March 3, 2014
By Maria Minsker, contributing writer

Adobe Integrates Digital Publishing Suite and Adobe Experience Manager

Software giant Adobe has announced the integration of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, its digital publishing platform, with Adobe Experience Manager, the company's Web experience management solution. The new integration, in combination with Adobe Analytics, bridges the gap between Adobe's creative suite of products with the business enablement solutions within the Adobe Marketing Cloud. Together, the solutions not only give brands a medium for content creation, but also provide a seamless transition into delivery and content performance measurement.

"The integration feels so natural it's almost surprising that it didn't exist in the past," Loni Stark, director of product and industry marketing at Adobe, says. "It's going to make a major difference when it comes to taking that creative content and moving it through the next steps—delivering it to customers and monitoring its performance. This connection between our two product offerings is going to be a time saver and a money saver for our users," she adds.

As responsive design and mobile-friendly content become increasingly important, the integration between Adobe's publishing suite and marketing solutions comes at a crucial time. Cross-channel digital publishing remains expensive and time-consuming, is the domain of only a few experts in the organization, and requires assets that live in silos separated from those used for Web publishing, according to a company statement. By linking the complementary solutions, Adobe will significantly reduce publishing cost and time for cross-channel content, Stark says.

Content creation will be simpler and will take less time, she explains, because Adobe Experience Manager's drag-and-drop interface, content, and creative assets will be added to responsive HTML templates and synced with tools from the creative suite, such as Adobe InDesign. The templates can be added to existing folios and automatically adjusted for publication on mobile devices and on the Web through responsive design. By sidestepping the need to create different versions of content for different devices, the integration will help cut down on production time. Costs will be decreased as well, because business managers will now be able to use creative assets such as predesigned templates to develop content on their own, decreasing their reliance on Web production teams or designers.

"We're taking a lot of the weight off of the design staff by putting some of these basic things at the fingertips of business managers. The solution is intuitive enough for those on the business end of things to use it, without the design staff having to worry about, for example, brand consistency or mobile compatibility. And, it's great for marketers because there won't be that constant content creation delay—they can just go in and do what they need to do themselves," Stark says.

As part of the integration, the digital publishing suite will also offer full app measurement capabilities from Adobe Analytics, also part of Adobe Marketing Cloud. "The analytics tools really complete the picture," Stark says, "because now we can offer our customers a really efficient publishing trio: campaign creation, delivery and measurement."