Content Hub Gives You Branding Controls, Not Ownership of the Experience

Content Hub gives you branding controls. It doesn’t yet give you ownership of the experience.

We evaluated AEM Content Hub as part of our Asset Hub project, and there is a lot to like. It gives organizations a much simpler way to expose approved assets to marketers, partners, agencies and other consumers without putting them directly into the full AEM Assets experience.

Operationally, that is a strong proposition. Adobe owns the application experience, the upgrades, the accessibility work and the ongoing feature delivery. Administrators configure branding, search, metadata presentation, renditions and navigation without having to build and maintain a separate application.

Where we ran into a limitation was customization. You can add your logo, change colors, configure banners, control which metadata appears and add navigation links. What you cannot really do today is take ownership of the underlying experience. The layout, the navigation model, the asset cards, the interaction patterns and the application shell are still largely defined by Adobe.

That is the boundary between configuration and composition, and our requirements were on the composition side. Asset Hub had to be more than a branded interface into the DAM. We needed greater control over the information architecture, navigation, presentation and overall user experience. Content Hub could get us part of the way there, but not far enough to satisfy those requirements.

None of that makes Content Hub a weak product. For organizations that need a governed, easy-to-deploy asset distribution experience, it is a compelling option, and Adobe owning the experience is part of what makes it easier to deploy and maintain.

There is a difference between making Adobe’s Content Hub look like your brand and building your brand experience using AEM Assets.

For us, that distinction mattered enough that we chose the second path. I would like to see Adobe continue expanding Content Hub extensibility, particularly around composable UI, navigation and application-level customization. There is a lot of value between today’s configurable SaaS experience and having to build an entirely custom asset portal.

Content Hub already solves a difficult problem well. More ownership of the presentation layer could make it considerably more useful for enterprise brand portal scenarios.