Publish and pray? No way. Uniform's Visual CMS + Experience Manager is heaven-sent for marketers

How does one describe Andrew Kumar?

Let’s try this: an intrepid soul on the digital frontier. An avid explorer restlessly digging through the detritus to uncover what’s below. Or maybe a brilliant guy who’s never really satisfied with the simple explanation – and thrives in the untangling.

Our conversations have always been engaging, challenging, and replete with a little fiery fun. You might recall this epic “Slackdown” from 2023, where Andrew and a cadre of digital provocateurs wrestled with the rise of digital experience composition as a category. 

It’s not just Andrew’s deep experience that I admire – it’s his reverence for our industry. He’s a passionate advocate for doing things the right way, and often shines a light on issues that might go overlooked. It’s what makes him a dynamo in his role as Global VP of Customer Solutions and Tech Ecosystems at Uniform. 

I could go on singing his praises, talking about his pedigree with leading brands like Telus, Air Canada, and Publicis Sapient. But our recent conversation was about his latest groove with Uniform’s Visual Workspace, where he walked me through some impressive new features – and, perhaps more importantly, how his company is positioning to drive success.  

Uniform’s Visual Workspace has been an innovative entry in the digital topology, giving enterprise teams a marketer-centric solution with a heightened degree of autonomous control. And while users can develop, experiment, and push omnichannel experiences faster and more efficiently with this platform, the concept has been a slightly more abstract sell into the stack. 

“We were spending a lot of effort trying to articulate what a Visual Workspace was,” Andrew described. “But we have customer solutions, and my team is talking to customers every single day, and we're at a point where we're just going to lean in.”

And by lean in, he means embracing the concepts of experience operations and experience management at a strategic level – and repositioning the Workspace as a Visual CMS + Experience Manager. 

“When people think about Uniform, and we're using a term like experience operations or experience management, we're [more likely to be] compared to something like Adobe Experience Manager,” he said, “and that's a much closer articulation of our product offering.”

Uniform’s Visual CMS is already finding fertile ground as market conditions continue to shift. According to Andrew, more progressive technologies like orchestration are catching on, but companies seem to be tightening their belts and doubling down on improving their content management systems. This is an area where Uniform can make an impact while still driving innovation. 

“What we're hearing from our customers and our prospects is that almost nobody has a budget for orchestration in 2024,” he said. “That might change in 2025, but [right now] everyone's budgets are being squeezed and they’re going to make do with what they have. But CMS has a budget line item – and if they can save money there, they will. And that's been part of our trajectory.”

In our discussion, we conducted a high-level review of the new features and updates to its Visual CMS + Experience Manager, and how they reflect Uniform’s disruptive voice in the digital chorus. The company has always challenged the status quo, and these new features – and renewed focus – provide a clear signal of where they plan to take things next. 

Solving headless headaches with experience operations

When we talk about Uniform and its place in the overall digital ecosystem, we can’t overstate its role on the composable stage. The company has been a persistent champion of solving the headless conundrum for digital teams that leverage composable technologies, and they have continuously innovated along that rail. 

It’s worth noting that Uniform is also a long-standing member of the MACH Alliance, reinforcing the palpable preference for MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud SaaS, Headless) architectures in composable stacks. Over the last few years, Uniform’s Mesh, Canvas, and Context products have all endeavored to eliminate the gaps that exist when using a headless CMS or e-Commerce platform – providing the crucial “neck” in an API-first world and enabling integrated personalization and A/B testing. 

"We're trying to remediate the trade-offs to make the shift to composable more of a ‘slam dunk’ for a digital leader.”

Uniform has also been a voice for embracing composable and MACH, despite many of its complex barriers to entry. As he noted, there are plenty of trade-offs when it comes to realizing these models, and understanding how to help customers see the light at the end of the tunnel is key to converting interest into action.

