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Monthly Archives: August 2021

  • August 27, 2021
  • 0

A Detailed Overview of Adobe Experience Cloud

Category : ecommerce-insights

Digital transformation has created a sea of changes in every industry today. Organizations must reflect more on their experiences with given factors like huge chunks of data, amplification of devices, and growing customer needs/demands. Companies that are far-sighted know the importance of what a great customer experience can do to the business and the brand. It is one of the key differentiators that help you stand out in the market and makes you a leader.

In order to offer an exceptional experience to the tech-savvy customers of the present era, businesses need an intelligent ecosystem and great design. Businesses need to cope up with the rising trends and fulfill their digital experience expectations and online shopping behavior by leveraging advanced technologies to their full potential.

But the question is, which digital platform can feed to the instantaneous evolution of customer behavior? The answer to this is any Digital experience platform like Adobe Experience Cloud. A complete digital platform unifies all the digital capabilities that include marketing intelligence, advertising, commerce, content management, campaign management, data analytics, and visualization into one native solution.

What is Adobe Experience Cloud?

Adobe Experience Cloud consists of Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Analytics and Magento Commerce Cloud in a single easily obtainable platform. It is pre-integrated with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a headless content management platform.

It helps you to provide great customer experiences by creating customized web applications, automating and managing tasks related to online advertising, collecting information and managing campaigns. Experience Cloud is built on the Adobe Cloud Platform, leveraging Adobe Sensei’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. And because it’s from Adobe, Experience Cloud integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.

Why Choose Adobe Experience Cloud?

In order to meet the demands of the customers, companies should get their customer experience management (CXM) practices right. But the uneven spread of data and legacy systems hinder delivering personalized experiences at a large scale. Adobe Experience Cloud helps you to overcome such obstacles and helps you furnish reliable experiences for each customer, at any time and on any platform.

According to the industry analysts Forrester and Gartner, Adobe Experience Cloud was cited as the highest-rated digital marketing solution for being an innovative one in multiple categories. The best thing about Adobe Experience Cloud is it is an open, scalable, and secure platform that easily integrates with any other current technology stacks. And with a robust ecosystem of partners, you can amplify the effectiveness and innovation even further.

Components of Adobe Experience Cloud

  • Adobe Marketing Cloud: This comes with a consolidated set of reliable solutions that allow marketers to create experiences that are unique to their brands, connect and proactively engage with the customers. It also includes Adobe Experience Manager (It’s part of the marketing cloud), Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Social, and Adobe Primetime, to help brands manage, personalize, set up and optimize campaigns and customer journeys.
  • Adobe Advertising Cloud: It is the first platform for managing overall advertising across traditional television and digital formats. Making the best of the features of Adobe Media Optimizer and recently acquired TubeMogul (an enterprise software organization for branding and advertising), Adobe Advertising Cloud eases the delivery of audio, video, display, and search advertising across multiple channels, screens, and touchpoints.
  • Adobe Analytics Cloud comes with predictive intelligent mechanism that helps businesses to convert insights into actions in real-time by integrating audience data exclusively across all Adobe clouds. Furthermore, it combines Adobe Audience Manager (data and audience management platform), and Adobe Analytics, and detailed audience segmentation across all marketing mediums. Since the open APIs and Adobe Sensei (Adobe’s ML and AI platform that enables companies to effortlessly create, make informed decisions and market target audience better) in the Adobe Analytics Cloud are accessible, brands leverage to collect, rationalize and understand huge amounts of their own data and then translate into specific customer profiles.

Apart from the above-mentioned three components, Adobe Experience Cloud can be integrated with the Adobe Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.

Benefits of Adobe Experience Cloud

    • Delivering authentic and rich end-to-end experiences:

The future of customer experiences is dependent heavily on intelligent systems like Adobe Sensei. Adopting AI and cloud technologies for customer engagement enhances the customer journey. It will be a win-win situation for both.

Adobe Experience Cloud platform is a powerful tool that combines content and data in a common interface. It forms the base for rich end-to-end digital experiences.

    • Effortless integration with other platforms

Magento and the headless architecture of AEM are integrated using an API/connector to deliver a holistic customer through experience-driven commerce solutions. Magento and AEM have about 1000+ extensions from the marketplace and native APIs are available for any two-way integration.

Adobe and Magento launch upgrades and security patches frequently and provide continuous support to the teams. You will not only save time but money as well.

