The vision of a modern component content management system (CCMS) offers a centralized hub for producing modular, reusable long-form content across all channels. Its goals are clear — improve authoring productivity, reduce costs, increase content accuracy, and accelerate delivery. Any work pertaining to long-form content requires extensive coordination among many stakeholders for planning, writing, reviewing, translating, or publishing. The long-form content lifecycle also involves project managers, who don’t typically use a CCMS, to initiate projects or allocate tasks. Often, this entire project management effort is either manual or managed via spreadsheets, emails, and outdated project management tools. Disconnected tools, siloed teams, and inefficient processes exacerbate problems even further. This results in disconnects between upstream planning and downstream execution, poor coordination among teams, time-consuming review and approval cycles, projects delays, additional costs, and limited performance insights.

Still, organizations often fail to equip their content professionals with the best work management tools, which complement the CCMS and effectively manage the flow of content across its entire lifecycle. For content teams, this makes it difficult to achieve streamlined content operations. For project managers, this results in a lack of visibility across the entire content supply chain and impedes proper content ROI measurement. And for decision makers, this prevents them from having the data they need to optimize decisions and workflows. But what if your content management tools could work seamlessly with powerful work management capabilities?

Adobe is excited to introduce a native integration of Adobe Workfront in Adobe Experience Manager Guides. This powerful combination brings together market-leading structured content management and AI-powered enterprise work management, helping organizations to reach the full potential of their content.

Common barriers in content lifecycle management

Content is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise. From product documentation and knowledge bases to support portals and regulatory content – high-quality, contextually relevant content drives customer engagement, operational efficiency, and ultimately business success.

Yet, organizations consistently face common operational barriers in managing content projects and the content lifecycle. In fact, a 2023 S&P Global report found that 65% of those surveyed want more automation, collaboration, custom workflows, and the ability to manage key projects effectively.

But what are these barriers, specifically?

1. People and project isolation.

Due to organizational structures, content teams often work in silos, disconnected from broader business initiatives and project management oversight. Cross-functional collaboration can be limited and lack transparency, making it difficult to align content tasks with overall project goals, or broader resource planning and management.

2. Process complexity and inefficiency.

Without strong integration between project management and content teams, processes become convoluted. Work gets duplicated, teams fall out of sync, content quality suffers, and projects miss deadlines. Content teams get bogged down in status update meetings instead of focusing on their core job — creating high-quality content. And tracking progress, coordinating tasks, and managing resources leading to increased costs and friction. Furthermore, the lack of comprehensive reporting and project monitoring tools hinders optimization efforts to balance visibility with execution, process standardization, and ensuring compliance.

3. Technology disconnect.

Enterprise project management platforms often lack the nuanced understanding of complex content lifecycles, while specialized content tools lack robust, enterprise-grade project management capabilities. This forces organizations into difficult choices — build expensive, custom integrations that require ongoing maintenance or simply live with the pain, relying on manual coordination and sacrificing speed, quality, and team sanity.

Unfortunately, these challenges aren't just inconveniences. They directly impact time-to-market, content quality, compliance, and the bottom line. Businesses need a new approach that breaks down silos, streamlines processes, and connects the technology dots, including:

• Advanced project management capabilities that easily adapt to content management and lifecycle workflows.
• Improved visibility and transparency between teams and their project managers.
• Monitoring and reporting capabilities to enable resource and performance management, and auditing for compliance.

Working better with Experience Manager Guides and Workfront.

Adobe Experience Manager Guides is an AI-powered, cloud-native CCMS designed for intelligent content management at scale. As part of Adobe Experience Manager, Experience Manager Guides provides a robust foundation for structured content creation and delivery.

Adobe Workfront is a leading cloud-based, AI-powered work management solution helping teams plan, track, manage, and collaborate on work efficiently across the enterprise. It serves as a centralized system of record, integrating work across diverse teams and applications.

Now, these two solutions are natively integrated to directly combat the core challenges hindering content project success.

