Customers buy a product based on glossy brochures and great digital content.
And repair it based on slips of paper. Or YouTube.
Everyone knows it - the difference in quality between presales marketing documents and aftersales technical documentation. But does it have to be that way?
With AEM Guides, Adobe offers the leading platform for the creation, management and delivery of technical product documentation.
AEM Guides...
enables companies to easily create technical content and reuse it as centrally managed content - for example, for additional manuals or other language versions.
AEM Guides is integrated with Adobe Experience Manager Assets - technical illustrations and marketing assets are managed in AEM Assets. XML and DITA have established themselves as international standards for the creation of technical documentation. AEM Guides therefore comes with a range of visual XML editing tools. These tools can be used to create DITA topics and DITA maps.
How AEM Guides works
Step 1: Import and Create
Web-Editor
AEM Guides offers its own WYSIWYG web editor for creating content. This can be used to create so-called DITA topics and DITA maps.
Content-Migration
The solution supports content migration with automatic conversion and checking from Word, XHTML, InDesign Markup Language (IDML), individual XML, non-structured FrameMaker data, etc.
Author-UI
User-friendly WYSIWYG Author UI for content creation. Authors can make use of the familiar, powerful tools of AEM.
DITA-Authoring
The DITA standard offers editors powerful functions in the editing interface, such as content reuse, inline tags, breadcrumbs with element paths, conditional tags, fields for content and topic properties, complete tag views, keys, etc.
Step 2: Manage and Tune
Translation
The effective reuse of content reduces translation times and costs. AEM Guides can use the existing and integrated translation providers from the AEM Sites project.
Indexing and searching
The ability to use individual content modules across documents, formats and departmental boundaries prevents duplicates and ensures accurate documentation. Content modules are indexed and can therefore be found easily. Content updates are made centrally at the source and are inherited by all referenced documents. Comprehensive metadata for structured content ensures that the documentation is optimally searchable, improves SEO and thus findability on the web. For authors, AEM Guides offers a powerful search function for easy retrieval of content, templates and assets.
Asset Management
AEM Guides is integrated into Adobe Experience Manager Assets. Technical illustrations and marketing assets such as images, videos, animations or 3D models are managed in AEM Assets and can be easily integrated into documentation.
Versioning
Versioning creates a "snapshot" of the current status. By creating multiple versions of a "topic" or "map", changes can be tracked and older versions restored.
Automation through AI
Artificial intelligence and machine learning based on Adobe Sensei enable fast provision and easy retrieval of content. The platform offers various AI services, such as automatic tagging of images, cropping of images, etc.
Approval Workflows
Web-based approval workflows enable simple and seamless collaboration between the people involved. This makes it easy to check content and add content yourself. AEM Guides offers three preconfigured user groups as standard: Authors, Reviewers and Publishers. The respective roles are assigned different rights. Publications must be made by publishers, authors can create new topics and reviewers can only review topics.
Step 3: Personalize and Deliver
Integration with AEM Sites
Publish DITA content to Experience Manager Sites as dynamically updated pages - with minimal reliance on IT teams and no intermediate conversion to HTML.
Different digital channels
Content can be published in different media at the touch of a button: Adobe Experience Manager Sites, Responsive HTML5, Mobile Apps, PDF, EPUB, Kindle and more.
PDF-Publishing
AEM Guides can be used to generate PDFs of individual topics or an entire map file. AEM Guides offers 3 methods for this: DITA-OT, FrameMaker Publishing Server (FMPS), Native PDF Publishing
Headless
This approach makes it possible to play out content for headless use cases across all channels using REST APIs. The advantage: content is retrieved from websites, support portals, mobile apps, knowledge databases, CRM platforms, mobile apps for the Internet of Things, chatbots (based on taxonomy, classification and semantics) via a single source.
Key Benefits
Centralized content delivery
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Single point of truth for all content
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Reuse of content on different platforms and in different contexts
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Management of content as structured data (DITA topics and DITA maps)
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Personalization of content for different users or target groups. The same documentation can be displayed differently for end customers than for specialist dealers or installers, for example
Lower TCO due to economies of scale
- Companies that already use AEM as a content management solution can make use of the platform's existing functions
- For example, existing translation workflows, AEM Sites components, user management, digital asset management, etc. can be reused.
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Reduced translation costs
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Updates and changes are made in a single place. This ensures that translation content is consistent and up-to-date
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Automated translation workflows: AEM Guides can draw on AEM's powerful features such as live copys, BluePrints, translation workflows
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AEM Guides turns technical documentation into a strategic advantage for better customer retention and operational excellence.
