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FAQ
"Never build your house on someone else's land."
"Think of Word + AEM like Dreamweaver." - Making a single change across thousands of documents will require a lot of work. No (easy + fast + common) automations exist.
"For not needing to train people on Word, we sure do a lot of training." - The complexity of authoring is in the project knowledge, not the UI of the editor. Often there is training to say what buttons in Word can or cannot impact a page.
"Funny how applying rate limits to the wrong people can spur innovation." - Frustrations with MS Graph API + un-fixable SharePoint versioning limits + not enough innovation in Word for common tasks (linking images).
"What happens first? Word and SharePoint become suitable for our needs or we build our needs."
A collaborative team of weekend warrior engineers from Adobe and other partners. You can see the full list: https://github.com/adobe/da-live/graphs/contributors
Anyone who is crazy enough to attempt this should realize this is a very dark alley to go down. For every pain point you may solve, you will create several others... "You can now link images, but versioning doesn't exist at all."
"We go down dark alleys to see if there is light at the end of them."
No.
First, both systems are almost universally used when making creative briefs that funnel into your website. They will almost always be the "hand off" format between writers and web creators.
We also believe there will always be a use case for the "part time" content creators that wear a lot of hats. People who would rather work in a single system for their entire content creation lifecycle can and should continue to use the existing services. Only if someone finds using the existing systems to be lacking should they consider Dark Alley. We do think this will be a lot of people, but it won't be everyone.
It's a bit nuanced, but the short answer is not really. Dark Alley stores content in the same format as *.plain.html. This means there's no migration or transformation of content that needs to be done. This also means that Sidekick's copy document source feature also works transparently. You still need to move the content, but DA can handle a lot of that work for you.
No.
We believe there's a lot of different use cases to cover, and Dark Alley is only one path. Dark Alley is not meant to be an SPA editor or an in-context (wysiwyg) editor. It's un-apologetically a document-based editor meant to be compatible with CMD + A, CMD + C, CMD + V workflows from Word or Google Docs.
The current roadmap is based on internal discussions with the team measured against blocking issues for ideal VIP customers. If you're still reading this, here's a few of the current (as of this writing) items:
- Editor improvements (see GH issues)
- Versioning
- Better Sidekick integration (edit > DA, proper preview detection, etc.)
- First-class collaboration tools
- Authorization (not be be confused with authentication)
For the right project, Dark Alley can be used today. There are limitations, most of which are documented in Github issues, but it is possible to ship a production site on Dark Alley today. If you want to be on the bleeding edge and understand what DA is currently lacking, please get in touch by starting a discussion (above).
Get in touch.