The Digital Revolution of Edge Delivery in Adobe Experience Manager

In today's digital age, effective content management is the key to a thriving online presence. In a world where handling complex systems and infrastructure is crucial, companies need to simplify content creation while ensuring the resilience of their website.

That's where Edge Delivery by Adobe, formerly known as "Next-Gen Composability” (NGC), comes in. Simply defined, this is a new Edge Delivery Service in Adobe Experience Manager designed to drive business value and built with the premise of performance first. It's a game-changer in web content management, offering remarkable benefits for businesses and developers. With the flexibility to craft content using Google Drive or Microsoft SharePoint, Edge Delivery introduces a fundamentally different way of supporting content creation. While still in its early stages, Project Edge Delivery is creating excitement in the web development community by challenging the status quo with its mind-blowing, fresh approach to content management. This innovation can potentially reshape the future of content management as we know it.

(source: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/.../content-sources.png)

Groundfog's Excursion into Edge Delivery Services

As cloud natives, we at Groundfog are always eager to explore anything labeled as such. Adobe Experience Manager with Edge Delivery had been on our radar for some time. After closely tracking news and reviews, we couldn't resist diving in ourselves. Edge Delivery Services held the promise of several benefits that aligned perfectly with our mission of crafting cloud-native solutions that empower businesses. Our primary motivation was to assess the capabilities of Edge Delivery in the context of our website and understand its impact on user experience and performance. We were excited about its potential benefits, particularly in addressing our customers' challenges. And while I’m writing this article natively in my Google Docs editor, I am just one click away from publishing it. So, let’s dive into it, sharing our experiences and insights along the way.

Rethinking Content Management

Implementing Edge Delivery for our website was eye-opening. Within just one week, this innovative solution was up and running, seamlessly integrating it into our content creation and management processes. One of our core values at Groundfog is to rethink, and we did just that with Adobe Experience Manager’s Edge Delivery and this project. We mentally detached ourselves from classic CMS approaches and abandoned creating complicated components from scratch. Instead, we embraced the semantic simplicity of documents and used elements like headings, images, and paragraphs to streamline content creation. This allowed us to structure our pages in a native context, simplifying the process overall and leading to a great experience. This positive experience also drove us to extend the benefits to our customers' projects. We've successfully implemented Edge Delivery, leveraging its power to optimize performance and streamline content workflows in our client ventures.

Streamlines the Workflow: AEM Sidekick Chrome Extension

An initial step for a smooth and productive journey with Edge Delivery is to install the Sidekick browser extension, designed explicitly for previewing and publishing pages. When we started our new project, we set the source, a particular Google Drive folder linked to our project. This extension has proven invaluable in the toolkit of Adobe Experience Manager with Edge Delivery, streamlining the process of making changes within the document sections that align with the website. With the Sidekick extension, we could easily preview and publish changes as needed directly from Google Docs.

Authoring Feature: A New Stage of Simplicity

The standout feature that caught our attention was Edge Delivery's document-based authoring experience, which took place entirely within Google Drive or Microsoft SharePoint. This unique approach allowed us to author pages as documents and create blocks, a term used in Adobe Experience Manager with Edge Delivery for traditional CMS components, with striking ease. Whether it was hero sections, columns, or other content blocks, we could effortlessly add them to our pages. Edge Delivery's auto-blocking feature simplified the process, automatically recognizing relationships between content elements and constructing blocks accordingly.

The Adobe Experience Manager concept allows users to populate their website content directly from common word processors, like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Since a page on the site is represented as a document, authors can produce content in programs they are already familiar with. Traditionally, updating content on a website was tedious by manually copy-pasting it to the content management system. Edge Delivery transforms this process. Content can now be pushed live directly from templates, saving time and reducing errors.

