Activate for Adobe Experience Manager

Go Beyond MVP Migration to AEM Cloud Service

Summary

Activate helps you migrate to AEM Cloud Service quickly and incrementally by establishing Adobe’s best practices and patterns without sacrificing long-term flexibility. Get the most value out of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Launch with unique features provided only by Activate. Streamline implementation, reducing the need for custom development and minimizing ongoing maintenance costs. Ensure your AEM platform is not only built for MVP, but ready to support your complex enterprise needs and scale without rework or changing patterns.

Activate expands upon the default capabilities provided by Adobe and other accelerators, with none of the proprietary lock-in or inflexibility. Every feature, every component, and every line of code in Activate can be customized to fit your exact needs.

The Activate Advantage 

Activate enables you to launch sophisticated sites on AEM Cloud Service methodically, with a best practice implementation that doesn’t put you “in a box”.  Unique features elevate the authoring experience to the same level as the end website. Collaboration between stakeholders, designers, and technology to support multiple brands, sites, and regions all benefit from embedded tooling.

Appealing to technology teams, reusability, maintainability, and ability to support the platform with internal resources are core to Activate. Functional examples of all major coding patterns and strict adherence to consistent patterns enable developers new to AEM to work effectively in the system. Reduced complexity and dependencies, plus automated testing, ensure IT can support the platform post-launch.

Activate lowers total cost of ownership by reducing both initial implementation and ongoing support efforts while increasing independence and self-sufficiency.

Atomic Design System

Activate’s flexible design system makes creating beautiful, functional web elements and components easy, applying the principles of Atomic Design to have an expressive and consistent design language that your content authors leverage to build new experiences. Predicated on composition and reuse, styles can easily be adapted to different, unique brands to ensure each site has its own look and feel.

Extensive Authoring Library

Activate goes beyond Adobe's core component set, incorporating features and interactions that visitors have come to expect.  With over 40 full-featured components incorporating more than 100 style variations, Activate makes it easy to build a dynamic experience out of the gate so you can focus your investments on what uniquely drives value for your business.

Living Style Guide

When we say living, we mean it. Activate development patterns include an always current guide to your components, variations, and templates. Authors can readily view all experience creation options at their fingertips. Designers can iterate on the current state without reinventing the wheel or trying to keep an offline style guide up to date. Testers can quickly validate updates without the need to create throw-away content. Ultimately, business stakeholders benefit from increased productivity across the board.

Proactive Accessibility

To support digital inclusion, Activate provides a unique Accessibility Mode in the authoring interface to notify authors of accessibility risks in content to help reduce the rate of publishing inaccessible content to their site.

Elevated Collaboration

Context switching is a huge detractor from productivity. With Activate, increased granularity of content change auditing helps authors understand exactly who changed what, when, and with a click of a button reach out to involved colleagues via Microsoft Teams. Authors are also connected more readily with product owners and the tech team, with the ability to create and track JIRA feature and enhancement requests directly from the AEM authoring interface.

Content Migration Tooling

Migrating hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pages to a new platform can seem like an intimidating task. Activate goes beyond simplistic automation, handling not only the easy cases of direct content mapping. For complex scenarios involving redesign or consolidation, Activate's content migration interface curates the migration process to enable manual content adjustments to fit new components and page templates while still gaining efficiencies of automation.

Configurable Branding

Template options available only with Activate allow you to manage branding of microsites, landing pages, and even parts of your flagship site without requiring a developer, giving users increased independence and enabling speed to market for unique experiences.

Advanced Site Integrations

Activate developers have built and tested 3rd-party integrations allowing you to take advantage of prebuilt site capabilities, saving you time, money, and defects. 3rd-party integrations include: 

  • Salesforce CRM for collecting contacts from lead gen forms
  • Google reCAPTCHA to protect your forms
  • Google Maps for pinned locations and location finding
  • Microsoft Chatbot for engaging your customers
  • Coveo Search for advanced search and faceting capabilities
  • Youtube, Vimeo, Brightcove, Vidyard, and Wistia videos
  • And more!

Streamlined Analytics and Personalization

Understanding and activating user data is key to achieving results. We start with strategy and a platform-agnostic data layer, then work with your tracking and testing tools to craft a unique solution. Activate integrates with tag management solutions such as Adobe Launch and Google Tag Manager to enable tracking and personalization via Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and similar tools from other vendors. Information surfaced in the data layer provides a basis for reporting, guidelines for action, and ultimately, delivering a personalized audience experience.

Internationalization and Localization

Translation is just the start of i18n. Activate ensures that all of your content, down to button labels, can be maintained by authors (i.e. no hard-coded text, ever), translated, and localized to cater to each unique audience across the globe.

Multi-Site and Reusability Patterns 

When your AEM platform is built with Activate, your effort and costs for adding new sites to the platform consistently decrease. Activate's patterns ensure that everything is built with modularity and reuse in mind from day one, serving several brands and business units without sacrificing individuality.

Training and Support

Activate provides the ideal playground for both formal and informal training, well before even the initial launch. Content authors can get their hands dirty within weeks of project kickoff. Developers have full visibility to the inner workings of every aspect of Activate, with consistent and clean examples of all major coding patterns. Bounteous teams offer to work in co-development models with internal resources to promote self-sufficiency post-launch.

Additional Benefits

  • Fully customizable with zero limitations or obtrusive coding patterns
  • Common features from Adobe ACS AEM Commons pre-configured
  • Shortened SEO-friendly URLs enabled by default
  • Multiple code quality checks (Checkstyle, ESLint, AEM Analyzer, OakPAL)
  • Robust suite of automated unit tests
  • Royalty-free, with no vendor lock-in

See how Activate comes to life at newco.activate.bounteous.com and view the living style guide to learn more.

 

Not Sure Where to Start?

Activate seems like a great fit, but you’re not sure about your business needs. We get it - and we know that a great experience starts with strategy. Reach out and we’ll help map your digital future.