Imagine a world where content creators, editors, marketers, and website owners craft their narratives without the hassle of copying, pasting, and navigating complex CMS interfaces. Adobe Edge Delivery Services empower precisely that—a new generation of content authoring and management.
Edge Delivery Services, formerly known as Next-Gen Composability, Project Franklin, or AEM Franklin, is a recently introduced solution from Adobe. It is an additional tool to AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) and allows users to publish website content straight from Microsoft Word or Google Docs. It boasts peak web and SEO performance, content velocity, and user engagement.
As a certified Adobe expert, Atwix will dwell on Adobe Edge Delivery’s intricacies in greater detail. Read on to learn more about this service’s operation, integration with your website, core features, benefits, and costs.
How Does Adobe Edge Delivery Work?
Adobe Edge Delivery is a set of services within AEM that allows for swift content editing and publishing. It offers flexibility in content authoring, enabling users to leverage both traditional AEM publishing and innovative document-based editing. Let’s get these two options straight:
- AEM authoring — involves installing author and publishing AEM environments and using them for content management
- Document-based authoring — involves leveraging content from Microsoft Word/Google Docs and transforming it into fully functional website pages
Adobe Edge Delivery is easy to use and requires minimal developer involvement. It only takes basic HTML, CSS, Git, and JavaScript knowledge to launch a website with this tech. Here’s how to integrate Edge Delivery with your website:
- Ensure you have GitHub and Google accounts, know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and have Node or npm installed.
- Create your repository, preferably using the Boilerplate repository template on GitHub.
- Make a folder in your Google Drive, and share it with the Adobe Experience Manager user (helix@adobe.com).
- Fill your Google Drive folder with essential content.
- Link this content to your Boilerplate GitHub repository by opening the “fstab.yaml” file in your GitHub repository and replacing the reference with your Google Drive folder’s URL.
- Develop the necessary website functionality using CSS and JavaScript on GitHub.
- Finally, install the AEM Sidekick extension in your Chrome browser for content preview and publishing.
Key Features and Benefits of Adobe Edge Delivery Services
Adobe Edge Delivery brings several promising features and benefits to the table. The newly fine-tuned Adobe Franklin’s functionalities offer a nearly perfect Lighthouse Score, constant performance monitoring, and multiple content publishing options. All of this helps to skyrocket your business metrics while reducing the associated costs.
Features
Let’s start our in-depth overview with Adobe Edge Delivery features. Here are the main ones:
- Global content delivery network (CDN). AEM uses two global CDNs to spread content worldwide. In the user-facing part, namely Edge Delivery Services, customers leverage their current CDNs, which then deliver AEM-based experiences to various platforms.
- Edge caching. Adobe Edge Delivery allows for edge caching, i.e., storing copies of frequently requested content at edge server locations. For example, it caches elements like website header, footer, and navigation and displays them to your website users with minimal delay.
- Optimized content loading. Edge Delivery Services boasts efficient content-loading capabilities. It organizes content into three phases — Eager, Lazy, and Delayed — each with loading priorities in descending order. This feature ensures that the most critical content is displayed quickly while other, less significant elements are loaded progressively.
- Traffic management. Adobe Edge Delivery focuses heavily on web performance. It features real-user monitoring (RUM) to help you study how user behavior influences your website traffic and make decisions accordingly.
- Security. Edge Delivery Solutions provides several security features. It allows you to enable author authentication for better protection of your organization’s resources. You can also set permission policies for AWS CloudFront CDN. Finally, AEM offers secure data transmission via HTTPS.
- Analytics. Adobe Edge Delivery supplies you with such analytics tools as real-user monitoring and a built-in experimentation framework. In this Testing and Experimentation feature, you can try different variants of your website, evaluate their performance, and choose the most suitable option.
Benefits for Businesses
Delve into the main advantages of Edge Delivery that are bound to inspire you to incorporate this tech into your B2B eCommerce solutions.
- Improved website performance and reliability. Adobe Edge Delivery uses Google PageSpeed Insight Service as its core web performance measurement tool. It guarantees a rock-solid Lighthouse score of 100, not only highlighting exceptional page loading speed but also its steadfast reliability.
- Reduced bandwidth costs. CDNs and edge caching in Adobe Edge Delivery Services help lower bandwidth expenses. Since content is cached at edge servers and decreases the load on the main server, you can significantly save on data transfer.
- Increased Scalability. Edge Delivery allows you to scale your website as necessary by several straightforward means. You can leverage either AEM authoring or document-based editing to fill your web pages with content and use standard dev tools like CSS and JavaScript to implement the required functionality quickly. Plus, you can benefit from the Block Collection available at Edge Delivery for lighting-fast website development.
- Improved Security. With Adobe Edge Delivery solutions, security is not your concern. By using access control options, HTTPS transport layer security, and author authentication, you can protect your content and user data from unauthorized access and breaches.
- Enhanced Customer Experience. Ultimately, Edge Delivery’s features and benefits culminate in a better customer experience. Faster loading times, reliability, and swift content publishing increase user engagement, satisfaction, and conversions. And real-user monitoring empowers you to fine-tune your content and services for the best possible experience.
Real-World Use Cases
Launched in October 2023, Adobe Edge Delivery is only getting traction among business owners, content creators, and marketers. Yet, companies that have already embraced the Adobe Experience Manager solution are cautiously exploring this new tool available.
From personal blogs and professional profile pages to eCommerce websites — no one wants to miss out on AED’s opportunities. Here is one such example.
The truck manufacturers Volvo Trucks North America and Mack Trucks felt the need to improve their customers’ online experience. As a viable way to achieve their aim, the companies decided to leverage AEM along with Adobe Edge Delivery Services. By incorporating these cutting-edge tools, they managed to migrate from outdated and costly CMS to lightweight and swift AED. Ultimately, they witnessed their Lighthouse Score jump from 60 to 100, better search engine visibility, and enhanced customer experience.
Costs
As we mentioned at the beginning of our article, Edge Delivery Services is a supplemental feature to AEM. Therefore, the Adobe Edge Delivery cost is typically an additional consideration for businesses already using AEM’s capabilities. If you’re just thinking about leveraging AEM, note that there is no set public pricing tiers, and pricing depends on multiple factors, but it is safe to say that AEM license rarely costs less than $30,000 a year.
Yet, AEM is a subscription service with a variety of pricing plans to choose from. Depending on your requirements, like the amount of bandwidth, storage, and extra features needed, the final cost may differ. To find out the price of your particular solution, visit the official Adobe website and get your customized pricing.
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The Bottom Line
Adobe Edge Delivery builds a new reality where businesses can engage with their audiences instantly and effectively. By offering robust content authoring and management features, unparalleled website performance, and effortless scalability — critical solutions in the digital landscape — this service elevates online presence to new heights. Leveraging the expertise of Adobe Commerce experts further enhances the capabilities of Adobe Edge Delivery, ensuring seamless integration and optimization of eCommerce platforms powered by Adobe Commerce for unparalleled online experiences.
If you’re still considering whether Adobe Edge Delivery is right for your business, our team at Atwix is eager to offer expert advice and answer your questions. Having learned all the pitfalls of this service’s integration, we’re here to help you implement it properly. All you need to do is contact us and get a personalized quote.