Background: A tech giant migrates to Adobe
Here at iSoftStone, our Adobe experts proudly support the web operations team for Microsoft 365 – the world’s best-known cloud productivity software. We’ve partnered with them for over six years. Our two companies enjoy a long-term relationship that stretches back more than ten years.
We provide ongoing software development and A/B testing services for a portfolio of 40 e-commerce websites. The scale and impact of our work is truly global. The main US homepage receives more than 7 million unique visitors per month, individual pages are localized for 60 different languages, and the content is distributed to 240 markets.
The Microsoft 365 web ops team had been using a proprietary content management system (CMS) that required significant internal resourcing to run and maintain. Additionally, there was no easy way to update content – even copy changes – and the engineering backlog sometimes stretched to six months. As a cost-saving measure, the CMO initiated a search for a new MarTech stack and Adobe Experience Cloud emerged as the winner for its end-to-end capabilities.
Adobe’s CMS – Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) – is ideal for a business that wants to build. Says Cameron Geasey, Director of iSoftStone’s Adobe Technologies practice, “AEM will give you a lot of the technology to integrate with other Adobe products and with your e-commerce back end. It allows you to do a lot more in a much more supported fashion.”
Our services: Development, content migration, and A/B testing
Because we’d worked on our client’s previous CMS migration, it was natural for iSoftStone to step up again. Thanks to our shared history and our detailed knowledge of Microsoft’s business needs, our experts provided a seamless transition to the new CMS.
And when the web operations team wanted to recreate customizations, we were there to help. Our experts architected additional integrations between AEM Assets and AEM Sites, building the components, extensions, and API data connections.
The user tools in Adobe Experience Cloud are built with a low barrier-to-entry and integrated workflow management. But complex changes still require development expertise on the back end. To empower page authors and designers, we added more options in Assets for formatting and sizing, extended support for dynamic content, and moved logic for product availability by market into AEM. We also built accessibility testing into the development lifecycle, ensuring a higher compliance standard and speedier outcomes.
“Our goal,” says Eli McCoy an iSoftStone software development engineer, “is to make things super simple and flexible for page authors, and still allow those customizations to function on a large scale.”
On top of the migration, we had business-critical launches that had to go out. Every single month there are new products and services. All of those are supported because iSoftStone’s development work has allowed us to manage our content very agilely on Adobe Experience Cloud.
Director of Web Operations | Microsoft
In addition to content migration and web development, iSoftStone supported our client’s Adobe Target implementation and provides ongoing technical services for A/B tests. We build out all the front-end modifications, partnering with our client’s design team and other stakeholders to gauge if an idea is technically feasible and how to implement it.
Our developers can deliver custom code to the page via Adobe Target. That means the potential to create more complex modifications for A/B tests than would typically be achievable through the page editor, even to entire interactive components.
“iSoftStone helped us get the experimentation process really dialed in,” says the director of web operations. “Before, the whole thing didn’t run like a well-oiled machine because we had one team making commitments around when things were going live without understanding the technical aspects. iSoftStone has done an effective job of partnering cross-functionally with that team and integrating our processes together so that the web marketing managers have clear insights into the road map.”
Now, there’s mutual understanding around how big a test is to fund, what the lead times are, and how long rollouts will take. Because iSoftStone’s A/B testing team works closely with our development experts there’s synergy afterwards too. Test modifications can be smoothly translated to real working components that can then be used on multiple pages in the CMS. Our experts have supported over 100 A/B tests since the Adobe Target implementation. That means marketing managers have more of the information they need to make data-driven decisions, mitigate risk, and grow revenue.
Impact: Agility, speed, and seamless customer experiences
Our services and expertise helped the Microsoft 365 team move faster without compromising customer experience – while still being cost-effective. The web ops director notes that “iSoftStone is a critical partner and was really able to help us accelerate. Any other agency wouldn’t have been able to move as fast. We actually have data to show the cost to build a component is cheaper with iSoftStone and it’s twice as fast.”
The end of the migration is in sight. The team has routinely exceeded its KPIs, with a rate of 20-25 components per month and 99-100% accuracy. They’ve also been able to meet big strategic changes such as AI launches and smaller vital rollouts.
The takeaway? Your business can’t stop because you need to change your CMS or build a new component. Managed services with Adobe Experience Cloud can help you harness the platform to create industry-leading capabilities, bring cross-functional teams together, and deliver seamless customer experiences – all while empowering you to meet business-critical goals.
