P data collection.  This is accomplished by incentivizing users to provide their data (for example their email address ) by registering on a website or to download a PDF, etc. Adobe's Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP), which is part of the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is a key component of Adobe's martech stack for enabling efficient 1P data collection  Personalization 1P data enables companies to attach web analytics data (captured via Adobe Analytics or a similar product) to the user. And products like Adobe Target, Customer Journey Analytics (CJA), Customer Journey Optimiz

  I've been attending Adobe Summit every year for years and it never fails to disappoint. This year was no exception. Whether your cup of tea is shorter 30-minute sessions or longer 2-hour training workshop-style immersion sessions (my personal favorites) or the not-to-be-missed Summit Sneaks  (cutting-edge innovations) hosted this year by the entertaining Kristen Bell, there's something for everyone. In the following paragraphs I'll highlight the key takeaways I came away with and point you to some of the must-watch sessions. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) is clearly the future and was at the center of a bulk of the sessions. AEP is much more than the Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RT-CDP) you see in the typical sandbox. This is where most of Adobe's next-generation products are being incubated. Although the CDP is foundational, several products sit atop the CDP and leverage it's near-real-time 360 view of the customer to deliver their magic. Customer Journey

I recently came across a post that highlights a disturbing trend. Some white-collar workers are working from home and holding down two full-time jobs without explicit consent from their employers.  As it turns out, I know someone who has had first-hand experience of this unethical practice with not one but two colleagues in recent weeks. In other words, it is real. Some unscrupulous defenders of this practice have suggested that this is a practice to be admired. They say that if you hire someone to build a shed at $100/hr for 20 hours ($2,000) and they complete it in 10 hours, you still owe them $2,000.  That may be true if you're being paid by the job. But a full-time job is precisely not that. When you're done with your assigned tasks, you're expected to look around and see how you can make yourself useful by mentoring and helping colleagues, picking up stories from the backlog, refactoring your own code, resolving technical debt, getting to know your team members, etc. 

As I wrote in a previous post , about five years ago I completely transitioned from handwritten notes to digital notes. I ended up choosing Sublime (aka Sublime Text 3) as my text editor and have stuck with it.  The file structure I use for notes is as follows: A daily file named mmddyy.txt for all notes related to that day (mostly work-related, but can also include personal stuff like a random conversation with a school teacher that has no other home) Topical files for notes relating to specific technologies, e.g. python-notes.txt Topical files for notes relating to other topics, e.g. chess-notes.txt Although the topical files don't need to be searched via the file system, the daily notes often need to be searched in a way that can search across all files to, for example, find a note regarding a specific client conversation that happened sometime in the year 2020. Using a plain text format for these notes not only removes any dependence on a proprietary product, e.g. Evernote, but