What do you do anyway? Part 2: AEM Connectors By Hoodoo

“So, what do you guys do?”
At just about every trade show or conference where you are mingling with people or scheduled for booth duty, someone is going to ask you that question. And you’d better have an answer. It could be a future customer, business partner, or crucial contact that leads to both. In those situations, the “pitch” needs to be simple and to the point. You aren’t going to pull out a slide deck, because there isn’t time. They don’t call it an “elevator pitch” for no reason. But in a blog post, we have plenty of time.

In Part 1 of our article series on what we do I introduced our expertise at delivering AEM experiences. Part 2 discusses our AEM Connectors.

What’s a Connector?

Back in late 2016 Adobe announced a marketplace where organizations could post tools that would make it easier to link up various products with Adobe’s Document Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Design Cloud solutions. The idea is that while the Adobe products do many wonderful things, they don’t do everything. And companies likely are using a wide variety of tools to accomplish certain goals. Wouldn’t it be great if these tools integrated with Adobe’s solutions much easier, and in some cases even enhanced their tool-sets? The answer is a resounding “YES!” These tools that connect Adobe solutions with other products in the marketing ecosystem are known as Connectors. And many of them can be found on the Adobe Exchange.

When creating Hoodoo, Andy Wakefield and Kem Elbrader (the founders of Hoodoo Digital) were starting to think about this problem and how they could solve it with the new company that they were planning. You see, building templates, components, and authoring controls in AEM is actually pretty straightforward, if you have a basic self-contained website. But what enterprise does? There is always some system that needs to be integrated into AEM because it is a critical tool that has been around for years and years within the organization. Having worked with Adobe Experience Manager for several years and having gone through the hassle of integrating AEM with many third party solutions they knew that there would be a great opportunity. Let’s briefly introduce our initial connectors: Workfront, uStudio, and Fastly.

Workfront Connector for AEM

Hoodoo’s Workfront Connector for AEM links up Workfront and AEM Assets to allow assets to be synced from Workfront to your AEM DAM, and back.

Many organizations use Workfront to manage and organize their various work streams. And they also use Adobe Experience Manager for their online channels. But most of these groups don’t usually interact with each other. Each have their own processes and workflows.

How do we eliminate the bottleneck of sharing the finalized assets, with their appropriate metadata, that doesn’t require each team to log in to separate systems, or manually send files over email with spreadsheets containing metadata? By using the Workfront Connector for AEM. This connector creates a bridge for the Media Production teams in Workfront and the authoring teams in AEM.

Fastly Connector for AEM

Hoodoo’s Fastly Connector for AEM integrates Fastly’s edge cloud CDN giving customer’s web channel fast, secure, and reliable delivery of their web experiences. Speed & performance matters in the web world. Users leave when content doesn’t load. This is a pre-built connector that accelerates AEM using Fastly’s powerful edge cloud CDN platform.

Using Hoodoo’s Fastly Connector with AEM replaces the need for dispatchers or load balancers in front of AEM, a source of frustration for any system engineer. The Connector provides a collection of tools within the AEM interface to configure Fastly for many operations such as redirects, cache invalidation, domain configuration, application routing, and security rules. Gone are the days of waiting for code deployments or server configuration changes to achieve these tasks. Fastly provides many additional integrated services that complement enterprise AEM deployments including advanced Web Application Firewall, DDOS attack prevention, and global distribution of static and dynamic content. Plus, as anyone who has worked with Dispatchers can tell you, Dispatcher configurations are a major headache.

For more details about the Fastly Connector by Hoodoo visit https://hoodoo.digital/fastly.

uStudio Connector for AEM

Hoodoo’s uStudio Connector for AEM offloads the heavy lifting of video storage, processing, and delivery without ever leaving the AEM interface.

Hoodoo teamed up with uStudio, Inc. to strengthen the video management and distribution capabilities for Adobe Experience Manager.

With the uStudio Connector, customers can now take advantage of the robust organization, collaboration, and workflow tools in AEM Assets while uStudio seamlessly handles the video transcoding, storage, and content delivery behind the scenes. After installing the connector, AEM Sites authors can intuitively find and add their uStudio videos using the asset browser and add their videos to their AEM content using standard methodologies. Video assets are powered by uStudio’s enterprise-class media management platform but still exist completely natively as assets inside AEM. The new uStudio interactive HTML5 player component gives organizations complete control over their player experience using the powerful uStudio Player Framework.

For more details about the uStudio Connector by Hoodoo visit https://hoodoo.digital/ustudio.

And we are planning for more connectors, in the future. If you are interested in connecting any of these systems up with AEM or a completely different marketing product then please reach out to us over email: hello@hoodoo.digital. 

As a trusted Adobe partner we want to help connect your organization to AEM. Join us for part 3 of our article series about what we do. That article will focus on Hoodoo’s AEM Cloud.