Do You Need Brand Portal or Asset Share Commons?

Quick-fire bullet points about Brand Portal

• Assets can be made available to a set of defined roles (Guest, Viewer, Editor, and Administrator). This is controlled at the asset and folder level, with the number of seats available to each role determined by your license agreement. This license also dictates how much storage is available.
• Whatever your current AEM infrastructure is, assets are sent to a secondary Author environment where the only thing available is the assets that have been flagged for the brand portal.
• There is a Publish event to the Brand Portal server to make assets available. This is separate and in addition to the normal Publish event used to make assets available for your Sites.
• Can use AEM’s built-in Omnisearch Tool to make search easier.
• The User Interface is that of a standard AEM Author server. So it requires an understanding of that AEM interface. You can’t customize the UI beyond the tools that AEM offers within the assets section.
• It can only be set up and accessed through Adobe.

What is Asset Share Commons?

Asset Share Commons is a reference implementation of asset share-like functionality built using AEM best practices. It is intended to provide a reference for AEM developers when developing asset sharing functionality. The Github project page indicates that it is not supported or warrantied by Adobe. Since it is an open-source project, contributions and enhancements from the community are welcome. If you want to have a good jumping-off point rather than starting from scratch to build your own tool, this is an excellent resource.



Quick-fire bullet points about Asset Share Commons

• Customizable in layout and view — There is a website feel to Asset Share Commons that makes it feel more friendly and easy to use. It comes standard with a choice of light or dark themes, but in reality, it can be styled however you want.
• Assets can be made available to a set of defined people or to everyone. And it is possible to only show certain assets once a user logs in, thus securing assets that should not be available to the general public.
• There are out of the box components that can be used to customize the experience, but you can create your own components if needed. As an example, we have done favoriting and subscribing for one of our customers. You can customize whatever is needed.
• This is set up within the regular AEM environment and should not need additional infrastructure manipulation, but will require a licensed Publish instance. Those that are using Sites should most likely be able to piggyback along with the current setup.
• Authors can create custom yet performant search portals into their assets.
• It leverages the Touch UI authoring system of AEM using the Editable Templates and Responsive Grid features, demonstrating the latest standards and practices from Adobe.
• Setup and implementation are handled solely by the company using it or its implementation partner.

Which is the best solution? That will depend on your use case, but we can help guide you through the process. Are you looking for a partner with the know-how to help you sort through the features of Brand Portal and Asset Share Commons to know which system to use?

We do. We’re Hoodoo.