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Comment by naet | Hacker News Reader

"Content Management – Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) was the tool of choice to update and revise the content that appears on the website."

If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a great choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different content system.

This decision alone probably sunk multiple millions of dollars.

The platform license alone for their operating scale was probably a half million or a million. What you get with that license is... the world's most complex and difficult content management system, that you now have to develop your whole platform around. Since it's so difficult to learn and work with you basically need a full time AEM specialist team, which again blows your budget up potentially in the range of millions of dollars, and then continues to burn strong every time you need any kind of update.

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I've done so many AEM sites for clients with more money than sense. I had to quit the agency business to get away from it. It's absolutely sensible for a big company with complex requirements to buy an off-the-shelf enterprise software package even at a substantial price tag, it's just that AEM absolutely sucks at almost everything. They sell it with the stupid Adobe Marketing Cloud saying you'll get CMS, analytics, A/B testing, ad targeting, yadda yadda in one giant package. Only they're all just a mishmash of acquisitions that don't integrate well at all and none of them are close to the best products for their task. They made for a very compelling sales pitch back in like 2013 when options were more limited and enterprise CMS was a busy space, but no one should be fooled by this in the 2020s.

Also, I can't prove this, but I am highly suspicious that Adobe and their integrators cook up a lot of these deals and get service firms like Accenture to recommend their products for a kickback. I've been stared at by their sales team asking me to help sell their products and refused. Not ever offered anything under the table but I felt like I was getting winked at.

Yes, a lot of "strategic partnerships", "joint ventures" and the like.

Just wait until your BigCo is buying stuff from the consultants/SIs and Adobe/SFDC/IBM/etc and they are all YOUR CLIENTS as well buying tons of services from your company in a totally different market.

"Balance of trade" is the term you'll soon learn about in deal negotiations :)

> If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a great choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different content system.

It’s tailor made for this. Management will always sign off because they’ve heard of Adobe.

As someone who holds a certification as an AEM Business Solutions Specialist (possibly lapsed by now) I have to agree. It's hot garbage.

How do I transfer out of AEM? I’m a junior dev at a company that uses AEM and I realized long ago that I’m wasting my time with it, but I have trouble landing interviews with AEM as my primary dev experience. I’m not an AEM author, I use Java every day.

Forget everything you know and keep learning Java or start learning C#. Yesterday.

My friend also wasn't enthusiastic about AEM at his workplace, he wanted just "ordinary" Java. But Java is just a tool and one often lands in some legacy or overgrown enterprise solution.

I advised him to do AEM certifications. He did and then contract recruiters has started to flood him. He collects tons of cash as independent AEM consultant now. And with Java, he does "fulfilling" Java stuff on the side.

Educate me: What does AEM do that a tweaked WordPress or Drupal (or even SharePoint Site Template) doesn't?

The modern version of "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" is "nobody got fired by using a brand name the boss recognizes". That is what AEM does that Drupal does not.

The boss doesn't know what content management even is, but they have heard of Photoshop and Acrobat so AEM must be good.

Also, they’re paying millions a year just for the license. Nobody would do that if the product wasn’t best in class right?

Guarantee they ran an RFP process for the CMS. AEM does everything its not intuitive and overly complex. Just like Concur does everything and but everyone hates it yet its defacto expense program at large companies.

Sadly, there’s a lot of truth in that!

Can't you use similar logic to tell your boss that nasa, energy.gov, the beatles, weather.com, tbs and all those other older-people-know-about-this sites all use drupal?

At least it's tolerable at all compared to the shitshow that is AEM.

it's suited mostly for large multinationals. I havent used drupal or wordpress at that scale, but if you have website that you need to rollout to >30 countries in many languages AEM might be for you.

just an example of the kind of companies that use it. apple, intel,etc .e.g https://jobs.apple.com/en-in/details/200207733/aem-engineer

The consultancy I worked for didn't sell or promote that kind of tech, but I still got exposed to it at various clients. Seems like a top-down approach, some upper manager saw the cool tool promoted by someone and bought it, then demanding the devs use it no matter the fit.

Instead of these heavy systems, my favorite has been https://www.sanity.io/ . Headless is the way to go, when your anyways building a custom frontend.

If you're talking about Sanity, feel like I should mention Directus. Been wonderful for a few projects and completely open source.

> upper manager saw the cool tool promoted by someone and bought it

And closing that deal and having their reports implement the roll-out was milked for an entire quarters worth of performance metrics for that manager's brag-sheet.

Seen loads of strapi around too; has its warts but it’s easy enough for frontend folks to manage. :)

Why anyone would pick that over a bunch of very mature open source offerings (with much larger developer communities) is beyond me.

There is a certain class of high scale enterprise client that always voices strong prefernce for AEM. I think it might be because AEM at one point was ahead of their competitors and so a lot of the existing enterprise level companies use it in production and have experience on it? Or maybe they think everyone at that operating scale is using it, and so it must be the best choice... truth is the development experience is painful and it usually isn't the best tool.

My agency had a contract to make a site for an Amazon event. They specified that we had to use AEM, probably because Amazon uses AEM on some of their other properties, but it was not a good fit for quickly standing up a limited scope event site.

Analyst reports, compelling demos at conferences, ecosystem of professional services partners with a relationship with the software vendor (implied promise of escalation of issues), 24x7x365 SLAs, competitor success stories using the same technology, existing training materials along with distant promise of developing in-house expertise by working along-side system integrators.

Just curious, which OSS CMS would you recommend for that kind of site?

I work with Drupal and WordPress, but would not recommend them for user data or transactional data (although in my case, we bridge Drupal/WordPress with CiviCRM, and that works relatively well).

Wagtail, you get a great CMS on top of a powerful framework (Django). Best part of Wagtail is that it doesn’t get in the way of Django so you can drop it into any Django project with ease.

Another variation on "Nobody ever got fired for buying ${big_corp}"

Would like to know what open source CMS offering has a very mature offering? Wordpress is fine for a blog/news site.

Django wagtail is pretty great.

Liferay?

Examples?

IBM WebSphere enters the chat...

Or as it used to be known, CQ5. You wouldn't expect Adobe to have built this themselves, would you?

I've been doing AEM projects for a decade. You are not wrong.

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