Edge Delivery is a game-changer for our team at Groundfog. While our team members have expertise in handling complex content systems, we understand that our customers may not share the same technical expertise. With Project Edge Delivery Services, we aim to bridge this gap and empower them by providing a refreshingly user-friendly platform. It enables easy website updates, enhancing content velocity without depending on others' availability. It's important to note that both traditional CMS and the innovative Edge Delivery approach have validity. The choice depends on the specific use case and what best suits the project. The beauty is that we are proficient in both and prepared to adapt to each use case that comes our way, ensuring optimal outcomes.

Performance Boost

Another advantage of the Edge Delivery Service in Adobe Experience Manager is its ability to achieve impressive Lighthouse page speed scores. This is achieved through powerful optimization techniques that ensure our sites load at lightning speed, providing an outstanding user experience. In the digital landscape, page speed is not just a statistic. It's a critical factor that can make or break your web presence. Slow websites can lead to lost clients, decreased user engagement, lower search engine rankings, and reduced conversion rates. This is where Edge Delivery truly shines. It optimizes our site's speed and conducts thorough performance audits with every deployment, ensuring your web presence consistently performs at its best.

With the Edge Delivery Services in Adobe Experience Manager, achieving remarkable Lighthouse scores of 99 or 100 has become the new norm for websites. This is a testament to its impressive optimization capabilities and offers tremendous benefits for any online presence. High Lighthouse scores attract more organic traffic, enhance user satisfaction and make Adobe Experience Manager with Edge Delivery a game-changer for businesses seeking to dominate the digital landscape. It prioritizes end-user satisfaction by guaranteeing a fast and seamless browsing experience and enhancing brands through better SEO ratings.

Tips to a Successful Journey with Edge Delivery

To kickstart your journey with Edge Delivery, follow the comprehensive "Getting Started tutorial" available at www.hlx.live/developer/tutorial. This tutorial will guide you through the setup process, and within minutes, you will have a fully functional setup. As you dive into Edge Delivery Services, freeing your mind from traditional CMS development and content creation processes is essential. Embrace a new perspective, rethinking how you approach web content management. Keep an eye on your Lighthouse score throughout your journey. Performance is key in the digital world, and by monitoring and optimizing your Lighthouse score, you'll ensure that your website delivers an exceptional user experience.

Our Experience with Edge Delivery Services

This journey has empowered us to enhance our web presence while staying true to our core values and focusing on what matters most to us and our customers. Our experience with Adobe Experience Manager’s Edge Delivery has been transformative, aligning seamlessly with our mission as cloud-natives. It's all about simplicity and efficiency in managing content. Project Edge Delivery's smooth integration streamlined our workflow, enabling creation, editing, and publishing within a single document. This approach optimized our processes, accelerating time-to-market and delivering cost savings.

Additionally, its user-friendly approach eliminated the need for extensive CMS training and simplified our team's onboarding.

On top of that, Edge Delivery Services in Adobe Experience Manager serves as a robust SEO platform. By enhancing the user experience and increasing search engine rankings, organizations can significantly boost organic traffic, amplify conversion rates, and successfully accomplish their marketing goals. These invaluable benefits make Adobe Experience Manager with Edge Delivery Services a perfect fit for digital and communication businesses.

However, its ease of use makes it perfect for more straightforward websites with lots of static content — although it's not a static content generator — that require minimal layout customization. Edge Delivery's approach ensures that content creators can focus on delivering content without getting entangled in the complexities of design or layout. Our excitement about the potential benefits of Edge Delivery Services in Adobe Experience Manager sparked enthusiasm within our customer projects, leading to the successful implementation of it in their projects. We possess the expertise required for seamless content migrations to Edge Delivery, backed by close contact with the Adobe Engineering team and our status as one of the early Edge Delivery Services partners. It's important to note that Edge Delivery in Adobe Experience Manager is not just about static content; it's a powerful modern delivery engine on the edge. We are actively working on integrating personalization into server-side delivery. Stay tuned and prepare for our upcoming Edge Delivery blogs as we continue pushing the boundaries of what's possible.