“We've reviewed this narrative around content being complex, the DXPs kind of being slow and clunky,” he explained. “But even headless, composable, and MACH are pretty complex. We're trying to remediate the trade-offs to make the shift to composable more of a ‘slam dunk’ for a digital leader.”

Traditionally, marketers working with a headless CMS were forced to navigate around publishing limitations. This resulted in outages and launch glitches, forcing them to wait on developer resources to move forward (the “publish and pray” mantra).

This debilitating dependency on IT is something I spoke to Uniform’s president Darren Guarnaccia about in early 2023. As he noted at the time, “We’ve done a great job in headless for the devs, but what the hell happened to marketing team?”

What happened indeed. As it turns out, Uniform has an app for that.

As already mentioned, the rise of Uniform's Visual CMS + Experience Manager marks a significant shift from pure content operations to a higher plateau of experience management, making the journey to composable even easier – and further shoring up the headless gaps for marketing teams. 

Before we traverse some of the new features, I recommend taking a few minutes to explore a “Day in the Life of a Marketer” courtesy of Adam Conn, Uniform's Co-Founder and VP of Enablement. It's a compact overview of the platform's visual capabilities, providing a foundational level-set of how it works through the marketing team's lens:

Marketers: leave “publish and pray” at the pew 

Uniform’s new features in Visual CMS + Experience Manager might be heaven-sent for digital teams. Feel free to bend a knee if you're so inclined. 

Not only do these features amplify the power and reach of key functions like workflows, but they also allow marketers to be more actionable – to take full control of their content, accelerate their campaign creation process, foster creativity, and achieve greater efficiency. According to Andrew, this sea change translates into big value when it comes to complex stacks of composable technologies. 

“Everyone has workflows or scheduling and these types of features, but they tend to only work with one source,” he explained. “So if you only have Contentful, you're good. But the moment you have Contentful and commercetools, or a digital asset manager or a PIM – or you're personalizing and need your workflow to work for someone speaking French and target them against a specific cohort – now you're mixing and matching sources. No one’s really solving for this intent, language, or level of complexity, but we can solve it when we add a workflow that [functions] across sources.”

As stated, a big part of the upgraded Visual CMS + Experience Manager is focused on enabling marketers to build advanced experiences independently, without relying on heavy developer resources. Additionally, the platform's experience operations capabilities now give digital teams greater confidence when launching ambitious, highly coordinated campaigns. It’s free of headaches, fully extensible, and composable to the core – allowing you to leverage content and data from any modern or legacy system.

Here's an overview of the big-ticket enhancements:

Releases

One of the keynote features is Releases, which effectively puts an end to the dreaded “publish and pray” phenomenon that plagues users. Now, digital teams can visually build and preview future experiences, bundle changes, and bulk publish to ensure campaigns go live flawlessly. 

With Releases, Uniform effectively eliminates visual blockers, allowing marketers to see exactly where content is being used across various pages and properties. This ensures new assets are published smoothly, effectively, and in the right order, so every launch is successful. Releases can also be managed at an integrated level, allowing multiple events to be staged, then staggered and sequenced – so marketing teams can facilitate more sophisticated content rollouts.

Want to go deeper? Click here to peruse Uniform's recipe for launching a campaign with Releases. 

Pre-assembled components 

New capabilities around components and patterns are now available in the Visual CMS + Experience Manager. This is a third-generation capability of the feature set, allowing teams to assemble and scale digital experiences by configuring pre-set parts of pages – including personalization – from basic page elements. 

What’s cool here is that marketers can build and save page sections (or even entire pages) as reusable templates – which, in turn, can be used repeatedly with a confident layer of control and governance. These pre-assembled components put marketers in the driver’s seat, making them more independent while significantly reducing the time needed to create landing pages, campaign assets, or more extensive digital experiences. 

Along with the core benefits, marketers can create and assemble their own library of components and templates from their design system, making it more extensible for brands. Users can also assemble and configure their experiences across multiple digital properties faster, lowering TCO and dramatically reducing time to market. 

