EVOLVE'14 | Enhance | Paul McMahon | AEM & Transactional Portal Systems
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The document discusses integration approaches for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) with transactional and portal systems, highlighting the need for a unified user experience across different platforms. It outlines three main integration patterns: transactional systems on top of AEM, AEM on top of transactional systems, and both systems acting as peers. The benefits and challenges of each approach are considered, focusing on user experience control, performance, and complexity in architecture.
EVOLVE'14 | Enhance | Paul McMahon | AEM & Transactional Portal Systems
- 1. AEM & TRANSACT IONAL /PORTAL SYSTEMS Real World Approaches to integration AEM to Transactional and Portal Systems P R E S E N T E D B Y
- 2. 2 INTRODUCT ION Paul McMahon Paul McMahon – Managing Director at Acquity Group – Part of Accenture Interactive North American AEM Practice Lead • 12 years of experience with AEM/CQ platform • First AEM/CQ integration to a transactional platform was in 2002 – CQ 3.5 and Blue Martini rendering a sporting goods manufacturers global digital presence. Agenda Drivers for Integration Approaches to Integration Transactional On Top AEM On Top AEM and Transactional As Peers
- 3. 3 DRIVERS FOR INTEGRAT ION Unified User Experience
- 4. 4 DRIVERS TO INTEGRATE Requirements to integrate AEM with portals, eCommerce platforms, and other niche systems to create a single consistent user interface have become more and more common. Traditionally organizations would create multiple web sites, driven by technology choices. Each platform would manage it’s own web sites and users would need to shift between web sites if they wanted access to multiple functions.
- 5. 5 The days of having separate web sites for different functions, or even the appearance of separate web sites are rapidly coming to end. This trend is driven by a number of factors including: Requirements for single unified user experience across an enterprise’s entire digital experience Requirements for user driven experiences that place fewer steps and boundaries in the way of users completing a transaction. Rise new technologies to deliver user experiences Typical Use Cases Sites with eCommerce capabilities – either B2B or B2C. Financial Services sites with account management or transactional capabilities. Member Service sites Employee Portals DRIVERS TO INTEGRATE One Web Site to Rule them All
- 6. APPROACHES TO INTEGRAT ION Three Common Patterns for Integration AEM Publish (Informational) Internet Shared session Visitors Integrated User Experience Commerce/Por tal/Other System Option 1: Other System On Top Commerce/Por tal/Other System Option 3: Peer Architecture * AEM Publish Option 2: AEM On Top AEM Publish Commerce/Por tal/Other System
- 7. 7 TRANSACT IONAL ON TOP
- 8. 8 The requirements dictate dynamic page display based on capabilities of the transactional system An existing web site/code base seeking to pull in content from a CQ repository. Most commonly this approach is found in internally facing employee portals, or B2B transactional portals like dealer or distributor networks. Normally this is a secondary use of AEM in the enterprise, and in other areas of the enterprise AEM is used in it’s traditional role. Transactional On Top TRANSACT IONAL ON TOP Typical Use Cases Visitors Shared session Commerce/Por tal/Other System AEM Publish
- 9. 9 The most typically integration approaches involve the transactional system consuming rendered HTML snippets from AEM. • A portlet makes a request to page and gets rendered HTML back and includes it into a page server side (/content/site/en/pagea.portal.html). • A product detail page rendered by an ecommerce system makes a AJAX call to a component that renders the right rail of the page (/content/site/en/pagea/_jcr_content/rightpar.html). The key to these and similar mechanics is that it keeps control of the overall user experience with the transactional system. Transactional On Top TRANSACT IONAL ON TOP Integration Mechanics Portal returns a Shared session consolidated HTML page with AEM Content embedded Portal REST call to Component/Page returns rendered HTML Snippet AEM Publish Commerce Page returned containing AJAX call Commerce REST AJAX call to Component/Page returns rendered HTML Snippet AEM Publish
- 10. 10 An alternate approach is to have AEM render a text template that is used by the transactional system to generate a full page response. • Authors create and manage a page in AEM that represents a template for a transactional page • The template includes global content (header and footer) and any other relevant content – maybe a right rail. • The authors also drop place holder components in the page representing the locations where transactional content is displayed. • The transactional system pulls this template from AEM (and usually implements an internal cache of the template) and replaces these tokens at runtime with actual transactional content/HTML and then serves the page. Key differentiator with this approach is that it grants a degree of control to authors over the user experience, but the transactional system still retains control of all page requests Transactional On Top TRANSACT IONAL ON TOP Integration Mechanics Shared session
- 11. 11 TRANSACT IONAL ON TOP Pros and Cons Benefits •Application flow control is left with transactional system. This may be important for systems with complex business logic and dynamic flow. •No SSO is required – only a single system needs to maintain session and security •Access to transactional system’s full API stack when rendering all pages – important for highly dynamic applications, or sites where the transactional system is also a personalization engine. Potential Issues •Preview is difficult – effective preview requires either a staging server and a staging publishing process. •Understanding the relationship between the web site and the content structure in AEM may be difficult depending on the basis for the relationship. • It is easy to create a brittle system where changes to the structure of content in AEM can break the web site. • Link rewriting can be a challenge
