In my blog post, "A plan for media management in Drupal 8", I talked about some of the challenges with media in Drupal, the hopes of end users of Drupal, and the plan that the team working on the Media Initiative was targeting for future versions of Drupal 8. That blog post is one year old today. Since that time we released both Drupal 8.3 and Drupal 8.4, and Drupal 8.5 development is in full swing. In other words, it's time for an update on this initiative's progress and next steps.
8.4: a Media API in core
Drupal 8.4 introduced a new Media API to core. For site builders, this means that Drupal 8.4 ships with the new Media module (albeit still hidden from the UI, pending necessary user experience improvements), which is an adaptation of the contributed Media Entity module. The new Media module provides a "base media entity". Having a "base media entity" means that all media assets — local images, PDF documents, YouTube videos, tweets, and so on — are revisable, extendable (fieldable), translatable and much more. It allows all media to be treated in a common way, regardless of where the media resource itself is stored. For end users, this translates into a more cohesive content authoring experience; you can use consistent tools for managing images, videos, and other media rather than different interfaces for each media type.
8.4+: porting contributed modules to the new Media API
The contributed Media Entity module was a "foundational module" used by a large number of other contributed modules. It enables Drupal to integrate with Pinterest, Vimeo, Instagram, Twitter and much more. The next step is for all of these modules to adopt the new Media module in core. The required changes are laid out in the API change record, and typically only require a couple of hours to complete. The sooner these modules are updated, the sooner Drupal's rich media ecosystem can start benefitting from the new API in Drupal core. This is a great opportunity for intermediate contributors to pitch in.
8.5+: add support for remote video in core
As proof of the power of the new Media API, the team is hoping to bring in support for remote video using the oEmbed format. This allows content authors to easily add e.g. YouTube videos to their posts. This has been a long-standing gap in Drupal's out-of-the-box media and asset handling, and would be a nice win.
8.6+: a Media Library in core
The top two requested features for the content creator persona are richer image and media integration and digital asset management.
The results of the State of Drupal 2016 survey show the importance of the Media Initiative for content authors.
With a Media Library content authors can select pre-existing media from a library and easily embed it in their posts. Having a Media Library in core would be very impactful for content authors as it helps with both these feature requests.
The Media Library work uses the new Media API in core. Now that the new Media API landed in Drupal 8.4 we can start focusing more on the Media Library. Due to bandwidth constraints, we don't think the Media Library will be ready in time for the Drupal 8.5 release. If you want to help contribute time or funding to the development of the Media Library, have a look at the roadmap of the Media Initiative or let me know and I'll get you in touch with the team behind the Media Initiative.
I shared that a number of new technology trends have emerged, such as conversational interfaces, beacons, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and more. These trends give organizations the opportunity to re-imagine their customer experience. Existing customer experiences can be leapfrogged by taking advantage of more channels and more data (e.g. be more intelligent, be more personalized, and be more contextualized).
This is actually good news for Drupal as organizations will have to create and manage even more content. This content will need to be optimized for different channels and audience segments. However, it puts more emphasis on content modeling, content workflows, media management and web service integrations.
I believe that the transition from web content management to data-driven customer journeys is full of opportunity, and it has become clear that customers and partners are excited to take advantage of these new technology trends. This year's Acquia Engage showed how our own transformation will empower organizations to take advantage of new technology and transform how they do business.
Last spring, Acquia Labs built a chatbot prototype that helps customers choose recipes and plan shopping lists with dietary restrictions and preferences in mind. The ability to interact with a chatbot assistant rather than having to research and plan everything on your own can make grocery shopping much easier. We wanted to take this a step further and explore how augmented reality could also improve the shopping experience.
The demo video above features how a shopper named Alex can interact with an augmented reality application to remove friction from her shopping experience at Freshland Market (a fictional grocery store). The Freshland Market mobile application not only guides Alex through her shopping list but also helps her to make more informed shopping decisions through augmented reality overlays. It superimposes useful information such as price, user ratings and recommended recipes, over shopping items detected by a smartphone camera. The application can personalize Alex's shopping experience by highlighting products that fit her dietary restrictions or preferences.
