Solving Content Workflow Challenges, Pt 1: Repeated Metadata Entry

Marketing plans are broad and expansive in nature. Numerous channels exist for businesses to disseminate information and content to their customers. This inherent nature has led the vast majority of companies to silo their teams to improve workflow specialization: planning, organizing, production (photography, videography, design, etc), writing, authoring, and distribution. While many organizations use various work management tools to help organize their internal teams to accomplish these tasks, the teams themselves tend to work independently, rather than as integrated components within the content management process and downstream delivery systems. This siloing and independent work tends to result in duplicated work, delays, and an overall lack of optimization.

Fortunately, there are work management systems, like Adobe Workfront, that can help break down silos and improve communication across teams. Over the next few articles, we’ll discuss several content workflow challenges that organizations face, and how connecting Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) can help solve them. The first challenge is Repeated Metadata Entry. 

Challenge 1: Repeated Metadata Entry 

This is a scene that many will recognize: you have a project to create assets for a specific campaign. During the process to produce the assets, your team agrees upon metadata and finalizes it for the finished asset(s). Your data could be related to the internal project itself, information about the people who produced it, possible actors or models portrayed, locations, and/or general keywords about the campaign. You document all your metadata related to this campaign in a file (spreadsheet, text, etc) and give it to the downstream team. This team’s job is to create the campaign by outputting these assets through a content management system (CMS), entering the metadata into the CMS during this process. 

Congratulations, you just paid your teams to type out the data and metadata at least twice… if you have an internal work management system, you might even pay people to type it up a third time. 

Solution: Bidirectional Metadata Mapping

Through connecting Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager, we can eliminate the need for repeated data entry. As part of the project, users can save all the data and metadata associated with the project/asset through the use of custom forms. With custom forms you can create all the fields necessary to capture the information that needs to be associated with the finalized asset and those fields can be synced to AEM. Once on the AEM side any changes made by the content team will then be resynced back to Workfront, thus ensuring that all metadata is kept current and up to date and only has to be entered once.

Hoodoo has been helping many organizations to connect Workfront with AEM to solve content workflow challenges for many years. If you are interested in how you can improve your internal processes for asset creation, management, and distribution with Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager let us know or you can check out our packaged migration offering page. 

Do you need a partner who knows how to integrate Workfront and AEM? 

We do. We’re Hoodoo.

Other articles in this series:

Solving Content Workflow Challenges, Pt 1: Repeated Metadata Entry

Solving Content Workflow Challenges, Pt 2: Duplicated Organizational Setup

Solving Content Workflow Challenges, Pt 3: Delays in Publishing