    • A single portal to combine data & content:

Adobe Experience Cloud offers a single gateway to companies where they can integrate their businesses to measure, improve, and customize user journeys at all touchpoints throughout the lifecycle. The Adobe Experience Cloud keeps every aspect of the company in sync and secure. Since it comes with several tools, companies can leverage to convey and extend the model to fit their requirements. This is done by allowing different systems like content management, loyalty, and analytics solutions, to communicate smoothly with one another, which surely improves overall efficiency.

    • Paperless Customer Experiences:

Adobe is giving a new dimension to the paperless customer experiences with enhanced integration between Adobe Experience Cloud and Document Cloud. Working together, Adobe Sign and Adobe Experience Manager Forms eliminate the cost and discontent of manual, paper-based processes for enrollment, onboarding, and service across the customer journey. The whole process has ultimately helped many organizations to go completely digital with credit card applications or government benefit forms or some other medical forms.

    • Simplified and sophisticated creative workflow:

Every great experience starts with great design and now the availability of Creative Cloud along with Adobe Experience Cloud has provided new heights to whole creative workflows. Marketers can now easily pull in content from Creative Cloud Libraries and edit images in Adobe Campaign to create and deliver personalized emails. Adobe Analytics and the Adobe Social Publishing Panel are also now available in Premiere Pro CC, enabling creative teams to publish video content across social media channels and receive real-time insights. In addition to these, Adobe Experience Manager’s digital asset management system can now automatically synchronize content based on shared metadata across Clouds to ensure that only the latest version of campaign assets is used.

Architecture Diagram of Adobe Experience Cloud

Adobe Experience Cloud

Image Source – Adobe
 

Overview of Experience Cloud assets

Experience Cloud Assets provide a single, centralized repository of marketing-ready resources that you can share across solutions. An asset can be anything digital. It can be a document, image, video, or audio. They can have multiple depictions and sub assets too.

Asset services consists of:

  • Asset storage, management interface, embedded selection interface (acquired through solutions).
  • Implementations with Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud collaboration, and Experience Cloud solutions.

Using assets improves stability and compliance, it helps brands with instant availability to customers and saves time for you and your customer. You can streamline workflows as shown below for example:

  • Social: Publishing on social channels, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+
  • Target: Create experiences for A/B and multivariate tests.
  • Media Optimizer: Launch ad units and campaigns across various channels.
  • Campaign: Engage assets via email newsletters and campaigns.

In Adobe Experience Cloud Assets, you can:

  • Navigation via Experience Cloud Assets
  • Use the Toolbar
  • Edit, search and interpret assets
  • View Full-Screen Assets and Asset properties
  • Asset sharing with Adobe Experience Manager
  • Run Usage reports

Adobe Experience Cloud compatibility

Adobe Experience Cloud provides resilience and limitless flexibility and expansion. Small, medium, or large enterprises can make the most of these features. Compatibility expands furthermore and offers high security and better performance for lesser cost with the help of service enablers. Adobe Experience Cloud offers single data depository and cloud hosting features enables companies to deliver and enhance time-to-market capabilities.

Small Businesses can leverage the personalized platform and go for a month-on-month subscription. Medium and large businesses can optimize an all-inclusive solution with B2B functionality.

Adobe Experience Cloud is built to work in sync with Creative Cloud and Document Cloud. Adobe’s Creative Cloud is an all-in-one platform to cater to all of the company’s creative requirements and Adobe Document Cloud offers the most extensive tools for digitizing document workflows. These business subscriptions are merged with Adobe Experience Cloud through the Adobe Cloud Platform and Adobe’s engine for cross-cloud integration. Together, these combined providing aids brands with all things they need to design and deliver outstanding experiences.

Great design leads to a greater customer experience. Creative Cloud combines with Adobe Experience Cloud to simplify and boost creative workflows. Marketers can now easily retrieve content from Creative Cloud Libraries and edit images in Adobe Campaign to generate and deliver customized emails. Along with this, Adobe Experience Manager’s digital asset management system (DAM) now automatically organizes content based on shared metadata across clouds to ensure that only the current version of campaign assets is used. Adobe Analytics and the Adobe Social Publishing Panel are present in Premiere Pro CC, helping creative teams to publish video content across various social media channels and get real-time insights.

Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger Extension

The Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger extension for Chrome inspects your web pages and analyzes issues and helps you with implementing Experience Cloud solutions.

The Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger can help you understand and regulate the executions.
It is optimized to show what Adobe solutions are implemented based on the analysis of Analytics, Target, Audience Manager, Ad Cloud, Launch, Dynamic Tag Management and Identity service feature.

