Adobe Asset Link streamlines collaboration between creatives and marketers in the content creation process. It connects Adobe Experience Manager Assets and Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials with Creative Cloud desktop apps. Adobe Asset Link lets creative professionals access, use, and modify the content stored in Experience Manager Assets without leaving the creative apps.

Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service works seamlessly with Adobe Asset Link. This integration offers out-of-the-box configuration and easy automation to automate selective processing of assets for an organization's specific needs. Experience Manager Assets Essentials is a new SaaS solution to store, manage, and discover digital assets, that also integrate natively with other Adobe solutions.

For Experience Manager as a Cloud Service to work with Asset Link, implement the following tasks. Use Experience Manager administrator account to configure.

When a Creative Cloud user logs into the Asset Link panel, it connects to the available Experience Manager account automatically. If a user is entitled to more than one Assets account, a list of available accounts is displayed. The user can then connect to the required account.

Adobe Asset Link users are able to seamlessly connect with Experience Manager when they are signed in to their Creative Cloud application. Common cloud infrastructure for user management and authentication across Experience Manager as a Cloud Service and Adobe Creative Cloud allows for seamless administration and governance of the services, the users, and the permissions.

Organization administrators use Admin Console capabilities to manage users and user groups and Experience Manager Administrators use it to add users of Asset Link to Experience Manager environment product profile. After this has been done, Asset Link users receive an email notification that they have access to the specific environment and can log in to Experience Manager via Adobe Asset Link.

Experience Manager administrators can grant permissions on specific assets or folders within Experience Manager Assets to Asset Link users added to the Experience Manager environment in the steps before. Asset Link users in Admin Console and groups, to which they are assigned there, are available in Experience Manager as profiles. As an administrator, ensure that groups, to which Asset Link user profiles are assigned, have the necessary access to content in Assets (under /content/dam path in the repository). Typically, you can add the user group to the Experience Manager standard DAM Users user group with default permissions for Assets users. Admins are free to configure more specific permission set up in Experience Manager depending on their business needs.

With appropriate permissions in place, the Creative Cloud users can access locations and assets in Experience Manager.

To manage users of Assets Essentials via Admin Console, see deploy Essentials and add users.

Generate For Placement Only renditions for Adobe InDesign

When placing large-sized assets from Experiene Manager into Adobe InDesign documents, a creative professional must wait for a substantial time after they place an asset. Meanwhile, the user is blocked from using InDesign. This interrupts creative flow and negatively impacts the user experience. Adobe enables temporarily placing small-sized renditions in InDesign documents to begin with. When the final output is required, say for print and publishing workflows, the original, full-resolution assets replace the temporary rendition in background. This asynchronous update in the background speeds up the design process to enhance productivity and doesn't hinder the creative process.

Assets provides renditions that are used for placement only (FPO). These FPO renditions have a small file size but are of the same aspect ratio. If an FPO rendition is not available for an asset, Adobe InDesign uses the original asset instead. This fallback mechanism ensures that the creative workflow proceeds without any breaks.

Experience Manager as a Cloud Service offers cloud-native asset-processing capabilities to generate the FPO renditions. Use assets microservices for rendition generation. You can configure rendition generation of newly uploaded assets and of the assets that exist in Experience Manager. See generate FPO renditions.

Configure Adobe Stock

Organizations can integrate their Adobe Stock enterprise plan with Assets to ensure that licensed assets are broadly available for their creative and marketing projects, with the powerful asset management capabilities of Experience Manager. It helps marketers to make licensed high-quality assets, royalty-free photos, vectors, illustrations, videos, templates, and 3D assets, available for their creative and marketing projects. Creative professionals can then use these assets using the Asset Link panel.

To Integrate with Adobe Stock, see Adobe Stock assets in Assets.

Use visual or similarity search

Visual search capability allows you to search for visually similar assets in the Experience Manager Assets repository, using the Adobe Asset Link panel. See how to search and use similar assets using Asset Link.

Tips and troubleshooting information for Experience Manager-related issues

Follow these tips or best practices to ensure a better experience:

• To generate FPO renditions of many assets or of the entire repository, plan and execute the workflows during low-traffic duration. Generating FPO renditions for a large number of assets is a resource-intensive activity and the Experience Manager servers must have sufficient processing power and memory available.

If you face issues when configuring Experience Manager, try the following:

• If your Creative Cloud users are unable to check in the checked out assets, then check for permissions assigned to users or user groups. Ensure that the users are provided access on the required Experience Manager repository folders or assets.
  
• Contact your organization's partner or system integrator.
• For more info, see troubleshoot Asset Link.