ACSF+Lift: Preparing for Content/Site Management

This is part one of a four part series on Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Acquia Lift. You can no longer think of your website as a summary of what your organization has to offer; it's less about you -- your products, services, etc. -- and more about the experience you are creating for your customers via unique, personalized content. If you are to succeed, you need to break out of the traditional website experience and focus on the digital experience. There's no shortage of open source and proprietary software that aims to make it easier to build sites and manage a proliferation of content. Some also make it easy to deliver and govern a large number of websites in your organization. Enterprises and brands are increasingly focused on other types of digital experiences beyond the website or mobile site. Many digital experience platform vendors have struggled with this; it's a myth that content and presentation must be tightly coupled. In reality, there are tools that offer flexible presentation and content distribution models. These tools decrease time associated with site deployments and manual content updates, reduce security and compliance concerns, and mitigate the risk of out-of-date or inconsistent content across sites. Standalone, a multisite management tools or a content syndication service is helpful, but together, you have both flexibility and control.

Acquia Cloud Site Factory Paired with Acquia Lift

A multisite digital experience management platform allows you to deliver and govern multiple sites that share a common range of functionality or architectural pattern instead of having to manage each site individually. For global companies, lack of governance makes security, compliance and brand consistency nearly impossible to achieve. With Acquia Cloud Site Factory, organizations can manage and govern all of their sites compliantly through a centralized digital site management console and shared Drupal platform. By taking advantage of a common multisite code base and management platform, an organization will have a unified view across all of their sites with a standard process for configuring and managing multisite delivery.Built on Acquia's scalable cloud platform, Acquia Cloud Site Factory allows you to manage multiple digital sites at scale, with features such as:

• A centralized, role-based site management console for managing digital sites built with Drupal tuned to specific content and site governance requirements.
• Multisite Stacks delivery and governance, for building multiple sites from dedicated codebases and deploying new updates across a collection of sites.
• Open integrations with REST-based APIs.
• Powerful delivery automation to eliminate error-prone manual processes.
• Acquia Cloud platform services, including DevOps services and tools, a guaranteed SLA, remote administration, security and monitoring.

In addition to Acquia Cloud Site Factory, Acquia offers Acquia Lift, a single cloud-based solution that unifies content and customer data to deliver contextual, personalized experiences. Platform agnostic, Acquia Lift integrates into your existing technology stack and enables the secure discovery and syndication of content across your many sites, different departments, and various technologies. One of Acquia Lift's key features is content discovery and syndication. Acquia Lift aggregates rich, structured, reusable content from multiple sources including websites, commerce systems, and mobile apps. Powerful discovery tools equipped with customizable filters, empower your marketers to quickly identify and repurpose existing materials to maximize their value and ensure no efforts are wasted. You can also automate and syndicate content updates in order to ensure consistency while eliminating manual content duplication. This central view of content streamlines the content distribution process while also delivering the most relevant content to customers.More than just a content repository, Acquia Lift features a robust set of capabilities, including:

• Intuitive, visual, data-rich, drag-and-drop, card-based UI
• Bi-directional content sharing across heterogeneous sources
• Decoupled content distribution and experience delivery
• Central management and mapping of content
• Open, well-documented APIs
• Platform agnostic
• Smart filters and faceted search
• Automated content subscription updates
• Creation and collection of unified visitor profiles
• Merging of anonymous & known visitor profiles
• Real-time, adaptive segmentation
• Behavioral targeting and A/B/n testing
• Pre-built and custom reporting & analytics

Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Acquia Lift together can increase efficiencies for building, deploying and updating sites within your organization and across your network, so you can mitigate risk, maintain brand consistency, and easily manage multilingual and/or global sites.

The Benefits of ACSF + Acquia Lift

The more platforms, systems, and tools you have to manage your digital properties, the more resources you need to maintain them. Not all technology is created equal; some of those resources might end up spending time supporting outdated software rather than building and deploying new sites. By using Acquia Cloud Site Factory, you can consolidate your websites into one system that allows you to build reusable themes and templates, improving deployment time and reducing cost. Faster Time to Market: Valuable time can be saved during the content creation and discovery processes. Acquia Lift lets you easily distribute new pieces of content across your network, instead of having to either send it via email to your network or update each site manually. In addition, the combination of bidirectional functionality and automation allows you to pull in content from your network or trusted external sources, and distribute it automatically based on your search filters. Content and personalization rules can be added onto pages with easy drag and drop functionality to deliver data-driven personalized digital experiences. For existing pieces of content, the faster you are able to determine if the type of content you need already exists, the faster you can repurpose that content, because you're not duplicating work or wasting time searching for relevant content. Lower Cost: Running multiple legacy technologies is costly; there's no two ways about it. By using a multisite delivery and management platform like Acquia Cloud Site Factory, you lower your costs by increasing reuse and reducing duplication and complexity while eliminating legacy systems. This also saves on incurring cost from the resources dedicated to each legacy technology, as well as license fees and maintenance retainers associated with those technologies. With Acquia Lift, cost is saved by not having to build and manage your own homegrown content distribution solution. Resources that would have been used on painstaking maintenance can now focus on using the open API to integrate with different technologies. And for content authors and marketers, using a system like Acquia Lift eliminates the time associated with searching for, managing, and duplicating content and building personalized digital experiences across a portfolio of sites. If you are to succeed in creating multiple digital experiences you need to break out of the traditional website experience by effectively managing your sites and allowing your content to shine. Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Acquia Lift not only help you manage today's multisite and content demands, but prepare you for the API revolution on the horizon.