What is exciting about this demo is that the Acquia Labs team built the Freshland Market application with Drupal 8 and augmented reality technology that is commercially available today.
The first step in developing the application was to use an augmented reality library, Vuforia, which identifies pre-configured targets. In our demo, these targets are images of product labels, such as the tomato sauce and cereal labels shown in the video. Each target is given a unique ID. This ID is used to query the Freshland Market Drupal site for content related to that target.
The Freshland Market site stores all of the product information in Drupal, including price, dietary concerns, and reviews. Thanks to Drupal's web services support and the JSON API module, Drupal 8 can serve content to the Freshland Market application. This means that if the Drupal content for Rosemary & Olive Oil chips is edited to mark the item on sale, this will automatically be reflected in the content superimposed through the mobile application.
In addition to information on price and nutrition, the Freshland Market site also stores the location of each product. This makes it possible to guide a shopper to the product's location in the store, evolving the shopping list into a shopping route. This makes finding grocery items easy.
Augmented reality is building momentum because it moves beyond the limits of a traditional user interface, or in our case, the traditional website. It superimposes a digital layer onto a user's actual world. This technology is still emerging, and is not as established as virtual assistants and wearables, but it continues to gain traction. In 2016, the augmented reality market was valued at $2.39 billion and it is expected to reach $61.39 billion by 2023.
What is exciting is that these new technology trends require content management solutions. In the featured demo, there is a large volume of product data and content that needs to be managed in order to serve the augmented reality capabilities of the Freshland Market mobile application. The Drupal community's emphasis on making Drupal API-first in addition to supporting distributions like Reservoir means that Drupal 8 is prepared to support emerging channels.
If you are ready to start reimagining how your organization interacts with its users, or how to take advantage of new technology trends, Acquia Labs is here to help.
Special thanks to Chris Hamper and Preston So for building the Freshland Market augmented reality application, and thank you to Ash Heath and Drew Robertson for producing the demo video.
I was in for a nice surprise this week. Andy Georges, Lieven Eeckhout and I received an ACM SIGPLAN award for the most influential OOPSLA 2007 paper. Our paper was called "Statistically rigorous Java performance evaluation" and was published 10 years ago at the OOPSLA conference. It helped set a standard for benchmarking the performance of Java applications. A quick look on the ACM website shows that our paper has been cited 156 times. The award was totally unexpected, but much appreciated. As much as I love my current job, thinking back to some of my PhD research makes me miss my academic work. Congratulations Andy and Lieven!
Last year on my blog, I shared a video that demonstrated what is possible with cross-channel user experiences and Drupal. We showed a sample supermarket chain called Gourmet Market. Gourmet Market wants its customers to not only shop online using its website, but to also use Amazon Echo or push notifications to do business with them. The Gourmet Market prototype showed an omnichannel customer experience that is both online and offline, in store and at home, and across multiple digital touchpoints. The Gourmet Market demo video was real, but required manual development and lacked easy customization. Today, the launch of Acquia Journey and Acquia DAM makes building these kind of customer experiences a lot easier. It marks an important milestone in Acquia's history, as it will accelerate our transition from website management to data-driven customer journeys.
Introducing Acquia Journey
I've written a great deal about the Big Reverse of the Web, which describes the transition from "pull-based" delivery of the web, meaning we visit websites, to a "push-based" delivery, meaning the web comes to us. The Big Reverse forces a major re-architecture of the web to bring the right information, to the right person, at the right time, in the right context.
The Big Reverse also ushers in the shift from B2C to B2One, where organizations develop a one-to-one relationship with their customers, and contextual and personalized interactions are the norm. In the future, every organization will have to rethink how it interacts with customers.
Successfully delivering a B2One experience requires an understanding of your user's journey and matching the right information or service to the user's context. This alone is no easy feat, and many marketers and other digital experience builders often get frustrated with the challenge of rebuilding customer experiences. For example, although organizations can create brilliant campaigns and high-value content, it's difficult to effectively disseminate marketing efforts across multiple channels. When channels, data and marketing software act in different silos, it's nearly impossible to build a seamless customer experience. The inability to connect customer profiles and journey maps with various marketing tools can result in unsatisfied customers, failed conversion rates, and unrealized growth.
