Solving Content Workflow Challenges, Pt 3: Delays in Publishing

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 third challenge is Delays in Publishing.

Challenge 3: Delays in Publishing

Many organizations segment and specialize their teams based on the type of work that they do. This is just one aspect of siloing, and while it has certainly gotten a negative knock, there are legitimate reasons to follow such a practice. Unfortunately, this type of siloing has the potential to delay publishing new or updated content, simply because it introduces additional steps and people into the publication process. Oftentimes, those who created the assets or produced the new content must hand it off to someone else to ensure that it gets pushed out to the right channel. Maybe it’s a simple email to the content team, or maybe it needs to be submitted through a ticketing system and then prioritized by a specific manager. Either way, because of how teams are set up and responsibilities are divided, this process takes time. Fortunately this inevitable publishing delay is solvable. 

Solution: Auto-Publishing

Delays in publishing can be avoided by connecting Adobe Workfront with Adobe Experience Manager to auto-publish assets or content paths. The method to handle this is to create a custom form specification so that when an asset is pushed over to AEM, it triggers an auto-publish request within AEM. This helps the workflow team to overcome some of the siloing by allowing them to have some publishing rights that they can manage from within Workfront. This not only helps reduce the time it takes to deliver new content to the market, but it also frees up time for your team’s AEM specialist(s), allowing them to focus on other, more urgent, tasks. Imagine what your AEM specialist(s) could do if they didn’t have to spend their time uploading and publishing updated data sheets.