You can use the Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger extension with the other Adobe activation solutions for any workflow as mentioned below:

  1. Use Adobe Experience Platform Launch to insert code that activates Adobe Experience Cloud solutions on your pages.
  2. Utilize Adobe Experience Platform Auditor to test all the implementations.
  3. Wield the Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger extension to debug issues found by Auditor or to check other information about implementations.

The above steps can be performed in any order but make sure you follow them.

The debugger can run on any web page, but any non-public data is only available in the extension if authenticated into the Experience Cloud in one of your open Chrome tabs.

Collect the information through the Debugger and understand how your Experience Cloud solutions are executed. For instance:

  • Platform Launch: See which property, environment, build is implemented on a page.
  • Target: See which activities you can and cannot and why.

Other Features

Adobe Experience Cloud consists of Page Builder to create custom pages, Adobe Business Intelligence, Magento Order Management with various implementation options and advanced analytics to recognize potential customers and Magento Market Platform with 1000 plus extensions made available for you.

Adobe’s PWA (Progressive Web Apps) studio allows you to create and manage powerful PWA. Edge Out is an extensive feature of PWA from Adobe’s PWA studio. It helps you in building your own PWA through a headless API. Seamless Omni-channels content delivery is backed by sensible Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) personalization. Adobe Sensei enables you to clout the AI/ML-driven personalization through an API.

Long story short, it is best to go with an all-in-one platform like Adobe Experience Cloud to integrate a complete digital commerce experience and minimize your operational expenses instead of incorporating different technologies and creating chaos.

Conclusion

Be a brand that delivers exclusively, consistently and be there for customers whenever and wherever they are. This will build a stronger bond with your customers which gives brand loyalty and growth to your organization.

Adobe Experience Cloud is a complete and extensive platform that brings in outstanding solutions, extensive data and content systems, a strong partner ecosystem, and an incredible expertise in experience delivery.

Embitel Technologies is a partner of Adobe and Magento and has delivered exceptional services to numerous clients globally. To make the most of the Adobe experience cloud solution and enhance your digital retail performance, contact our team and get a premium Adobe Experience Cloud consultations and flourish your business.

  • August 23, 2021
  • 0

How Qt Application Development Helps You Craft Stunning UI Across Platforms

Category : Embedded Blog

In the current digital landscape, it has become inevitable for businesses to offer exceptional user experiences through their products to delight customers. Companies like Disney, Tesla and Amazon have cracked the code to accomplish this. The legions of loyal customers that their products have amassed is testimony to the importance of delivering a great UX.

In this article, we will explore the Human Machine Interface (HMI) design considerations for exceptional UX. We will also highlight how Qt application development helps engineers to create sensational HMIs across platforms easily.

Designing an Intuitive HMI/UI for Delivering Great UX

In theory, User Experience (UX) on a platform is based on the presentation, performance, interactive features, assistive behaviour, branding, and even the user’s state of mind. Since UX encompasses a wide range of criteria, often involving the user’s feelings and emotions, the job of a UX designer is not easy.

A great UX is not just based on usability or simplicity. It should contribute to the user’s feeling of accomplishment and discovery while substantiating the cost of the product. It should give the user control of the application while retaining important information. For instance, consider the auto-recovery feature in Microsoft Word. Don’t we all agree that it is an absolute necessity?

Embedded product development is an integral part of an IoT solution. With advancements in IoT technology, people have grown to expect a smashing user interface for even the most basic connected product. Hence, while designing and developing these products, it is essential to rely on product development frameworks such as Qt to ease the process of crafting an impressive HMI.

Challenges in Designing UI Architecture for Embedded Devices

  • Complex UI specifications
  • Large number of developers within the team
  • Many hardware dependencies, especially in automotive industry
  • Scale to manage multiple backends
  • Limited development time
  • Low productivities

HMI/UI Design Best Practices

  1. Evaluate User Requirements – The first step in the design of a great HMI starts with the evaluation of user needs. You should also understand how users perform each task and in what order. Check out existing products of similar nature and assess the problems faced by users when interacting with these products. This will help you gain a good understanding of the desires of the user, which may otherwise, be difficult for them to express clearly.
  2. Design the HMI Look and Feel – The next step is to decide the workflow of the application and the appearance of the HMI. You should also consider the operating environment of the product. For instance, if the application is running in an environment with a lot of background noise, then it doesn’t make sense to design audible alerts for the user. Another example related to the deployment of the application – If the app is being used globally, you need to understand whether web functionality or multiple language options are required.
  3. Pick the Right Tools – If the UI design and development environment is graphical, it will be a great advantage for the engineers. The tool will then inherently have an object-oriented approach to design and development of components. If there are no specifications on compatible hardware or operating system in the code, it can also be easily ported and recompiled on a different platform. Best-of-breed cross-platform development tools like Qt application enable you to develop prototypes quickly. The framework allows engineers to utilise pre-built components that can be customized further. The components of the prototype can also be reused when developing the final product. Note that this really helps in cutting down on the overall development time and effort significantly!

