DA - Introduction

[auniverseaway]

As many know, there has been a small team of volunteers across AEM engineering, adobe.com engineering, and Adobe partners building a 100% E2E alternative to SharePoint. This project is called DA. Short for Document Authoring.

DA is the answer to the question, "Why doesn't Adobe make a document editor?"

DA has five major pillars

1. Fast and reliable APIs - Up to 1000 docs per minute. Engineered on the edge for high availability.
2. Adobe-grade author experience - Collaborative. Spectrum 2 (where it makes sense). Vertically integrated authentication.
3. 100% native Edge Delivery storage format - Mix and match with existing content providers. Zero code changes for delivery.
4. Enterprise-grade features - Bulk tooling, healthcare-grade versioning, detailed audit logs.
5. Rich integration with Adobe Experience Cloud - There’s no need to re-invent the best asset and taxonomy manager in the world.

DA is un-apologetically a document-based editor. There are many great AEM-based solutions for other types of web content management; headless, universal editor, etc.

Today

As of today, DA is very much not an AEM product. Similar to Helix in the early years, DA is an advanced research project. Also like Helix, if an Adobe customer is aware of this research and wants to use it, they can, and we (the DA team) will support them. This is happening today and an external Adobe customer will be going live with DA next month.

For adobe.com, DA has been approved and used for sandbox and non-production use cases only. DA's import speed lends itself to creating a lot of content quickly without the burdens of the DOCX format or the rate limiting issues of SharePoint. We have seen our SEO team be successful in testing mass content changes that are not reasonably possible in SharePoint.

Tomorrow

We have identified a site on adobe.com for a production pilot of DA. We'll be working with engineering and product leadership to ensure they're happy and see the same value in DA that we do today. As always, I'll share more details as they solidify. We are also in talks with other external customers who see DA as a path to simplified and scalable web content management. All this being said, we have to be careful that we do not on-board too many projects.

Links

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKSU20EqrX0 - A 6 minute overview of most DA features (sorry, you're stuck with my voice).
2. https://da.live - If you want to play around, this is the best place. A demo project is here, go make some drafts!
3. DA Architecture (internal Adobe link) - If you're into diagrams, this is for you.
4. https://github.com/adobe/da-live - The front-end of DA. If you're into code, this is for you.
5. https://github.com/adobe/da-admin - The back-end of DA. If you're into code, this is for you.
6. DA SDK - Build rich fullscreen applications and editor plugins. If you've ever built a sidekick plugin and wanted to see what it'd be like in DA, this is for you.

For you

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!