Solving Content Workflow Challenges, Pt 2: Duplicated Organizational Setup

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 second challenge is Duplicated Organizational Setup.

Challenge 2: Duplicated Organizational Setup 

Organizing assets is always an issue, especially when systems are disconnected or siloed from each other. Most often, an upstream team decides things should be stored or structured and then downstream systems are expected to follow suit. But this requires two things: first, all the structures must be entered manually, and second, they must also be entered correctly. When you add multiple languages or locations to this process, the margin for inputting errors in the structure increases exponentially. While this may not seem like an enormous issue initially, 6-12 months down the road mistakes like this can make it nearly impossible to find a specific asset.  How can assets be organized on both sides of the workflow process to prevent this? 

Solution: Project Linked Folders

Coupling AEM with Workfront can help you avoid both the mistakes that come with manual entry as well as the resulting headaches from having such a mismatched content structure. By using Project Linked Folders, the structure of a project is duplicated automatically between Workfront and AEM. Whatever your Portfolio, Program, and Project in Workfront are will be automatically created within AEM’s Asset content tree structure. For example, if you had an Apparel as your Portfolio, Seasons as your Program, and Hats as your Project, then within AEM you would be able to find all the finalized assets under the Assets content structure Apparel > Seasons > Hats. Further, you can define additional levels of structure as part of the custom Workfront forms that will allow more folders to be mapped and created in AEM.