Content continues to grow at an alarming, unmanageable rate. With enterprises looking to publish large volumes of web content at an increasingly rapid pace, it becomes critical for tech companies to continuously look for solutions in the market that address the demand for newer and relevant content.  Key to success in this competitive market are products that eliminate the need for in-depth learning for marketers. Solution providers like Adobe, Salesforce, Google, and others strive to provide tools that try to stay ahead of demand while driving adoption.  Adobe has proven itself time and again as a truly innovative company when it comes to pioneering and reinventing new approaches to content management and web development. The promise of allowing users to create and publish content using familiar tools while ensuring a perfect Lighthouse score.

A Paradigm Shift

Content Management is a complex and time-consuming undertaking and the more sophisticated the tools, the steeper is the learning curve. Many marketers still provide content through traditional authoring products and hand it over to skilled staff to copy the content into a CMS. Adobe Franklin is an Adobe Next Gen Composability product that has already created a lot of buzz by introducing a paradigm shift in web development. Simply put, Franklin allows users to create and publish content using tools they already know and love like Microsoft Word, Excel, and Google Docs. This simplified approach helps enterprises rapidly publish their content in huge volumes by allowing them populate websites from templates designed in office productivity tools.

What does Franklin (Adobe Edge delivery services) bring to the table?

The million-dollar question is whether this new product in the market lives up to the buzz and hype. Also, can Franklin carve out a big chunk of the content management enterprise market for itself making other complex CMS products irrelevant?

To understand this let’s take a closer look at a couple of salient features of Franklin:

• Franklin is 100% serverless, so you don’t need dedicated environments. All you need to get started on Franklin is a GitHub and Google account with some basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge and a Node/npm installed for local development.
• Franklin relies on blocks for development. Blocks are similar to AEM Components, e.g., Tiles, Columns, Hero, Header, Footer, Table etc. There is a collection of blocks which can be used as a blueprint to start new projects.

But …

While Franklin provides the basic building blocks for the solution, it still has some work to do:

• Franklin doesn’t come with a well-structured language master, language copy, and live copy approach.
• Clients need to manage the multi-site feature on their own. For example, creating language-specific copies of the word file in different folders.
• Content backup is dependent on the client’s infrastructure.
• And more importantly, there are no out-of-the-box integrations available with Adobe tools or workflows. Custom development of these integrations is needed, and all theme changes need to be managed at a code level.

So, what’s the verdict?

Where does that leave the future of Franklin in the world of CMS? While it may be a boon for small to mid-sized customers who don’t want to invest heavily in a state-of-the-art CMS tool, it is unlikely that Franklin will take a big chunk of the market share from other CMS products shortly.  This doesn’t seem to be realistic as most of the enterprise websites are not just content-heavy; they also have lots of static content that needs regular updates.

The good news is that AEM sites and Franklin can co-exist. A section of a site can be migrated to AEM Franklin and the CDN can be used to have some of the traffic go to AEM Sites and some of the traffic go to AEM Franklin. In my view, the future of Franklin lies intertwined closely with AEM in the enterprise space. There needs to be a fine balance – using Franklin for enterprise static content.

And what opens opportunities for companies like Infosys to bridge the gap by integrating Franklin with AEM Sites.