Ensemble and Project Firefly: Unlocking Better B2E Workflows Through Custom Apps
By: Ensemble Systems
Tags: Platform, Custom Application, Single Page Applications, Adobe, Project Firefly

Having worked closely with Adobe for more than 15 years, we have a lot of experience working with Adobe technologies and using various Adobe tech stacks to build enterprise applications for our customers. When we were given the opportunity to work with the new Project Firefly, Adobe’s cloud extensibility framework for building custom apps within Adobe Experience Platform, we were eager to learn more about this latest technology, put it to the test, and see what kinds of business problems we could solve with it.

What excited us about the Firefly framework was the ability for enterprises to serve a market that is often overlooked — their own enterprise employees; companies rarely build apps purely to improve the workflows of their employees (due to the time and resources required to focus on internal development). With Firefly, we at Ensemble saw the opportunity for enterprises to quickly, easily, and securely build custom single page applications (SPA) and headless applications to support their own employee workflows. In essence, Firefly unlocks possibilities for B2E (business-to-employee) applications to improve the daily operations of enterprise employees.

To test the capabilities of Project Firefly, we thought about a problem that is common to organizations both large and small: campaign code generation and tracking.

Moving beyond the spreadsheet: A better way to track campaign codes

No matter how large an enterprise, the most common way of managing tracking code creation and maintenance is through a spreadsheet. Even if the spreadsheet lives in the cloud, this solution is still completely manual, difficult to secure, and prone to errors. Additionally, there is no way to integrate the spreadsheet used to track these campaign codes with the apps in which the codes are actually used. Each step of this process requires human intervention and with that comes an increased opportunity for human error.

Based on this familiar real-world problem, we developed CGen — a custom application that allows a user to create a campaign, add associated activities and tags, and from this information automatically generate a tracking link for use in downstream systems. Through Project Firefly, CGen accesses Adobe APIs using I/O Runtime (Adobe’s serverless platform) in order to send the tracking code to Adobe Target as soon as it is made. Within Target, the tracking code can be picked up and used immediately in a campaign with the peace of mind that the information is correct (no duplicate codes, incorrect values, etc.)

CGen home page

The CGen app still provides the ability to export tracking codes to a spreadsheet; sharing tracking codes with third parties (such as a PR firm or consultant) is a necessity, however the master database is maintained within CGen keeping all of the campaign-related data secure, up to date, and error free. Looking to the future, development for CGen will see the integration of other Experience Cloud products, such as Adobe Campaign and Analytics. The goal is to create a complete end-to-end user flow from campaign code creation in CGen, to activation in Target or Campaign, to campaign success reporting in Analytics.

App architecture using Project Firefly

Quick turnaround, effective results with Project Firefly

Using Project Firefly, we were able to quickly spin up our SPA using modern technologies including serverless computing, Node, and React. Through the use of React Spectrum components, CGen looks like an Experience Cloud solution that can live alongside Adobe solutions in an enterprise organization.

With early access to Firefly, we found ourselves developing CGen very quickly. In the end, we were able to create a light-weight, custom application without ever losing momentum on our idea. Firefly enabled us to integrate with Adobe solutions and deliver a fully customized web app with better performance, higher security, a lower cost to scale, and a better developer experience than was available previously.

Now that we’ve seen what Project Firefly can do, we’re excited to explore the possibilities available in B2E applications and help our enterprise customers solve more business problems for their employees. With the power and ease of Firefly, those “impossible” workflow challenges are finally becoming possible.