Creation date: 2016-03-23T00:57:49
A hallway full of filenames
Late afternoon. Someone taped a printout to the office wall with a marker circle around a photo named final_final_OK_retouch.jpg. Our producer sighed and said the sentence that kicks off so many team cleanups. We need one place for all of this. This week Adobe Summit is buzzing and every booth has a story about content at scale. Meanwhile, in real life, we are juggling Dropbox links, email attachments, and a share drive that creaks whenever the photo team dumps a new shoot. The question landed on my desk. Should we move the team to AEM Assets and treat it as our hub for everything we make.
There is romance in the promise. One library. Fast search. Renditions ready for every channel. Designers working from Photoshop while marketing grabs the same files in the browser. No more watermarked comps sneaking into a launch. The catch is always the same. New tools shape your habits and your moments of panic. So let me share what I have seen, where AEM Assets shines, where it bites, and the decisions that avoid long weekends.
What AEM Assets gives a team
Adobe Experience Manager Assets is a digital asset management tool that sits inside AEM. If you already run AEM Sites, you have a door that opens into a library built for more than folders. It stores images, videos, PDFs, InDesign packages, and oddballs like 3D or audio. It tracks versions, runs workflows for approvals, makes renditions, and lets you build metadata schemas so files carry the context your team actually needs. Think product line, shoot date, rights expiry, region, campaign, talent, agency, and anything your lawyers will ask about right before you go live.
The browser is friendly. The new Touch UI is fine for search, previews, and bulk edits. You can drop a folder and watch it chew through files while creating thumbnails and web copies. For designers there is the AEM desktop app that mounts the library in Finder or Explorer so you can open and save from desktop tools. For brand managers and partners there is Brand Portal to share approved files without handing out VPN credentials. If you publish to the web, Dynamic Media connects AEM to the old Scene7 service so you can deliver adaptive images and rich zoom without babysitting every pixel.
Where AEM Assets earns its keep is in metadata and process. You can define the fields that matter, require them, and make them easy with pick lists and tags. You can trigger review steps when a video lands in a folder. You can auto create a watermarked copy for partners, push an approved hero to publish, and set it to expire next quarter. You can capture usage rights and block downloads if the rights date passes. Box and Drive are good at file sync. AEM is good at governed reuse, where the same master feeds many uses without turning your server into a duplicates museum.
Decisions and tradeoffs before you jump
First, know your center. Some teams want a library for long term reuse. Others want a factory that feeds a site or app. AEM Assets can be both, but the setup is different. If your center is reuse, invest in schemas, tags, and rights fields. If your center is delivery, invest in Dynamic Media, CDN setup, and consistent renditions. Trying to do both at full speed on day one will spread your team thin.
Second, inventory the pipes. Big shoots and heavy video will stress your ingest path. AEM will call ImageMagick and FFmpeg and eat CPU while it churns. On author, storage grows fast. Consider Oak with S3 Data Store if your storage plan is cloudy or your studio keeps the shutter busy. If your author traffic is intense and you plan for many concurrent editors, Mongo can help but adds new moving parts. For most teams a well sized TarMK author with S3 for binaries is calmer and cheaper to run.
Third, keep roles clean. AEM permissions can get messy once you start nesting groups and mixing folder rules with metadata rules. Decide who can upload, who can approve, who can publish, and who can see pre release work. Then reflect that in a small set of groups. Fewer groups leads to fewer surprise calls at midnight.
Fourth, choose a folder strategy. People reach for brand folders or campaign folders. Both can work. The trick is to make your folder tree human and use metadata for the rest. Do not encode rights or region into the folder name. Use tags. Think in three buckets. Evergreen content such as brand kits and logos. Campaign content such as the spring launch. Work in progress. Keep work in progress separate so search pages do not get flooded with half baked drafts.
Fifth, decide what stays out. AEM Assets is not a raw file dump for every PSD layer and camera RAW from the first second of a shoot. Keep your creative working files where they are fastest. Move the select masters and the final exports into AEM with clean names, versions, and rights. Your team will thank you when search results are clean and previews load quickly.
Risks nobody puts on the slide
Adoption is fragile. If designers feel the desktop app is slow or odd, they will keep a shadow folder on their laptop and you are back to hunting for finals. Plan short training sessions. Show how to check out a file, how to save versions, and how to find previous edits. Set naming rules the team can live with.
Ingest can drown your box. A day of heavy uploads can starve your author for CPU while renditions cook. Stagger big imports. Use transient workflows where possible. Watch disk I O and set limits on parallel tasks. This is unglamorous, yet it decides if people trust the tool.
