Last month Adobe bundled some of its web management products under a new name. The new Adobe Experience Manager includes Adobe CQ for web content management and Adobe Scene7 for organization, storage, and delivery of rich media and other digital assets. That's nice, but not the focus of this blog – so I didn't cover it and didn't pay much attention to it.
But today Adobe announced new webinar-specific capabilities in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). That makes it my business.
It can be very difficult to interpret what's new in Adobe's announcements due to the company's propensity for renaming and rebundling products every other week. I got help from Chris Nguyen and Peter Ryce of Adobe in a briefing and demo.
The one big new capability that did not previously exist is that enterprise web page designers and content managers now have dynamic access to information about company webinars that have been scheduled in Adobe Connect. So you can build a web page announcing upcoming webinars and instead of having to manually type in the details about date, time, title, description, etc… You can drag and drop that content straight from your Connect account. That's a nice feature and much appreciated. It should help speed up provisioning of web pages about events and reduce the potential for transcription errors by HTML coders who know nothing about the event in question.
As far as I can tell, everything else in the announcement echoes functionality that was already existent, but integrates it and makes it accessible under the overall AEM umbrella.
When I reported on the new Events Module in Adobe Connect 9 last year, I praised it as a major step forward in end-to-end webinar management, allowing drag and drop creation of rich media landing pages, registration, lead tracking, reporting, and analytics. The problem was that getting access to some of those capabilities meant separately licensing, learning, and operating a number of additional Adobe products. Adobe Experience Manager should now bring together the functionality into a single consistent platform.
Just to highlight some of the niftier integration points, I like the ability to create dynamic web pages that classify visitors and show them information on relevant webinars. Or the ability to easily embed the delivery of a webinar directly onto a web page so that a separate login and browser window is not needed. Or the ability to add social media links to things like Twitter and Facebook next to the webinar information to help spread awareness and build community.
In order to use the new integration, AEM users will have to license an add-on to their product. Adobe is targeting availability for June of this year.
