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What is AEM? A Rapid Explanation of What Adobe Experience Manager is and Does

What is AEM?

Here’s a rapid explanation: Adobe Experience Manager is a software package which is used by larger companies to run their large marketing and corporate website presence. It combines the features of a Content Management System (CMS) with extensive digital asset management (a place to organize, manage, store and serve images, video and other assets like PDFs). It also has a massive array of features which allow it to be extensively customized to provide personalized experiences to web & mobile visitors based on things like location, language, purchases, previous visits, etc, and is designed to plug into Adobe’s many other solutions for complete web experiences like their commerce, analytics and customer data platforms.

AEM can be deployed both as a self-hosted software solution that one installs & configures internally, or as a hosted solution by Adobe using their AEM as a Cloud Service offering.

Who Uses AEM?

AEM is, to be frank, a higher-end system. It sits at the top of most “magic quadrant” evaluations of features and functionality, and is used by the very largest companies to run their mission-critical brand websites as well as their primary corporate presence sites. Even though it could be scaled to run a website of any size, its sheer complexity and breadth of capability makes it best-suited for companies that have internal teams to run the site, or who use agencies like Arbory Digital to install, maintain and manage their AEM environments.

Or if you’d prefer to listen: “What is AEM” on our AEM Podcast

As we’ve onboarded a new Project Manager, we decided to take that basic explanation of what AEM is and does LIVE and bust out an “AEM 101” session in 30 minutes or less.

And somehow we managed to make it, despite the Fire Department randomly showing up about 19 minutes into the podcast recording!

Please join us as we welcome our Project Manager, Joanna, into the land of AEM, and see if we also answer your basic questions on what AEM is and does!

And if we missed anything, please do reach out - as we’re planning on doing another round of AEM for absolute beginners!

Or listen on Apple podcasts or on Spotify.

Tad Reeves
Principal Architect at Arbory Digital

AEM Architect & DevOps guy with 14 years experience on AEM/CQ and 25+ years in systems infrastructure.

Contact Tad on Linkedin

Joanna DeMott, MHR, PMD
Project Manager at Arbory Digital

Contact Joanna on LinkedIn

Like what you heard? Have questions about what’s right for you? We’d love to talk! Contact Us

Podcast Episodes & Blog Posts

Setting up Splunk on AEM as a Cloud Service

How do you set up log aggregation on AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS)? The only supported path for most users is to use Splunk, and this how-to walks you through the full Splunk setup on AEM.

Is Self-Hosted AEM Still A Thing?

Is it still possible (or advisable) to host Adobe Experience Manager outside of Adobe? Tad Reeves and Joey Smith get into it!

AEM in China: What if you’re targeting users in Mainland China?

Do you have a user base in Mainland China that you’d like to reach? Is AEM as a Cloud Service an option? What do you need to consider before making a move to reach in-China internet users?