Optimizing Workflow with AEM + Workfront: 3 Key Takeaways

The 2021 Adobe Digital Summit was a gold mine of information and innovation. In 2 days, there were over 400 presentations, including Hoodoo Digital’s joint presentation with IHG, Adobe Experience Manager + Workfront: Accelerating Global Brand Management at IHG. In this presentation, we discussed how Hoodoo helped IHG integrate Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to accelerate internal processes by reducing redundant workflows and improving internal collaboration.

As users of both Workfront and AEM, IHG needed a solution that could automate authoring activity in AEM based on campaign details collected in Workfront. IHG wanted to complete their editorial and review processes in Workfront, and then have Workfront tell AEM to author the pages automatically. As the creators of Workfront Tools, a connector that integrates AEM and Workfront, Hoodoo was uniquely positioned to help IHG achieve this objective.

In our presentation, Kara Troester, Solutions Consultant from Hoodoo Digital, and Jake Isaac, VP of Guest Products and Platforms from IHG, discussed this unique use-case and the benefits IHG has seen as a result of this implementation. Below, we’ve highlighted just three important takeaways from their presentation. 

1. Users can dynamically create AEM landing pages directly from Workfront: By connecting AEM with Workfront, users can create automated AEM landing pages by completing specific forms and tasks in Workfront. This eliminates the need for manual asset and site page creation by directing Workfront to automatically author content in AEM without requiring an individual person to actually create it.
   
   
2. A Workfront+AEM integration can improve brand consistency across sites: IHG has a very large footprint. They employ over 400,000 people, working for 16 different hotel brands, in 5,900 hotels, in 100 different countries, supporting 17 languages. Ensuring consistency and accuracy across each of these hotel websites is key to creating a united IHG brand. By automating the AEM landing page creation process through workflows in Workfront, IHG removed the need for their AEM content authors to create dozens of identical landing pages across websites. Additionally, through their partnership with Hoodoo, they were able to sync AEM with an internal database so they could auto-populate unique, hotel-specific data in AEM, ensuring consistency and accuracy in how the data was displayed across each hotel website. Both of these integrations have helped IGH ensure brand consistency across sites for each of their 16 hotel brands. 
   
   
3. Automation and customization can and do go hand-in-hand: IHG needed an elegant combination of automation, to reduce redundant work, and customization, to allow hotels to highlight their own unique amenities and attractions. Properly integrating Workfront and AEM allowed for a dynamic relationship between automation and customization that optimized workflows while still allowing for nuanced content. 

Workfront and AEM are both tremendously robust programs that offer a myriad of benefits to the companies that use them. Successfully integrating these two platforms, as Hoodoo has done for IHG, can save both time and money by removing redundant work, creating brand consistency, and improving workflow processes. 

Do you need a partner who knows how to integrate Workfront and AEM to help optimize your processes and accelerate your global brand management? 

We do. We’re Hoodoo.