Metadata sprawl is real. If anyone can add a field, you will end up with five ways to say the same thing. Put one person in charge of the schema. Start with a small set. Add slowly. Lock what you can. Make tags a shared language across teams so search results feel natural.
Permissions drift. Over time, someone will grant a quick exception so a partner can see a folder. Those quick moves pile up. Do quarterly checks. Remove stale accounts. Review group membership. It is boring work. It keeps headlines out of your world.
Upgrades take planning. If you are on 6.0 or 6.1 and eyeing 6.2 when it lands, do a dry run with a copy of your repo. Test custom workflows. Check thumbnails, video transcodes, and any link to Dynamic Media. The upgrade story gets better each year but it still needs a weekend and a checklist.
Do not treat AEM as a sync drive. It is tempting to point a whole project folder at AEM and sync day by day. The result is noise. AEM is best when it holds approved masters and the handful of work files that people outside the studio truly need.
Decision checklist for your team
- Goal: Are you building a reuse library, a delivery engine for your site or app, or both
- Volume: How many assets do you expect this quarter and by year end
- Formats: Images, video, print, or a mix that needs color accuracy and long previews
- Rights: Do you need hard stops on expiry and territory
- Access: Who can upload, who approves, who can publish to web or share with partners
- External sharing: Do you need Brand Portal for agencies and retailers
- Creative tools: Will the desktop app fit how designers open and save files
- Search: Do you have a tag plan and a small set of required fields
- Structure: Will you sort by brand, by campaign, or a simple top level split with metadata doing the rest
- Renditions: Which sizes and formats should be auto created for web and email
- Video: Do you need transcodes for mobile and subtitles stored with the asset
- Delivery: Will Dynamic Media serve public images and video with a CDN
- Storage: Local disks or S3 Data Store, and what is the growth curve
- Throughput: Can your network handle big imports from the studio
- Backups: Do you have a tested backup and restore for Oak and the binary store
- Environments: Dev, stage, and prod for assets, and a plan for moving content safely
- People: Who owns the metadata schema, who reviews permissions, who cleans up tags
Action items to get moving without drama
Run a two week pilot. Pick one campaign with a mix of images and video. Limit the pilot to a small group from creative, marketing, and web. The goal is hands on feedback, not a glossy deck.
Create a tiny schema. Start with ten fields or less. Title, description, brand, campaign, region, rights owner, rights end, talent, product, and usage notes. Make three of them required. Add more only when a real search fails.
Pick a simple tree. A top level folder for Evergreen, one for Campaigns, one for Work in progress. Inside Campaigns create a folder with a clear name like Spring Launch. Keep folder names readable. Let tags carry the rest.
Set processing profiles. Define the renditions you always need. Thumb, small, medium, large, and a web friendly original. For video, one HD and one mobile copy. Keep it lean at first. You can add a fancy set later.
Wire up review and publish. In the campaign folder, add a simple review step and an approval gate. On approval, publish to Brand Portal or to Dynamic Media. Set an expiry date for assets that should not live forever.
Train with a live task. Ask designers to open files from the desktop app, save a new version, and add notes. Ask marketers to search by tag and use filters. Ask web to grab a link for an image served by Dynamic Media and drop it into a page. Real tasks beat slide decks.
Watch the server. During import, track CPU, memory, and disk. Cap workflow threads if the box gasps. Turn on transient workflows for steps that do not need to store history. Keep logs handy for failed renditions.
Clean permission edges. Create three or four groups. Uploaders, Approvers, Publishers, and Viewers. Map people to groups. Avoid folder specific hacks during the pilot. If a partner needs access, use Brand Portal.
Write two pages of rules. One page for naming. One page for rights. Add a third page later for archiving. Keep it plain. People read what they can remember.
Decide the cutover plan. At the end of the pilot, pick a go date for the next campaign. Do not backfill years of history on day one. Migrate the last quarter of approved masters first. Mark the share drive read only for that campaign so there is no split brain.
When AEM Assets is the right move
Choose AEM Assets when your team needs governed reuse, consistent renditions, and repeatable review steps. If the plan stops at shared folders and simple links, a cloud drive will be cheaper and easier. If you live inside AEM Sites and push hundreds of images and videos to the web each week, AEM Assets and Dynamic Media save time every single day.
We taped over the hallway printout. The team picked one campaign, set ten fields, and kept the folder tree boring. Two weeks later, search felt honest, rights were visible, and the share drive was oddly quiet. That is the test that counts. When the drama fades and the work flows. If you are in Vegas this week, enjoy the lights. When you get back, start small, set clear rules, and let your library earn trust one upload at a time.