Acquia Journey delivers on this challenge by enabling marketers to build data-driven customer journeys. It allows marketers to easily map, assemble, orchestrate and manage customer experiences like the one we showed in our Gourmet Market prototype.
It's somewhat difficult to explain Acquia Journey in words — probably similar to trying to explain what a content management system does to someone who has never used one before. Acquia Journey provides a single interface to define and evaluate customer journeys across multiple interaction points. It combines a flowchart-style journey mapping tool with unified customer profiles and an automated decision engine. Rules-based triggers and logic select and deliver the best-next action for engaging customers.
One of the strengths of Acquia Journey is that it integrates many different technologies, from marketing and advertising technologies to CRM tools and commerce platforms. This makes it possible to quickly assemble powerful and complex customer journeys.
Acquia Journey will simplify how organizations deliver the "best next experience" for the customer. Providing users with the experience they not only want, but expect will increase conversion rates, grow brand awareness, and accelerate revenue. The ability for organizations to build more relevant user experiences not only aligns with our customers' needs but will enable them to make the biggest impact possible for their customers.
Acquia's evolving product offering also puts control of user data and experience back in the hands of the organization, instead of walled gardens. This is a step toward uniting the Open Web.
Introducing Acquia Digital Asset Manager (DAM)
Digital asset management systems have been around for a long time, and were originally hosted through on-premise servers. Today, most organizations have abandoned on-premise or do-it-yourself DAM solutions. After listening to our customers, it became clear that large organizations are seeking a digital asset management solution that centralizes control of creative assets for the entire company.
Many organizations lack a single-source of truth when it comes to managing digital assets. This challenge has been amplified as the number of assets has rapidly increased in a world with more devices, more channels, more campaigns, and more personalized and contextualized experiences. Acquia DAM provides a centralized repository for managing all rich media assets, including photos, videos, PDFs, and other corporate documents. Creative and marketing teams can upload and manage files in Acquia DAM, which can then be shared across the organization. Graphic designers, marketers and web managers all have a hand in translating creative concepts into experiences for their customers. With Acquia DAM, every team can rely on one dedicated application to gather requirements, share drafts, consolidate feedback and collect approvals for high-value marketing assets.
On top of Drupal's asset and media management capabilities, Acquia DAM provides various specialized functionality, such as automatic transcoding of assets upon download, image and video mark-up during approval workflows, and automated tagging for images using machine learning and image recognition.
By using a drag-and-drop interface on Acquia DAM, employees can easily publish approved assets in addition to searching the repository for what they need.
Acquia DAM seamlessly integrates with both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 (using Drupal's "media entities"). In addition to Drupal, Acquia DAM is built to integrate with the entirety of the Acquia Platform. This includes Acquia Lift and Acquia Journey, which means that any asset managed in the Acquia DAM repository can be utilized to create personalized experiences across multiple Drupal sites. Additionally, through a REST API, Acquia DAM can also be integrated with other marketing technologies. For example, Acquia DAM supports designers with a plug in to Adobe Creative Cloud, which integrates with Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.
Acquia's roadmap to data-driven customer journeys
Throughout Acquia's first decade, we've been primarily focused on providing our customers with the tools and services necessary to scale and succeed with content management. We've been very successful with helping our customers scale and manage Drupal and cloud solutions. Drupal will remain a critical component to our customer's success, and we will continue to honor our history as committed supporters of open source, in addition to investing in Drupal's future.
However, many of our customers need more than content management to be digital winners. The ability to orchestrate customer experiences using content, user data, decisioning systems, analytics and more will be essential to an organization's success in the future. Acquia Journey and Acquia DAM will remove the complexity from how organizations build modern digital experiences and customer journeys. We believe that expanding our platform will be good not only for Acquia, but for our partners, the Drupal community, and our customers.
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