Connecting Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud

Creating digital assets means collaboration — and capturing feedback can be a consistent headache for creatives and stakeholders alike. Picture a designer with their project nearing final review, placing final touches in one of several Adobe Photoshop layers. They export the file to share with the team.

But then, their workflow stalls. The document is too large to share by email. The stakeholder’s file share service is full. Which project management tool did this request come from? The answer was lost in an email. The designer sifts through email, messages, and browser tabs, reaching for a way to restart their flow before lunch.

Scenarios like this one afflict teams, despite an increasingly digital workplace. Customers demand personalized digital content in still, video, 3D, and AR (augmented reality) formats. And wasted hours mount over days and weeks across teams, the creative process misconnected with a grab bag of file management software. As much as 70% of time is spent managing manual tasks in various systems across roles in the content supply chain. More than 30% of creatives and marketers list the inability to share assets with multiple stakeholders as their top challenge. Various tools aimed at simplification sound promising. In practice, real interconnectivity is the hallmark of integrated, feature-rich digital solutions.

Adobe Professional Services has extensive experience helping organizations build functional content supply chain processes, balancing each organization’s unique needs with powerful automation and efficiency that deliver value at scale. Our organization excels at empowering creatives from beginning to end.

For those planning their own implementation of Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud, here are five exciting opportunities to empower your teams.

Asset Link

Scale the digital asset distribution process to teams of designers and maintain a central source of truth. Experience Manager with your Creative Cloud implementation can take your teams to the next level. To connect the two clouds, look to Asset Link.

Designers can find approved, high-quality assets in seconds with the Asset Link extension, a panel accessed directly from within Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign. The latest versions of files, like a company logo or design template, are ready for off-the-shelf use — just a placement away. When the content is ready for distribution, designers can save it directly to Adobe Experience Manager.

Visit the Creative Cloud site to see a demo in action.

Adobe Experience Manager desktop app

With changes saved in real time and the ability to collaborate, it may be time to leave the free file share storage or aging on-premise server behind. Teams already using Experience Manager enjoy the ability to quickly upload and manage assets directly from a browser. But you might want to consider incorporating a power user tool for uploading or managing assets in bulk. The Experience Manager desktop app is an excellent addition to the toolset and can be deployed to teams quickly across operating systems.

Once installed, your designers and asset managers can call on the digital asset manager (DAM) to review, annotate, and check out assets. Creatives can download the assets and make changes directly in Creative Cloud applications. When finished, check the asset back in to record the version and edit history and empower teams for their creative reviews and final approvals.

An Adobe Professional Services customer in the retail industry found the desktop app to be a powerful replacement for legacy servers, prone to disconnection and downtime.

Workflows

Unlock the power of Experience Manager Assets built-in features like the inbox and custom workflow models. Schedule a review step for a creative review. Create a step to automatically organize images in a contact sheet, eliminating the need to waste glossy photo paper. Even better? Train your partners to use Collections and use comments to manage your selections.

Clearly complex business solutions are also achievable using a combination of Adobe solutions. For instances where a defined process is involved — like a critical legal and compliance review step or AI-assisted content translation — consider a combination of solutions defined across the asset lifecycle. Connect your design process to your end-to-end asset management needs by developing a process flow, gaining alignment with stakeholders, and working with your technical teams to design the ideal solution.

Creative Cloud collaboration

In situations where speed and quick collaboration matter most, now the Creative Cloud has become even more collaborative. The latest Creative Cloud feature announced at Adobe MAX in October 2022 brings the power of annotations and comments to your Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and other applications — embedded within your workflow.

Start by familiarizing your teams with the Creative Cloud application and cloud files stored within. When ready to gather feedback, share one or more assets with other members of your organization. Directly within the file, fellow designers, stakeholders, and leaders can provide comments or request edits with real-time updates for the creator. Once the files are ready for prime time, connect with your team’s DAM librarian or taxonomist and start sharing with the entire organization.

Brand Portal and Asset Share Commons

For some teams, the use case to share assets with internal colleagues is already well supported. But asset reviews may need to cross geographies or domains. Consider the consulting company with clients in four countries or the independent designer a team has brought on to help with a high-profile project. Brand Portal can serve as another method to distribute and review assets. With simple permission groups, third-party team members can access a separate environment from your team’s DAM. Publish one or folders of assets with a built-in expiration date.

Directly from the DAM, unlock the ability to pair art directors and photographers to make photo selections while still on-set or review a new slate of rebranded logos for quick buy-in while at the company offsite. Assets can be published from your DAM to Brand Portal for projects, then easily shared with a notification to internal colleagues or when needed to guest users outside of your organization.

Sharing assets is important, but options exist for teams practiced in asset management as well. Asset Share Commons is another practical, scalable improvement to asset management. It functions as a search component and when paired with a basic search engine, it can enable users to find assets based on asset metadata. Like shopping at your favorite retailer, you can filter data by last modified date, product SKU, or style to retrieve approved assets. Your team may use a feature like this to enter information and retrieve previous season product assets or approved images from the brand photo library, then move into the next phase of creating.

View an Asset Share Commons product demo by visiting Adobe’s demo site.

Putting it all together

A healthy content supply chain is increasingly important for creatives, and Adobe delivers on the promise of interconnectivity. Under Armour has reduced asset retrieval time from 5–7 days to just 10 minutes. In aggregate Adobe customer results show a 30% increase in project capacity, with 29% fewer revisions and 36% faster revenue growth after solving these content creation challenges. To define your organization’s content creation process, connect with our consultants for a deep dive on putting the pieces together.

When you’re ready to get started, speak with an Adobe Professional Services representative.

Andrew Crisp is a consulting lead who partners with organizations and product teams to deliver integrated digital platforms, providing solutions across the content supply chain. He has deep experience in Adobe Experience Cloud, along with a broad background in a variety of other Adobe and third-party applications. Crisp specializes in defining complex projects into requirements through to execution and seamless delivery.