Adobe announces new products to expand mobile core services

PanARMENIAN.Net - Adobe announced a number of new products at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that will expand the company’s set of mobile core services in its Marketing Cloud and make it easier for enterprises to manage content for their mobile apps, TechCrunch reports.

Adobe’s Experience Manager, its enterprise tool for building content-rich sites, is getting the biggest update. The company is introducing Adobe Experience Manager Mobile, an additional version of the Experience Manager tool that will allow enterprises to build and manage mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows that plug into their existing enterprise content management systems. Using the tool, anybody inside a company can build a template for a basic content-driven mobile app and then connect it to the company’s data sources.

With Experience Manager Mobile, the company is essentially combining the capabilities of its existing — and rather developer-centric — Experience Manger Apps and its more designer-focused Digital Publishing Solution.

Adobe argues that for most companies the problem isn’t so much building apps but maintaining them and keeping them updated.

Experience Manger Mobile works somewhat similar to some of Adobe’s other designer-centric tools like Muse — but the focus here is more on building templates and connecting them to data than on designing a single HTML site. Experience Manager Mobile uses a grid-based design tool that’s similar to the likes of Muse, but instead of writing static content for the app, designers can then add ‘cards’ that can be hooked up to an enterprise’s data sources.

All of this is then also integrated directly with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, so businesses can see exactly how well their apps are actually performing and integrate them with this existing marketing solutions.

For now, Adobe only supports its own analytics suite for this and that probably won’t change anytime soon. The company says its aim here is to make integrating analytics as easy as possible for its users. With this solution, they only have to enter the address for their analytics report into the service once and from then on, everything that happens in the app gets fired off to analytics automatically, TechCrunch says.

On the technical side, the tool uses Cordova to build the apps for all three platforms from a single code base.

Experience Manager Mobile, as well as Adobe’s other marketing tools, will now also benefit from a number of additional mobile core services that aim to give developers more marketing options. The new mobile experience enhancements, for example, now enable developers to leverage location-based personalization.

Also new in these core services for the Marketing Cloud is the ability to integrate deep linking into apps.

Maybe the most important update here, though, is improved support for mobile push and in-app messaging, TechCrunch says. Adobe is moving to a unified messaging platform for all of its Marketing Cloud products that should make it easier for brands to send deep links via push messages.