Notable changes to Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service notable-changes

Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service brings many new features and possibilities to manage your Experience Manager projects. There are many differences between Experience Manager Assets on-premise or hosted as Adobe Managed Service as compared to Experience Manager as a Cloud Service. This article highlights the important differences for Assets capabilities.

The main differences as compared to Experience Manager 6.5 are in the following areas:

Asset ingestion, processing, and distribution asset-ingestion-distribution

Asset upload is optimized for efficiency by enabling better scaling of ingestion, faster uploads, faster processing using microservices, and bulk ingestion. Product capabilities (web user interfaces, desktop clients) are updated. Also, this may impact some existing customizations.

  • Experience Manager uses direct binary access principle to upload and download assets and uses asset microservices to process asset. See overview of microservices.

  • The default workflow DAM Asset Update in previous versions of Experience Manager is no longer available. Instead, asset microservices provide a scalable, readily available service that covers most of the default asset processing (renditions, metadata extraction, and text extraction for indexing).

  • The website components that deliver a binary file without any transformation can use direct download. The Sling GET servlet is updated to let developers do this by default. The website components that deliver a binary with some transformation (for example, resize it via a servlet) can continue to operate as is.

The standard renditions generated with asset microservices are stored in a backward-compatible way in the asset repository nodes using the same naming conventions.

Develop and test asset microservices asset-microservices

Asset microservices provide a scalable and resilient processing of assets using cloud services. Adobe manages the cloud services for optimal handling of different asset types and processing options. Asset microservices help to avoid the need for third-party rendering tools and methods (like ImageMagick) and simplify configurations, while providing out-of-the-box functionality for common file types. You can now process a broad range of file types covering more formats out-of-the-box than what is possible with previous versions of Experience Manager. For example, thumbnail extraction of PSD and PSB formats is now possible that previously required third-party solutions such as ImageMagick. You cannot use the complex configurations of ImageMagick for the Processing Profiles configuration. Use Dynamic Media for advanced FFmpeg transcoding of videos and use processing profiles for basic transcoding of MP4 videos.

Asset microservices is a cloud-native service that is automatically provisioned and wired to Experience Manager in customer programs and environments managed in Cloud Manager. To extend or customize Experience Manager, the developers can use the existing content or assets with renditions generated in a cloud environment, to test and validate their code using, displaying, downloading assets.

To do an end-to-end validation of the code and process including asset ingestion and processing, deploy the code changes to a cloud-dev environment using the pipeline and test with full execution of asset microservices processing.

Feature parity with Experience Manager 6.5 cloud-service-feature-status

Experience Manager as a Cloud Service introduces many new features and more performant ways for existing features to work. However, when moving from Experience Manager 6.5 to Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, you may notice that some features either work differently, are not available, or are available partially. The following is a list of such features. In addition, see the deprecated and removed features.

Functionality or use case
Status in Experience Manager as a Cloud Service
Comments
Duplicate asset detection
Works differently
See how it worked in Experience Manager 6.5.
For Placement Only (FPO) renditions
Works differently
Processing Profiles use asset microservices to generate FPO renditions. In Experience Manager 6.5, a third-party solution such as ImageMagick was available to generate the renditions.
Metadata writeback
Works differently
Disabled by default. Enable the corresponding workflow launcher if needed. Writeback is handled by asset microservices.
Processing of assets uploaded using Package Manager
Needs manual intervention
Manually reprocess using the Reprocess Asset action.
MIME type detection
Not supported.
If you upload a digital asset without an extension or with an incorrect extension, it may not be processed as desired. Users can still store the binary files without an extension in the DAM. See MIME type detection in Experience Manager 6.5.
Subasset generation for a compound assets
Not supported.
Dependent use cases like annotations may not be fulfilled. See subasset creation in Experience Manager 6.5. PDF preview of some file types is available starting 2021.7.0 release.
Edit images
Not supported
Editing assets is not supported in Experience Manager as a Cloud Service. See how it worked in Experience Manager 6.5.
Home page
Not supported
See Assets Home Page experience in Experience Manager 6.5
Extract assets from ZIP archive
Not supported
See ZIP extraction in Experience Manager 6.5.
Assets ratings
Not supported
The rating widget in the metadata schema editor is not supported.
Content disposition filter
Not supported
A popular use case of ContentDispositionFilter is to let administrators configure Experience Manager to serve HTML files and to open PDF files inline instead of downloading those. On the Publish instances, you can manage the disposition using Dispatcher configuration. On the Author instances, Adobe does not recommend modification to the Content Disposition header. See Content Disposition filter in Experience Manager 6.5.
Product photoshoot template
Not supported
See product photoshoot template in Experience Manager 6.5.
Smart Translation
Not supported
Smart translation is not supported in Experience Manager as a Cloud Service.
WebDAV
Not supported
For alternatives, see Creative Cloud integration or Developer reference material.
Classic UI
Not supported
Only Touch-enabled user interface is available.

See also

recommendation-more-help
fbcff2a9-b6fe-4574-b04a-21e75df764ab