Adobe Experience Manager Assets Sidekick Plugin

This article lists down the steps to use the Experience Manager Assets Sidekick plugin. With this plugin, you can use assets from your Experience Manager Assets repository while authoring documents in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Supported Experience Manager Assets Versions

The Sidekick plugin for Assets described here supports access to:

• Adobe Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service
• Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials

Note: To simplify access to Experience Manager Assets version 6.5 (Adobe Managed Services, on-premise), you can implement a project-based plugin, e.g., using the asset selector from version 6.5.

Using Experience Manager Assets for Website Authors

If you are a website author working in document-based authoring, you can now access assets from Experience Manager Assets without having to leave Microsoft Word or Google Docs. This flow assumes that there are assets already available (uploaded, tagged, approved, etc) in your Assets repository.

1. Open up the sidekick browser extension and it should show up the “My Assets” button if it has been already configured. Please see “Configuring AEM Assets Sidekick Plugin” for configuring this plugin.
2. Asset Selector visual component should open upon clicking the “My Assets” button. To get access to assets from Experience Manager Assets, you need to login to the Asset Selector using your Adobe login credentials for Assets. For more details, please see “Give users access to assets.
   Please note that these credentials might be different from the ones you are using to log in to Microsoft Word / Google Doc, depending on how authentication is set up in your organization.
   
3. Search for the asset that you need in the Asset Selector view. You can use keyword search, filtering for specific asset format, sorting and different views (list, grid, gallery and waterfall views). Assets view shows basic properties of the asset including approval status if set. When hovering over assets, you will see an “info” icon, which, when clicked, will show you additional metadata of the asset as well.
4. You can select the asset and it gets copied over to your clipboard. Then you can paste the copied asset to the Microsoft Word Google Doc document. After using Preview and Publish in the Sidekick, the new asset will be shown as a part of your web page.
   Note: Unlike images, non-image assets like videos, PDF documents, zip files etc. cannot be copied in Word / Google documents. For using them, the reference url for those assets should be copied over instead. For enabling this reference url based copying of the asset, please refer the section on Utilizing assets from Assets Cloud Services delivered via Dynamic Media with OpenAPI

Give Users Access to Assets

Website authors, who need access to assets using this plugin, need to be entitled to an Experience Manager Assets environment by assigning them to the respective product profile. See Assigning AEM Product Profiles for details.

Utilizing assets from Assets Cloud Services delivered via Dynamic Media with OpenAPI

Key Benefits of leveraging Dynamic Media with OpenAPI

• Access to on brand approved assets only (images, videos, pdfs, other formats) from AEM Assets Cloud Services
• Governance (references vs. copies of the asset), that helps with auto-propagation of asset lifecycle events like Expiry, Deletion, Updates
• Dynamic image renditions and smart crop
• Rich media optimization and delivery (e.g., adaptive video streaming OOTB, original asset delivery for PDFs)
• Asset level impressions report (Coming Soon)

For more information on capabilities offered by Dynamic Media with OpenAPI, check here.

Delivering Assets with Dynamic Media with OpenAPI

Prerequisites for using assets references,

• An Assets Cloud Service environment where Dynamic Media with Open API is enabled is needed for this integration.
• Dynamic Media license is a prerequisite for enabling Dynamic Media with OpenAPI delivery capabilities.
• AEM Assets sidekick plugin enabled with copy reference for image assets as demonstrated here.
• Asset must be Approved, i.e. dam:status="Approved" via Assets Cloud Services backend or UI actions

Dynamic Media with OpenAPI is now in an Early Adopter program. Please reach out to your account team or support Adobe Slack channel to get more information.

Using image references in site authoring

In this section, we’ll see how to use image assets from your AEM Assets repository by copying their reference url and delivering them on your site through the “Dynamic Media with OpenAPI” stack.

Example: Selecting image assets.

1. Select a repository with “Delivery-” prefix in the repository switcher of the Asset Selector and filter for image assets as shown below
   
2. Select target image asset. Single click on the image asset card, copies the details to clipboard. This is confirmed via a success message with “Copied” text.
   
3. Paste on the doc
   Notice the link of the image file, being incorporated. The link points to the original rendition delivery URL of the image, which gives you the image as is.
4. Preview the site
   
   
5. If all looks good, publish. Below is the publish view
   

Note: Additional image transformation like, crop, rotate, flip etc in Dynamic Media with OpenAPI can be achieved by following this article. All it needs is to append the desired query param at the end of url to the asset reference provided by AEM Asset Selector.

Using video references in site authoring

In this section, we’ll see how to use video assets from your AEM Assets repository by copying their reference url and delivering them on your site through the “Dynamic Media with OpenAPI” stack.

Example: Selecting video assets.

1. Select a repository with “Delivery-” prefix in the repository switcher of the Asset Selector
   
2. Filter for assets that you want to select
   
3. Select video asset. Single click on the video asset card, copies the details to clipboard. This is confirmed via a success message with “Copied” text.
   
4. Paste on the doc
   Notice the embed block, which has the text, which is a hyperlink. The URL for the hyperlink, is the video player URL for the video asset being selected.
5. Preview the site
   1. Click on the “Preview” button
   2. Video is incorporated in the site (preview)
      
6. If all looks good, publish. Below is the publish view
   

Using others asset references in site authoring such as PDF, ZIP etc

In this section, we’ll see how to use other asset types (non videos / non images) from your AEM Assets repository by copying their reference url and delivering them on your site through the “Dynamic Media with OpenAPI” stack.

1. Select a repository with “Delivery-” in the repository switcher in the Asset Selector
   
2. Filter for assets that you want to select
   
3. Select pdf asset. Single click on the pdf asset card, copies the details to clipboard. This is confirmed via a success message with “Copied” text.
   
4. Paste on the doc
   Notice the link of the pdf file, being incorporated. The link points to the original rendition delivery URL of the pdf, which gives you pdf as is.
5. Preview the site
   
   
6. If all looks good, publish. Below is the publish view