If you're interested in going deeper, here's a recipe for creating new components without code.  

Advanced experience localization capabilities

Another standout embellishment to the Visual CMS + Experience Manager is the more robust localization features. As the name suggests, these advanced tools enable users to make content and design adaptations to their experiences based on regional and local preferences across the globe. 

But it’s not just content. With Visual CMS + Experience Manager, users can adapt design, navigation, and site structure per locale and visually preview these experiences with ease. This ensures that every experience feels local – no matter where it’s being viewed.

Want an up-close view of how to localize for different markets? Check out Uniform's recipe for its dynamite localization features.

Connect multiple content sources into a single entry

As previously noted, Uniform is blazing trails when it comes to managing multiple sources for things like workflows. But marketers are also managing rich content from a variety of similar sources as well, making it challenging to track or reuse content in different experiences. 

With the upgraded Visual CMS + Experience Manager, you can also visually connect content and data from multiple content sources into a single unified content entry. That means marketing teams are no longer straddled with having to determine where content originates, making reuse incredibly simple. 

Case in point: if you're looking to pull content from three different sources like a DAM, a PIM, and a product catalog, they can now be represented as simple structured content and placed into a digital experience visually – and easily. You can learn more here. 

Manage your content supply chain

Uniform's Visual CMS – introduced earlier this year – delivers headless CMS features for digital teams to create and deliver omnichannel experiences. With the latest upgrade, there's a bevy of new capabilities that enhance content modeling, content types, and the aforementioned streamlining of content entries. 

There are also big improvements around leveraging structure and pattern data, all designed to simplify how a marketer leverages the tool to rapidly build, test, and deploy in one place.

Click here to see how you can connect content with your design system using Uniform.

Why it matters

The adoption of content operations across enterprise marketing organizations has become pervasive, but Uniform is challenging that with an evolutionary vision for experience operations.

Sure, we can argue that it’s all content on a foundational level. But Uniform is taking a novel and even pioneering approach by telescoping out to the experience level and reinforcing the critical role of visualization. It’s been a fracture in the social contract betwixt marketers and developers, and Uniform has worked diligently to mend the gaps. 

Do we need this lingering pain and anxiety around the whole “publish and pray” mentality? Heck no. It didn’t take long for people to spot the headless gaps (Preston So was talking about it years ago), but it took far too long to find any real solutions. This is where Uniform has laser-focused its energy. 

As I mentioned in my recent article about Optimizely’s new SaaS CMS and its onboard visual building tool, we’ve seen a rampant case of “visual builder exuberance” exploding across the digital experience vendor landscape. Headless players have already rallied to fix the editor experience with preview capabilities and myriad drag-and-drop tools, and many DXPs are embracing a more composable posture by decoupling products and introducing their own builders and orchestration tools. 

But none have achieved the stitching capabilities that Uniform presents. This is both the opportunity – and the challenge – in a noisy market of choices. 

It's worth noting Uniform will be attending both the Universal CMS Summit and CMS Connect Conference in Montreal this August. We can expect a lot of discussion around these topics, particularly at a time when so many platforms are grappling with their own visual builder strategy. 

But as Andrew eluded, this all goes beyond the charter of visual composition. Uniform is invested in the marketer’s journey, helping them preview the potential of their experiences and move faster to achieve live production. By latching together multiple data and content sources, they’re helping users and brands achieve greater reach, productivity, and efficiency – so they can ultimately preview success. 

“I look at what we have in Uniform out of the box, where I can preview at a point in time in the future, preview against languages, preview against sources, preview against channels, even preview against someone in a cohort and an audience that's being personalized,” he explained emphatically. “I can do that all, and I can do it at the same time. And that opens up this whole world to improve my review and approval process because I can click around and see exactly what the user is going to see, based on their location, language, cohort, and more – and at a point in time in the future when we do these campaigns. That's pretty powerful, right?”

Right. One might even say it’s heaven-sent. 

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