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Content management software: Workflows and governance in Adobe Experience Manager Sites.
Master content management system workflows. Find out what website, digital property, and application content management workflows are and how to govern them.
Find out which features in Adobe Experience Manager Sites can help web teams manage website content, such as connecting workflows to different teams, finding existing creative assets, and upholding strict brand guidelines for copy and creative assets.
AEM Sites expedites publishing, manages website content, and ensures consistency through automation.
Running enterprise websites comes with complex operational challenges. Without the right technology, publishing and managing website content at scale can be overwhelming and slow. For example, when changes to a site are ready for publishing, they may sit in a backlog because there are no automated reviews, approvals, or activations in your content management system (CMS).
The platforms behind these sites require a seamless content management workflow and content governance to enable hundreds of individuals to create, manage, and publish thousands to millions of pages — all while keeping the massive content base compliant with brand guidelines, local laws, and security regulations. This holds true whether you use traditional or headless CMS, or responsive web design models.
Adobe Experience Manager Sites is the industry-leading enterprise content management system that helps marketing , creative, and IT teams create, manage, and deliver the right content to any digital property at lightning speed. It powers some of the largest enterprise sites in the world, which contain properties in multiple languages, spanning numerous countries, and across various channels. These customers consistently achieve massive scale and efficiency:
built and launched a new site in just 8 weeks.
In this guide, we’ll explain:
- What website, digital property, and application content management workflows are and how to automate them.
- What website, digital property, and application content governance is and why it matters.
- How workflows and governance in Adobe Experience Manager Sites speed up the publishing process.
What are content management workflows?
Content management workflows in a CMS are steps that pages and assets must go through before publishing. The purpose of these workflows is to streamline website content creation and management processes, ensuring that everything is high quality, compliant, and aligned with business goals. For example, you might use automated workflows to initiate initial website or application content reviews, stage that content for preview, ensure proper brand formatting and styling, secure stakeholder approval, and finally, schedule publication.
The right CMS will allow you to define and create automated steps that guide you through the following processes:
Creation
How authors create their website and app content and upload it to the CMS?
Review
Who on your team needs to review website and app content before it goes live?
Approvals
Does website and app content need to be approved by leadership or your legal team before publishing?
Editing and revisions
What are the processes for updating website content?
Publishing
How does content get staged and published when it's ready to go live?
Archiving and retirement
What happens when content becomes outdated or needs to be removed?
Content automation for seamless publishing.
If you work with a large team of website content creators or are ramping up content production using generative AI, the scale can be daunting. You need guardrails in place, but you don’t want to hinder your team from doing their best work. In Adobe Experience Manager Sites, you can automate website content workflows to keep your content creation flowing efficiently.
Experience Manager Sites enables you to break down the complex tasks of creation and publishing into specific actions, rules, and procedures based on user roles. Automated workflows eliminate many of the unnecessary delays and communication issues that you might otherwise encounter.
Let’s say a member of your marketing team assembles the copy and assets for a new page on your website. Once website content has been authored, Experience Manager Sites automatically alerts the proofreading team, via email or the Adobe Experience Manager Inbox, that the copy is ready for approval, while simultaneously informing the design and branding team of the updated content. After the page has been reviewed and all feedback has been addressed, automated workflows alert the legal team that new content is about to go live on the site and requires final review and approval. Once the website's content receives a final sign-off, it can be automatically published.
The Experience Manager Inbox is a customizable dashboard that compiles all tasks and workflows assigned to a specific user. It lets users keep track of projects, manage approvals, and check the status of each item in both list and calendar views.
Experience Manager Sites can automatically assign tasks to team members, so content authors don’t have to move content through the review process manually. This saves time, ensures that set procedures are followed, and keeps work from slipping past necessary approvals and deadlines.
Expand and connect workflows with integrations in Adobe Experience Manager.
You can use Adobe Experience Manager to manage large-scale marketing initiatives with all your workflows in one place.
Let’s say you have a lead intake form on your Experience Manager website that captures the visitor’s name, email, company, interests, and other relevant information. Workflows can orchestrate the process of pushing lead information into your CRM solution, kicking off a nurture campaign in your campaign management solution, and creating a task for a sales team member to follow up with the prospect. These automations help eliminate manual tasks, minimize the possibility of human error, and ensure your data is accurate.
Experience Manager Sites is part of Adobe Experience Cloud, which means it is natively integrated with the full suite of Adobe solutions. Experience Manager Sites is also highly extensible, allowing developers to customize and extend the platform’s capabilities through its API-first approach, supporting both custom-built and third-party integrations. This architecture enables it to serve as a high-performance headless CMS. With the Experience Manager API, developers can easily import and publish content to external systems — and in various formats, including HTML, JSON, and XML, using the content rewriter framework.
While Experience Manager Sites provides the essential framework for a scalable enterprise CMS, its true power in managing complexity, achieving speed, and ensuring compliance is unlocked through a native integration with Adobe Experience Manager Assets. This integration provides the following benefits:
1. Enhanced website content creation and velocity.
Integrating your CMS with a robust digital asset management (DAM) transforms your content supply chain, moving beyond simple publishing workflows to accelerate website content production. Here’s how:
Asset discovery and enrichment.
- Find high-value content faster by easily browsing and discovering assets in a single location. This repository is enriched with generative AI-powered tagging and classification to accelerate asset discovery.
- Easily search with natural language processing and advanced filtering across millions of assets.
- Ensure all website content is housed in a single location by easily ingesting any asset type, including 3D and other rich media, within a single unified platform.
