Project Asset Hub – Modernizing AEM Asset Share with Edge Delivery Services, Content Hub, and Edge Compute
AEM Asset Share has served customers for years as the go-to way to share brand assets externally, but it depends on the classic AEM Java and Publish stack and is showing its age. Adobe now offers Content Hub as a modern product solution for asset distribution with a much-improved search experience. However, many customers still need deeper customizations.
We present Project Asset Hub: built on AEM Edge Delivery Services for speed and performance, Dynamic Media & Content Hub APIs for modern asset binary delivery and AEM Content AI for smart and scalable search. Customizations are solved via edge compute on Cloudflare to support 3rd party authentication, authorization or rights request management. Instead of waiting for the perfect product solution, we push customer-specific logic to the edge.
We have worked with multiple customers in co-innovation to bootstrap and fine tune this approach. The goal is to give AEM partners a reusable blueprint for building customized asset distribution solutions. We'll also share how AI development sped up our co-innovation and how that is part of the blueprint for every project.
angela
What is your authorisation model ?
Maxi V
How will licensing be handled for Project Asset Hub? Will the same AEM Assets 'limited users' quota be used as for the content hub?
Alex K - Adobe
Licensing is still in the works. We are fully aware that limited user licensing can be seen as challenging for these portals, but I don’t have an answer at the moment.
Edgar
Will be this the most recommended solution solution to provide customizations on a portal like content-hub? One of the main content-hub lacks is not allow to include complicated custom personalizations.
Alex K - Adobe
Yes, this is exactly why we did this - to allow full customization on top of Content Hub, since many customers need more than what CH supports out of the box.
jack.jin
This is very cool! What’s the timeline for this for GA?
Alex K - Adobe
No timeline yet but we are working hard on this. We want to complete a few more pilot customers to fine-tune this to reality. And licensing discussions have already started. Stay tuned.
Yegor Kozlov
Does it distribute delivery urls? Assets can be taken down from the hub. Is there a way to track usage once an asset was distributed ?
Alex K - Adobe
Yes, public urls with Dynamic Media with OpenAPI can be used for delivery urls. You can customize this as well if needed since you are in full control of server side logic. As for assets taken down: we have been using a separate attribute on the asset (and in the index) to mark assets that should be visible in the search. You would remove that if you want to take the asset down (make sure agencies no longer can start using this asset), while the asset stays in Dynamic Media/Content Hub and can still be delivered via its public URLs. Usage tracking: that’s a common question. We do have some insights from Dynamic Media URLs. But we know there is also more that could be done end-to-end.
Ive
Did you use Smart Crop from Dynamic Media in your EDS projects, or any other Dynamic Media features?
Yegor Kozlov
can it distribute a specific crop?
KatieP
It’s still unclear to me why we’d use this instead of content hub?
Alex K - Adobe
Content Hub is good when it’s feature set is what you need. No coding, fast time to value. However, many customers need very specific customizations: custom and multiple identity providers (to allow login of external users), multi-brand management, custom authorization models, 3rd party rights management, tailored authoring, templating, …. And many more. That’s where we needed a way to customize the UI, the server-side logic, storage and integrations without any limits.
Tomasz
A someone who died few times on Asset Share Commons hill I just wanna say I love this!
Alex K - Adobe
🤜
Schogi
Does this work with Experience Workspace? Any skills already available?
Alex K - Adobe
Yes it uses normal EDS authoring so will worl with EW as well.
Georg Henzler
Can the edge worker layer also used from Content Advisor to have more flexibility on authorization from AEM Sites? (use case is e.g. to hide assets before a product release but make it available for authoring in AEM Sites already before it becomes public)
Alex K - Adobe
This sounds interesting. So far we did not have any cases of integration between this custom portal and AEM Sites or EDS websites. Mainly our customers want portals for their external partners like agencies where the publication channel could be anything, not necessarily AEM (email, print, social media, ads, …). Having said that I can imagine this being something we could support. You might be able to do this right in your custom portal implementation- you fully own the client + server side logic, meaning there are almost no limitations. It would just depend on the other side - can it plugin a custom selector or the like.
wolf
If it is a yet another custom portal, will it finally replace Brand Portal?
Alex K - Adobe
Content Hub (the existing product) has already replaced Brand Portal for the cases where customers do not need deeper customizations. New customers should not go to Brand Portal anymore. What Project Asset Hub aims to do is fully replace Asset Share for customized asset distribution portals.
Masoud Rozati
Q1: Are carts persisted in the user profile so that users can access them from different devices? Q2: do you have plans to support collections - or multiple carts?
Alex K - Adobe
Q1: you can customize as you want. You can store in localStorage or server-side for cross-device using eg. cloudflare KV storage. Q2: yes, have already done collections for 2 customers. I did not show them in the demo. Customer requirements vary a lot - whether collections are only per user, or can be shared with other users or are curated by authors. We can support all of that. Multiple carts - I haven’t seen this use case so I might not understand the nuances but I am confident it would be possible.
KatieP
Is this a separate sku? Or will we be able to set it up with extra cost?
Alex K - Adobe
Licensing is still in the works.
Yegor Kozlov
do I need the content hub license to run it?
Alex K - Adobe
Yes but you can’t do this yet unless you + customer are part of our co-innovation pilots at this time. There is no GA licensing yet but also there is also technical limitation to access the Content Hub APIs that cannot be done without our Adobe help yet. But stay tuned or fill in our contact form if interested: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/GBH8gSe3jj
Tad Reeves
Do you see any reason why we wouldn't be able to replace the MFE in DA with a library plugin based on Project Asset Hub? That way we could integrate publication criteria, your great search, etc.
Alex K - Adobe
DA has an asset selector already - what gaps do you see? In theory yes, you could have an experience served from your custom Project Asset Hub portal/domain that shows up inside a DA plugin.
Edgar
Will be the possible to provide directly same privilages than on content-hub?
Alex K - Adobe
Yes. Although we have seen with the early customers that custom authorization logic (together with custom authentication) is a key reason why standard Content Hub is not enough for them.