- 12. 12 AEM’s Portal Director is an example of portal on top. It provides more advanced integration mechanics which address some of the potential issues with the Transactional On Top Model • Author and Preview – it is possible to author content from the portal, as well as preview prior to publication with Portal Director • Allows for a shared security model where the portal users identity and permissions are shared with AEM allowing standard AEM permission models to be applied • Provides features to reduce the danger of content structure impacting the application (portal content map allowing keys to be configured in the portlets so content references can be safely updated). • Link Rewriting • Caching Portal Director TRANSACT IONAL ON TOP AEM Portal Director Portal Admin Shared session Visitors Portal – End User View Portal – Admin View AEM Publish AEM Author
- 13. 13 AEM ON TOP
- 14. 14 The requirements call for a high degree of author control over user experience. Heavy integration to other parts of the Digital Marketing Cloud Site is more content than transactional eCommerce sites with smaller product catalogs that require richer content – Life Sciences for example. AEM On Top AEM ON TOP Typical Use Cases Visitors Shared session AEM Publish Commerce/Por tal/Other System
- 15. 15 The most common integration approach is for AEM to render all pages and to access the transactional system using web services (either directly from the client browser via AJAX, or with Publish server functioning as a proxy). In cases where the transactional system is the source of truth for a large amount of stable content (like a product catalog) this pattern will involve importing the content into the JCR to reduce the web service traffic. The key to this approach is that AEM maintains control of the page flow and user experience. AEM On Top AEM ON TOP Integration Mechanics Shared session AEM Dispatcher Publish AEM Author AJAX Calls Directly From User Import of stable relatively long lived content AEM Delivers the page with embedded AJAX for dynamic data Commerce Catalog Manager Web Service Calls Proxied from User
- 16. 16 AEM ON TOP Pros and Cons Benefits •Author control of the user experience across the full site. •Access AEM – Digital Marketing Cloud integrations, keeps all relevant content (including product content) in the repository and available to DMC integrations. •Maintain a single session and context for targeting and analytics Potential Issues •Potential performance penalty due to proxying of web service requests through AEM. •Managing state across multi-step transactional processes in AEM requires additional frameworks that are native to most transactional systems. • In use cases where data is imported into the JCR additional complexity is added to the solution and may require significant custom coding depending on the source system.
- 17. 17 AEM AND TRANSACT IONAL AS PEERS
- 18. 18 AEM AND TRANSACT IONAL AS PEERS Typical Use Cases Mixed requirements where both authoring and transactional features carry equal weight. Significant performance concerns for transactional functionality. Retail eCommerce sites with large product catalogs and high product turnover. Member/Partner portals where the transactional features have little or no content integrated and the primary connection between the two systems is the common header and footer. Peers Visitors Shared session AEM Publish (Informational) Commerce/Por tal/Other System
- 19. 19 AEM AND TRANSACT IONAL AS PEERS Integration Mechanics Use of a single web server tier through which all HTTP requests are accepted and then distributed to either AEM or the transactional system based on URL. When a page rendered by the transactional system needs content from AEM it is typically pulled in via a HTTP call to AEM that returns rendered HTML or JSON. The variations are similar to the integration patterns mentioned for the Transactional on Top Pattern. When AEM page requires transactional functionality it will typically access that functionality through a web service call as discussed in the AEM on Top Pattern, or an AJAX call from the client. Sharing CSS/JavaScript/Static Images is a crucial integration mechanism to ensure a consistent user experience. At runtime this normally easy to achieve by deploying the required static files to the shared Apache server, however sharing these files between the applications adds significant dev ops complexity. Peers Visitors Shared session Shared Web Server Farm Common User Experience AEM Publish Commerce/ Portal/Other System Web Server routes request to proper system based on URL Content Sharing as needed via web services between systems Appropriate system returns rendered HTML page Architecture also allows for AJAX requests to share content between systems
- 20. 20 AEM AND TRANSACT IONAL AS PEERS Pros and Cons Benefits •Leverages both systems to perform their optimal roles. •Normally easier to achieve required performance goals. •Loosely couples the integration between the two systems Potential Issues •Add significant complexity to the architecture •Triaging and troubleshooting are more complex. •Development operations are more complex because of the coordination required in non-production environments. •Development is more complex because the UI must be maintained consistently in two systems. •Preview can still be challenging for content appearing on transactional pages.
- 21. 21 AEM AND TRANSACT IONAL AS PEERS Key Points Key to these architecture is splitting responsibility for responding to end user page requests among two or more systems for one web site in manner that is transparent to the end user. The goal is to allow the most appropriate system render the page, hiding from the user that different systems are involved. Every URL rendered by the web site is assigned to be rendered by one of the systems backing the web site. Pages within the web site are broken down into content areas, and the source of each content area is defined. Peers
- 22. 22 Q&A QUEST ION Q&A Contact – [email protected]