In the world of pharmaceuticals, achieving a centralized, compliant, and secure content management system (CMS) is a relentless pursuit. If your team finds itself entangled in outdated methods or struggles with post-publishing optimization, it’s time to explore the transformative capabilities of Adobe AEM Franklin.

AEM Franklin: Transforming Content Management in Pharma

AEM Franklin, the latest offering from Adobe, has garnered significant attention across diverse industries, but most notably within the pharmaceutical sector. Departing from traditional approaches, AEM Franklin introduces next-gen composability, a revolutionary method for content publishing and AEM page development. This framework empowers users and teams to author, review, publish, and manage content seamlessly across multiple websites, markets, regulatory landscapes, languages, and countries.

The distinguishing factor lies in AEM Franklin’s ability to bridge the gap between content creators and web developers, fostering seamless collaboration. Even the most extensive websites can promptly publish precise, curated content, achieving an impressive 100% lighthouse score from the outset.(The Lighthouse Score refers to a performance metric provided by Google’s Lighthouse, an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. Lighthouse analyzes web pages in various aspects, including performance, accessibility, SEO, and more.)

Reshaping Pharma Interactions: Prioritizing Speed to Delivery

In reshaping the interaction between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients, AEM Franklin prioritizes speed to delivery. Its core objective is to facilitate exceptional user experiences, meaningful connections, and heightened conversion rates.

As a trusted Adobe partner actively involved in implementing AEM Franklin for leading pharmaceutical companies, NewPage Solutions brings a wealth of firsthand insights into the exceptional qualities that position Adobe Franklin as a true innovator in the marketing technology landscape.

Empowering Content Creation: Bridging the Gap Between Teams

Pharmaceutical companies continually grapple with the challenge of delivering exceptional customer experiences, particularly when it comes to timely and engaging content updates on their websites, especially for new product launches.

Traditional tools, prolonged review processes, regulatory hurdles, and outdated publishing methods exacerbate content distribution efforts, burdening content creators with time-consuming procedures and compromising on quality. AEM Franklin emerges as a solution that empowers users and teams to leverage familiar tools such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs, facilitating the authoring, review, and publishing processes with minimal intervention from web developers.

Innovative Approach: Next-Gen Composability

The innovative approach of Franklin in removing barriers between content development and authoring is a notable departure from traditional CMS paradigms. While platforms like Drupal or WordPress require manual copying and pasting of reviewed content to populate a website, Franklin aims to streamline this process, facilitating a swift transition to digital and bringing self-servicing and speed to content publishing.

Core Functionality

How does AEM Franklin function at its core? AEM Franklin operates as a template-based CMS, allowing users to create templates using familiar tools such as Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. These templates employ tables and tags to provide clear instructions to Franklin regarding content and its placement, enabling users to push content directly from the template to the website effortlessly.

Franklin’s emphasis on content is evident through continuous monitoring and updating of the live site with minimal delay to ensure the latest version is always published. The simplified composable architecture empowers users to create high-performance websites without extensive knowledge of HTML, modern CSS, or vanilla JavaScript. This results in intuitive user experiences without the usual overhead, leading to enhanced scalability, security, and faster time to market.

Additionally, AEM Franklin offers 100% fidelity in each preview, providing reviewers with a unique and easily shareable URL. The platform actively monitors performance and provides insights on SEO improvements and speed optimization. This approach fosters a truly agile and collaborative environment in the pharma industry, enabling teams to achieve more with minimal training and generate fewer support tickets with IT.

Navigating Technicalities: Understanding Adobe Franklin’s Architecture

Adobe AEM Franklin stands out as an enterprise-grade CMS solution built on a cloud-native architecture. It utilizes the Helix Bot, Sidekick, and a GitHub app to automate deployment and content publication. In a departure from traditional CMS structures, Franklin utilizes “blocks” instead of components to build pages. These blocks, defining commonly used page components like text, images, buttons, headers, footers, and hero images, allow for quick page generation and template reuse.

The modular design of Franklin’s services, deployed independently, enhances scalability and reduces downtime. This approach also facilitates an efficient rollback mechanism in case of issues. The four main areas in Project Franklin, EDGE delivery, PIPE markdown-based content transformation, AUTHOR authoring, and DEV development workflow, contribute to a comprehensive and well-orchestrated framework.

NewPage Helps Overcome Hurdles in CMS Transition 

However, transitioning from another CMS to Franklin presents its set of challenges. While Franklin excels in front-end capabilities, it may face challenges compared to traditional components leveraging backend functionality. Customizing blocks may necessitate familiarity with HTML/CSS and JavaScript programming, requiring additional training for team members. Non-technical users may require some time to adapt to the block-based approach compared to the traditional component-based content creation.

The initial implementation and setup of Franklin may demand assistance from Adobe or external consultants experienced in building projects using AEM Franklin. Feedback has indicated concerns about excessive usage of div tags, potentially leading to messy markup. Franklin operates outside the AEM Assets (DAM) environment, requiring users to access the DAM separately for assets or rely on alternative storage solutions. While the Helix Bot offers preview capabilities, the accuracy of the blocks representing the content during construction and editing may pose challenges.

It’s worth noting that utilizing Google Docs and Microsoft Office/Sharepoint with Franklin may require additional licenses and could have limitations. For instance, Google Docs downsizes images to a maximum of 1600 x 1600 px. While Franklin is not yet fully integrated with Adobe Cloud, Adobe has expressed its commitment to future full integration plans.

NewPage is one of the first, trailblazing companies to help large pharmaceutical companies transition from Drupal to Franklin.