Advantages Offered by Qt Framework

Qt is a cross-platform software development framework that enables the design and development of embedded applications, mobile apps and desktop apps. It enables engineers to code in C++ and functionalities/features of the app are separated out into modules.

Some of the key benefits offered by the Qt framework include:

  1. Cross-platform Development – Qt supports various operating systems such as Android, Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, etc. This implies that the framework can be leveraged to design and develop all sorts of applications, starting from mobile apps to automotive infotainment systems and even high-performance medical equipment. A single code base developed using Qt can be deployed on all supported platforms with the Qt APIs.
  2. Multidimensional Design Capabilities – Through Qt application development, it is possible to create beautiful 2D/3D visuals on a touch-based UI that can scale up/down to all form factors. The framework contains readymade UI libraries that can be dragged and dropped to the design workspace, to ease the design process. QML also enables engineers to build UI in a declarative manner.
  3. Bridges Gap Between Designers and Developers – The Qt Design Studio facilitates unified design and development. This breaks the constant cycle of feedback loops between the design team and the development team, and accelerates the iterations.
  4. High-performance UI Development – With Qt, you can create highly responsive human machine interfaces with quick startup time and sleek animations.
  5. Framework Maturity – The Qt framework has been preferred by engineers for more than 20 years. The framework has also witnessed a lot of improvements over the years. Hence, it offers the much-needed stability that may be missing in other frameworks.
  6. Quick Prototype Development – The UI concept can be implemented quickly using the Qt framework – right from the design stage to prototype development and validation on target hardware. The final product with interactions and animations can also be developed easily from the prototype, as modular library classes can be reused.
  7. Incredible Documentation and Support – The Qt framework has great documentation when compared to competing platforms. There are guides on every aspect of application development, including examples and tutorials. Qt also has a huge user-base of more than 1 million users. This helps developers in receiving community support easily.

Understand the Key Milestones in Qt Application Development

  • When using Qt for application development, the first step is to compile it for the target platform. You need to have a clear idea of the device that is being designed, so that you can decide the type of tool that will be used from the Qt framework.
  • The next step is to identify the type of low-level communication that is required on the driver side.
  • After that, you can proceed with the actual application development process. During application development, it is important to identify what kind of screens will be created. In case some screens can be reused, those will have to be separated out as a different stream of work.
  • The subsequent steps you take will be based on the target platform/device the application will be running on, i.e., laptop, desktop, tablet, smartwatch, etc.

Our Experience in HMI/UI Development

With over 15 years of IoT application development experience, Embitel has been a frontrunner in crafting cutting-edge HMI/UI in the automotive, Industry 4.0 and healthcare domains. Our expert team of engineers have collaborated with global customers to develop cloud-based and native embedded applications that are operator centric.

We have leveraged Qt application for designing rich, intuitive and compelling HMIs for several projects. To check out our portfolio of work related to HMI/UI development, please connect with us at sales@embitel.com.

  • August 9, 2021
  • 0

A Comprehensive Guide to Enable Continuous Integration (CI) in Agile

Category : Digital Commerce & Experience Blog

Any software is crucial in operating various functionalities in the organizations. It becomes tough to bring in many changes like bug reports, new feature installations and contributors to the codebase with a complex application. This is one of the predominant reasons why development teams have validated Agile methodologies. With Agile methodologies, you can facilitate the software lifecycle and provide continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) without the limitations of obsolete ways of managing the processes.

We bring you an in-depth look at how to enable continuous integration in Agile software development.

Waterfall Methodologies are Dated

You might have come across the terms Agile and Waterfall methodologies used together or compared many times. Yes, Waterfall methodologies were popular and are still used today in certain projects. In older applications, the codebase was smaller with less features and QA (quality assurance), hence it was easier to perform tests as soon as it was developed. In fact, small projects require design, development, and testing done in the lifecycle that too only once before installation.

In Waterfall methodology, sequential or linear approach is used for software development. The project is run down into smaller sequence of tasks. These tasks are grouped into phases and used in the project lifecycle.