Asset preparation and delivery automation.
- Improve time-to-market by automating critical asset handoffs within your website's content creation workflows.
- Dynamically create millions of content variations from existing digital assets for personalized or localized digital experiences on any channel.
- Dynamic media features like smart crop automatically detect and crop assets to the focal point and optimize/resize content based on the delivery channel or internet bandwidth, ensuring the highest-quality viewing experience and faster load times.
Asset analysis and performance insights.
- Discover asset usage data to identify which assets are being used effectively and which can be repurposed.
- Find out how assets perform across all channels through first- and third-party analytics integrations.
2. Comprehensive content and brand governance.
CMS governance, which focuses on pages and overall structure, is fortified by detailed DAM governance, which focuses on the individual assets used within those pages, protecting your brand from legal and reputational risk. Here’s how:
Legal and brand risk mitigation.
- Digital rights management (DRM) features, including watermarking and content credentials, prevent violations and legal ramifications of using the wrong content.
- Admins can easily manage asset expiry dates and ensure that outdated assets are automatically removed from the DAM, safeguarding brand integrity.
- Content governance is enforced with customizable workflows that ensure all assets are brand-approved before distribution.
Asset integrity and collaboration.
- Asset integrity can be maintained using tools, such as version control and duplication detection, to keep repositories clean.
- Customizable workflows enable tasks to be assigned to appropriate users, and updates are immediately available without downloading to a separate application.
What is content governance and why it matters.
Content governance refers to the rules and guidance that manage the content lifecycle, ensuring content remains up-to-date and aligns with your strategies, brand guidelines, and legal or regulatory requirements. Another part of governance is clearly communicating these requirements and assigning ownership to each step of the validation process to the correct parties within your organization.
The main goal of content governance is to guarantee that the content published on your website is high-quality and compliant. Governance ensures your content is clear, aligned with your brand’s tone, inclusive, accurate, and consistent. This applies to all internal content as well as user generated content (UGC) that your brand may promote.
Governance in the context of your CMS considers the following aspects:
Content strategy
Does this content align with your business and campaign strategy?
Roles and permissions
Which users or groups have the authority to edit this content?
Standards and guidelines
Does this content align with your brand and legal requirements?
Workflow processes
Has this content received the necessary approval for publishing?
Content lifecycle management
Is this content still current, or does it need to be updated or archived?
Data security and privacy
Is this content compliant with data protection laws and regulations where you operate, and does it adequately protect user data and privacy?
Technology and infrastructure management
Does this content or platform align with your technological needs?
The primary goal of content governance is to ensure that the content published on your website is high-quality and compliant. Governance ensures your content is clear, aligned with your brand’s tone, inclusive, accurate, and consistent.
Another benefit of proper content governance is that it improves customer experience. If your content feels disjointed, customers may leave your site in search of an alternative source to what they’re looking for. Creating a polished, professional website at all levels means keeping your content across web properties and apps consistent with your brand guidelines, so customers can easily recognize your brand.
Without these checks, your organization is at risk. If you allow outdated, inaccurate, or inconsistent content to remain on your site, it could harm your brand, confuse customers, and expose you to potential legal risks.
Customer spotlight.
Learn how integrated workflows allow Kyndryl to host, translate, and maintain web properties in 41 countries and in 25 languages — while maintaining a consistent brand experience.
Governance features in Adobe Experience Manager Sites speed up publishing while ensuring compliance.
Adobe Experience Manager Sites empowers your creative teams while still maintaining one cohesive look and feel across all the web properties you manage. When roles are clearly defined throughout the publishing process, approvals move more quickly. Creatives can upload their work, receive feedback and sign offs right away, and then publish in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.
Another benefit of using Experience Manager Sites is the ability to manage permissions at a very granular level. Permission management for small sites can be handled by differentiating between admins, editors, and contributors. However, for larger enterprise sites, permissions often need to be assigned at the page level or even at the asset level. This is key for enterprise content management systems.
Experience Manager Sites comes with an access control and permission system, allowing you to control who has access to view or edit website or application content, while still granting individuals and teams the appropriate permissions to create powerful, personalized experiences at the enterprise level. For example, you can allow your regional teams to edit and update content for their region while still maintaining governance over templates and branding. The platform provides access and audit logs, allowing you to easily view the changes users have made, including what they were and who made them, for auditing or version tracking purposes.
For instance, you can give your mobile product and development teams access to the shared content for your mobile application without giving them control of your main website. Or let your creative agency personalize a single landing page without giving them broader access to the entire website and asset library. With this level of granular access control, your teams can deliver personalized content without sacrificing critical governance.
“Scalability is critical for us. Experience Manager makes it possible for us to scale content creation and onboard our four divisions and local editing teams to keep up with expanding site content while maintaining branding control. Today, we manage 55+ million pages across 65 websites in more than 30 languages from a single location.”
Lisa Ingemann Simonsen, Global Web Platforms Senior Manager, Grundfos
Source: Adobe
Automated workflows and content governance made simple with Adobe Experience Manager Sites.
Experience Manager Sites can help you effortlessly manage all your enterprise-scale digital properties across multiple regions, in different languages, and on separate platforms — all in one place. The content management system’s workflow engine and content governance help your team manage complex approvals, content scheduling, and publishing processes required to deliver the user experiences customers expect, wherever they are.
Explore more resources to learn how Adobe Experience Manager Sites can help bring your website content to life at lightning speed across all your digital properties.
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