A Manager’s Guide to Document Authoring with Edge Delivery Services
This is a manager's guide to Document Authoring with Edge Delivery Services. Although Edge Delivery Services is a serverless platform provided and maintained by Adobe, setting up the web hosting, GitHub, CDN (content delivery network) and DNS (domain name system) management requires some technical skill. This post assumes you have access to a technical team to do this with you.
I cover some of the technical aspects in a developer’s guide to Edge Delivery Services post here:
https://allabout.network/developer-guide-to-document-authoring-with-edge-delivery-services
This guide provides an overview of how Document Authoring with Edge Delivery Services functions. It is designed for managers who require a high-level understanding of the services but do not need to be involved in the developer detail.
Here are the key points to understand:
- Purpose: Document Authoring with Edge Delivery Services enables organisations to create, manage and deliver rich, interactive documents with near-instantaneous load times and fast turnaround from concept to go-to-market, with A/B testing.
- Benefits:
- Improved user experience: Documents load quickly, providing users with a seamless and engaging experience.
- Increased productivity: Authors can create and update documents efficiently, as changes are reflected quickly.
- Cost savings: Organisations can reduce infrastructure costs by leveraging Edge Delivery Services.
- Scalability: The service is highly scalable, ensuring that documents can be delivered to many users without performance issues.
- Components:
- Authoring environment: Authors use Google or Word documents to create and edit web pages. Spreadsheets to provide configuration.
- Edge delivery network: Documents are cached on edge servers strategically located worldwide, ensuring fast delivery to users.
- Content delivery network: Documents are delivered to users from the nearest edge server, reducing latency and improving performance.
- Technical setup:
- Infrastructure: A technical team is required to set up the necessary infrastructure, DNS, GitHub and CDN.
- Integration: The service can integrate with existing content management systems and workflows.
- Use cases:
- Documentation/manuals: Deliver complex technical documentation with interactive diagrams, videos and simulations.
- Marketing collateral: Create engaging marketing materials such as brochures, presentations and reports.
- Training materials: Develop interactive training modules that can be accessed from anywhere.
- Legal documents: Share legal documents with clients and partners securely and efficiently.
- Landing pages: Create campaign landing pages, pages for sharing with social media, etc
Everything discussed below is identical if you have an existing Word or Google Doc. I will demonstrate importing an existing web page into the system.
Consider a web page such as
The AI Tipping Point: A Consultant's Takeaways from CMS Kickoff 2024 | CMS Critic
If we want to convert this page to Document Authoring with Edge Delivery Services, we start with the AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) import command. The importer is currently named Franklin Import UI. Franklin is one of the internal product names; another used in the codebase is Helix. Helix refers to the DNA spiral and is used as a meme throughout the documentation and developer “getting started “ site: https://www.aem.live/home
I will continue to use Franklin in this document.
The Edge Delivery Services platform provides the security, scalability, and speed that Adobe offers for websites. Franklin is an individual project that utilizes the Edge Delivery Services content bus.
The platform also includes other projects discussed in a separate blog post.
The importer reads the website and recognises the main content, removing the adverts. It then saves the content as a Word document. We edit the document to remove the menu hangover in Word or Google Docs and add a heading title format. That's all we have to do. The document is ready for Edge Delivery Services.
Upload to Google Drive (or SharePoint)
In Google Drive (or SharePoint), we can use the document's normal workflows, plugins, and tools, including translation, AI content enhancement, etc.
When we are ready, press Preview to check the website. Then press Publish, and the web page will be complete and ready for the public.
This technique is called ‘autoblocking’ in the Franklin project. We have not created any components, added fancy tags, or used JavaScript Blocks on the web page. We have taken a basic article with images and turned it into a reasonable web page. Franklin has preserved font emboldening, heading levels, and links and loosely styled them all, which Edge Delivery Services will serve fast.
Franklin understands the document's headings (h1, h2, etc.) and applies these values to the final web page. Franklin also understands bold, italic, and underlining. Franklin understands the Courier font as a code marker and outputs the content raw, without font decoration.
Adding new items
We want to be creative and add new items to our site. Let's explain how that works.
In the GitHub repository, we store individual code and styling in blocks. Your developers take care of these, and your integrator or developer team will provide some additional blocks.
When applying code or styling to a fraction of our web page, one adds a table with the block's name. Let’s add a centreblock:
Many out-of-the-box blocks are available for Franklin; see Block Collection.
Further down the page, you will see Block Party.
One can add teasers, heroes, accordions, tabs, etc. Your developers can create many more.
Metadata
Another feature of Franklin is a special block embedded in the HTML page containing the content and the values to be used as metadata. This block describes the page to external systems and configures the page for the Franklin project.
In each row below, the first column is the metadata keyword, and the second column is the value of the metadata element. We have multiple items: one for the page title, one for the page description; one for an image, and one for a line of extra data. The case is ignored in the first column. The metadata table is typically placed at the foot of the document, though this is not a requirement.
This metadata translates into the final HTML
I will cover metadata in detail in the developer's guide. It's good to know that Franklin covers metadata, that it is easily maintained by the content team, and that it may be used by Google or other indexers. Franklin may also use the metadata to change the page layout.
Preview and publish
Franklin contains a toolbar that allows authorised users to preview or publish pages via the Edge Delivery Services platform.
Pressing Preview allows the content author to see the final page, and then pressing Publish sends the page and its assets—the content, media, and code buses—to the public store.
The publish bus system stores the various elements of the web page in a publicly visible cloud storage system where the code bus provides the final code needed to serve the web page to the public. The Adobe code in the code bus is started by a JavaScript file embedded in the HTML, named aem.js. This orchestrates the delivery and sequencing of the assets, the other code blocks and only the blocks required for the current page. This is a speedy delivery, made faster by a bring-your-own CDN such as Fastly.
The assets bus provides images in a suitably rendered format using HTML picture elements, keeping the website fast and performant on mobile websites.
A properly implemented Edge Delivery Services page should have a great Core Web Vitals or Lighthouse score.
Lighthouse performance scoring | Chrome for Developers
The Lighthouse score for this page is below:
The great score 100/100/100/100 comes out of the box. As you add scripts, especially third-party or monitoring scripts, you must continually monitor the performance to ensure the site performs as expected. Adobe provides great tools in the Franklin ecosystem, such as real user monitoring (RUM) and performance checks on GitHub. It helps you ensure you keep world-class speeds. Any Lighthouse score above 80 is at the top of the web.