Sunday, June 6, 2021

Multi-Org Adobe Target and AEM Experience Fragment Integration and Governance Ideas

Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Target integration is one of the most powerful and robust in the Adobe Experience Cloud. I wrote about some of the benefits of this integration back in 2019. In this post, I want to cover two topics within the context of these two solutions:

  1. Cross-IMS Org integration between AEM and Target
  2. General Target workspace governance and XF nomenclature ideas


AEM & Target Cross-IMS Org Integration

This is one topic I never got a clear answer to unless I tried and tested it myself. A well known fact about IMS orgs is that we cannot integrate solutions across which is absolutely true when it comes to the Adobe Experience Cloud Visitor ID among other solution but in this case, it is possible to integrate AEM with different Adobe Target instances via Adobe I/O. Having said this, I must also mention that it's not very common for us to see given most companies have a single Target instance but there are some Adobe customers that have multiple Target instances and orgs.

I've included the steps I took to set this up where I tested this using a single AEM author and two Target instances across two IMS orgs. Let's a closer look:

In AEM (6.5.x), go to Security - > Adobe IMS Configurations and either click on an existing Target integration or create a new one. In this case, I already have two integrations set up with two Target instances (2 IMS orgs). 

The first few steps are outlined in the next two screenshots which is key where we first need to generate the public certificate/key in AEM.


The next step is to upload the public key (called AEM-Adobe-IMS.crt) generated in AEM in the Adobe I/O console to integrate AEM with Target. I did this twice by uploading the public keys for both IMS configurations separately into each of the Adobe I/O consoles per IMS org.


You can follow the rest of the steps to set this up in Adobe's official documentation here and once it's set up, you can test the connection for both IMS orgs.


The final step is to connect to each Target instance and send Experience Fragments (XF) separately to both Target instances (and workspaces) in different IMS orgs.


Adobe Target Workspace and AEM XF Governance


This is another important topic that a lot of customers often ask about that's tied to best practices around creating a standardized process for organizing and naming workspaces and XFs in Target and AEM respectively. I previously wrote about a slightly similar topic about creating a segmentation governance strategy in AAM. 

A colleague of mine Ryan Lillis took the first pass at the Target workspace governance strategy so want to give credit where it's due and a lot of these concepts are also covered in Adobe Target's official enterprise permissions documentation so I highly recommend you review it.

Before we can set governance in any solution, it's important for us to understand the concepts of user access in any solution. I'm not going to explain each of the user roles or the core access functionality in Target (covered in great depth in the documentation) but I have taken a stab to visualize WHAT the users are given access to in Target. 

As you can see, the "Default Workspace" in Target has access to all Target properties and any additional workspaces do not have access to Target properties by default so you will have to manually add them to the workspace. This is an important concept as in AEM 6.5, you can share Experience Fragments directly to Target workspaces. 

Target Workspace Governance


Here are some options for you to consider when you're deciding your Target workspace strategy:

  • Workspaces by Brand: This works well in companies that have multiple brands and each business group operates differently.
  • Workspaces by Geography/Locale: This works well in companies that have multiple country sites/implementations/teams. 
  • Workspaces by Environment: Workspaces are tied to each unique site environment like Dev, QA, Stage etc. This is getting more and more common as more companies start sending XFs to these environments for testing before a launching to production.
  • Hybrid Workspaces: This typically works well for a large companies that are organized by various functions but eventually, it always makes sense to formalize it based on some fundamental construct.
It's also important to note that a company's organizational structure (divisional vs functional etc.) can also dictate how the workspaces are laid out but it's not very common as not every department necessarily has a testing program.

 Experience Fragment Nomenclature Ideas

I've seen examples where XFs are named as "XF1" to something which is well structured like "Site:Location:Offer".

In my experience, a good XF nomenclature has a delimited set of values that have a predefined logic to it and I'm only referring to cases where they're meant to be shared with a Target workspace. Some examples are:

  • XFs based on Brand: <brand>:home:summercampaign
  • XFs based on Geography: en-us:home:springcampaign
  • XFs based on Environment: <dev/stage>:home:wintercampaign
  • Hybrid XFs: <brand>:en-us:home:fallcampaign:20%off

These examples are probably oversimplified and generic but the main point I'm trying to make is that it's important to add some sort of structure to how XFs are named as we want to minimize any confusion and redundancy when these land up as offers in Adobe Target. The other important point is that both the developers in AEM and Target users should align on these before applying these widely to save time. 

Even though Target has robust filtering capabilities for offers (and others), this is how XFs will look in Target if the two groups won't align which in this example, shows inconsistency.


So, that was it! Hope you found this topic helpful. Please feel free to share with me your ideas on workspace organization or XF nomenclature best practices that you've seen work well. 

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)