AEM as a Cloud Service - Local Login and Licensing Cost

[aem_noob]

hi all,

We are exploring the options of sharing assets from our AEM Cloud DAM instance to some external marketing agencies.

We tried with Brand Portal but that has a constraint of 10 GB (Source - The maximum upload limit for any Brand Portal tenant is 10 GB which is cumulatively applied to all t...

We have a license for about 50 users but that is almost consumed completely by our internal marketing team and content authors.

The license cost for each user is upwards of 5k$ per month which is a big constraint for adding agency users on the IMS.

In such a case, what would be the best way to incorporate the external users? Should we provision them locally within the AEM Author instance considering they won't be using the system often and can be confined to a group that has permissions set such that they have access defined for certain folders only?

Or is there any other way which would be a better way to handle this?

@aanchal-sikka, @arunpatidar, @EstebanBustamante, @sravs, @HrishikeshKa, @Raja_Reddy, @Rohan_Garg 

thanks in advance,

[sarav_prakash]

Brand portal do have limits. And its content duplication. Assets need to resync into Brandportal.

You can try Asset Share Commons https://opensource.adobe.com/asset-share-commons/

This is an aem application on top of publisher. So this avoids content duplication headache and reflects publisher state. We implemented SAML on top of this ASC, so upon SSO login, our employees can search and download required assets. UI is neat. Easy to author and setup. Some caveat was, extending was not good. It uses semanticui, a retired library for UX. components are rigid. custom properties require custom lucene indices. Otherwise decent option to expose assets. 

Other alternate is to use DM  Now adobe is also promoting Cloud DM, something your adobe POC should be able to recommend. ASC is a good alternate you can try. 

[aem_noob]

Hi @sarav_prakash, we don't have a publish instance. We have a license for cloud author instance in DAM. Is it possible to put ACS on top of the author instance?

Publish is meant for public access but author would require SSO/SAML login again.

How will Dynamic Media assist in solving this problem?

[sarav_prakash]

You have author but no publisher? If you are on cloud, an environment comes as package with author+publisher+dispatcher+cdn. its complete package, dono why author alone is delivered. And yes you can install ACS over author. But to access ACS on author, they ll need author server access.

How DM solves is, similar to Brandportal, DM is another external delivery system, that delivers assets. Again its content duplication, assets are synced from AEM into DM. After you create author instance and setup cloud config for DM, from the image renditions, you can get a DM rendition link. This is a public url outside AEM. DM urls doesnt require authentication, can be shared to view to outsiders. 

[Rohan_Garg · Accepted solution]

Brand Portal was never meant to expose the full AEM repo for assets. Each tenant has 10 GB constraint.

Adding user locally is not a long term solution as the users will not be provisioned in Adobe IMS in the cloud hence prone to local maintenance.

The AEM Publish instance would have been the best option as mentioned by @sarav_prakash which could have been used to custom implement the feature.

Not having publish license means you really can't expose those assets to any 3rd party without authentication. What is the use case for having only author instance?

Maybe you can use the below option -

1. Use Asset Share Link to send entire folder to the marketing agency with an Expiration Date. This is available out of the box and requires just the SMTP configuration.

Hope this helps!

[aem_noob]

adobe has a custom soln for exposing assets from author instance without requiring a publish instance license.

Anyways, the asset share link is a known method but then there is no way to track which folders and assets have been already shared