New project and task management capabilities for Experience Manager Guides

This integration goes well beyond the native project management capabilities of Experience Manager Guides by bringing advanced work management capabilities directly into the Experience Manager Guides environment, while simultaneously providing Workfront users with visibility into content workstreams. Here’s how it transforms content operations:

• Unified task management: Content teams can now create, view, manage, and update Workfront tasks directly within Experience Manager Guides. Project managers gain visibility into these tasks and their real-time status within their Workfront dashboards. This eliminates the need for duplicate task creation and manual status updates. While basic review task creation exists natively in Experience Manager Guides, the integration unlocks the full spectrum of task types linked directly to Workfront projects.
• Streamlined collaboration and workflows: The integration facilitates smoother, cyclical review processes among authors and reviewers, with clearly defined states for accurate progress tracking. Cross-functional collaboration is enhanced as tasks related to long-form content become visible within broader business initiatives managed in Workfront, rather than existing in isolation.
• Actionable notifications and visibility: Users receive Workfront notifications (including configurable digests and reminders) directly within Experience Manager Guides and via email — ensuring everyone stays informed about assignments and deadlines. An actionable task widget on the personalized Experience Manager Guides landing page keeps assignments front and center. Task status is continuously synchronized, providing real-time visibility for both content teams and project managers.
• Enhanced project monitoring and reporting: Project managers can leverage Workfront's powerful reporting and analytics capabilities to monitor project health, track performance against goals, assess costs, and optimize resource allocation across projects. This includes visibility into resource utilization and load balancing capabilities.
• Airtight compliance and auditing: For organizations in regulated industries, maintaining a clear audit trail of the content lifecycle is critical. Workfront provides comprehensive audit logs capturing who did what, when, and any associated comments for every task. This granular tracking supports compliance reviews and ensures accountability.

Tangible benefits across the organization

This integration delivers significant advantages for everyone involved in the content lifecycle as it breaks down silos, automates and simplifies process, and consolidates the technology stack allowing users to work in their native tools without being disconnected.

For content teams.

• Work within your familiar environment. See and work on Workfront tasks — from authoring, reviewing, translating, and publishing — without leaving the Experience Manager Guides interface.
• Boost efficiency. Leverage enhanced workflow features like cyclical reviews, task tracking, due dates, and notifications to improve productivity across multiple contributors and reviewers simultaneously.
• Collaborate seamlessly. Easily connect with project managers and other stakeholders across the business involved in broader Workfront initiatives.
• Gain context. Understand how your content tasks fit into larger projects, gaining valuable cross-functional visibility.

For project managers.

• Improve visibility and control. Use advanced project dashboards in Workfront to gain upstream and downstream visibility into projects related to long-form content.
• Enhance communication and productivity. Keep all participants informed and engaged with customizable notifications, monitor progress in real-time, and optimize resource load balancing.
• Monitor performance and compliance. Use reporting, analytics, and audit trails in Workfront for comprehensive oversight.
• Accelerate delivery. Increase speed-to-market and enforce process standardization through automated workflows and reduced manual coordination.

For the organization.

• Break down silos. Foster better alignment and collaboration by integrating content processes into the broader operational fabric of the business, and in cross-functional initiatives like product launches.
• Consolidate technology. Rely on a single, market-leading vendor for both CCMS and enterprise work management, eliminating costly and complex multi-vendor integrations.
• Improve project outcomes. Enhance the quality and timeliness of content delivery and strategic projects.
• Maximize Adobe investment.  Extract more value and ROI from both Experience Manager Guides and Workfront platforms.

Stepping into the future of content supply chain

The native integration between Adobe Experience Manager Guides and Adobe Workfront marks a significant step forward in connecting content strategy with execution. By bridging the gap between content creation and project management, organizations can finally overcome the friction and persistent challenges of siloed teams, complex processes, and disconnected technologies.

This is more than just an integration; it's a strategic enabler. It allows businesses to streamline complex, multi-author, multi-reviewer workflows, accelerate delivery timelines, improve content quality, ensure compliance, and gain unprecedented visibility into their content operations. It transforms the content lifecycle from a potential bottleneck into a strategic advantage.

As Adobe continues to deepen the integration between its powerful Experience Cloud and work management solutions, the future points towards even tighter collaboration, more intelligent automation, and a truly unified approach to managing the entire content supply chain.

Ready to transform your content operations?

Explore how the Adobe Workfront integration for Adobe Experience Manager Guides can help you accelerate content creation, enhance collaboration, and ensure compliance.

Book a personalized demo.

Rohit Bansal is a principal product marketing manager at Adobe, leading global go-to-market strategy for Adobe Experience Manager Guides.
 
With over 15 years of experience, Bansal has led marketing for product and services firms in the B2B domain and managed key functions like product marketing, digital marketing, thought leadership, demand generation, and partner relations. A passionate data-driven marketer, he is also a big advocate of customer experience.

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