To avoid the shortcomings, project managers, engineers, and other experts came up with various techniques along with CI and CD which can accelerate new development, versioning, and bug fixing.

What is Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD)?

Let us first understand the process of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) before heading forward towards Agile and Continuous Integration installation part of it.

With CI and CD methodologies you can get the updates quickly during software lifecycles. Continuous integration is a process where recently committed code are automatically added to a testing and staging environ for quality assurance (QA).

Both automated and human tests are used to verify software version stability before installing it to production. Commonly tests were done before the code was sent to production, after CI a “new code” is deployed and added to the main repository and tested later.

Continuous Deployment (CD) is an additional step in the software release process where automated testing is used to verify the changes in a codebase and determine whether it is accurate and lasting for immediate autonomous deployment to a production environment.

In case the testing fails, then code will be sent back to developers, and the automation process will remove it from the next deployment. The process is repeated until the bugs and issues are fixed, and finally it is sent to production.

How Continuous Integration and Deployment Work?

It is a known fact that even a simple software has a lifecycle and needs timely modifications and upgrades. The sole purpose of CI and CD is to make these versions happen faster with minimum effort and time from the development teams.

The key stages in CI and CD are as follows:

  1. To build and assemble the code which is committed to the codebase by developers.
  2. Find errors by running unit tests on the code.
  3. Proceed the code to a staging environment in case no errors are found.
  4. If there are issues, run the tests against the codebase with the help of human intervention, or automation, or both.
  5. In case CD is a part of the environment, the tested code is deployed to production.

It is an important point to be noted that, there is a distinct difference between continuous deployment and continuous delivery. In continuous delivery, changes in production happens manually and in continuous deployment, changes are automated.

Continuous Integration CI for Better Performance and Productivity

It really takes time to adapt for teams when Agile and continuous integration is combined. However, Agile forms the base for progress in development and CI manages the dynamic changes that happen in the design or features of any application.

A lot of work goes in where teams will have to strategize, research and deploy tools, adapt to Scrum framework to achieve success in Agile software delivery cycle.

It is time for your team to implement continuous integration and Agile. If you haven’t, you are surely losing out on product success in this competitive sector.

Get your basics right with Agile

The foremost thing to know about Agile is that it needs multiple initiatives. If any of the processes goes wrong, then the entire software cycle will be impacted.

So many teams opt for Scrum framework to begin with. Scrum is a lightweight architecture which is used to manage product development and other knowledge work. But processes here will need more than proper management method to become Agile. The processes will need the support of tools which offer continuous response at a relatively higher speed.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are used for this very reason. These are a set of automated processes which helps in bringing out the product with consistent flow and continuity.

More automation and less human intervention,

With the automation of CI/CD processes, you will be able to submit, version, build, test and release the code automatically. This results in shorter and frequent release cycles with lower risk of bugs and thereby better user experiences.

As a result, teams can focus more on innovation rather than manual work or administering the processes. It thereby avoids rigid process management in order to deliver quality at speed.

CI/CD needs trust from the team and the systems, and definitely requires an enriching mind shift. In addition to automation, the success of Agile lies with management and culture as well.

Quicker the speed of the tests, sooner you move ahead.

Continuous integration will need automation tools. CI requires persistent integration of code (daily or even hourly) into the code repository and testing at every integration.

Testing is essential to ensure quality delivery, but it is one of the most tiresome and extensive tasks when done manually. If we automate the testing, then we can save plenty of time and also provide feedback quickly to the developers.

When you go with shift-left testing (when testing is done earlier in software lifecycle), it will help you save resources. Here bugs are intercepted when testing costs are less, as compared to doing it later in the pipeline where the testing load is often bigger and expensive to complete.

But not all test automation tools are Agile, why?

It is a fact that to achieve agile and continuous integration & continuous delivery, test automation is the key answer. But it is also a fact that it is not acknowledged by software teams in large numbers. But why? Let’s find out:

Well, test automation tools need plenty of time and effort to begin and manage throughout the software lifecycles. It also requires automation scripts to be written by developers which in turn might be a hiccup for various development teams within an organization.

The good part is that test automation does not require coding. No-code test automation allows testers to set up and manage test automation. These testers are not technical experts, they are actually business experts.

Embitel is one such business expert in the industry with a domain experience of over 15 years. Our team fits effortlessly within your CI/CD process by offering a transparent view of the testing method. This not only is economical and saves your time during set-up and maintenance, but also enables Agile teams to test consistently at high speed.

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