# 1.1 Understanding Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection

## Context

Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection is used by brands for a number of use cases. It is a next generation Tag Management System (TMS) that gives customers a simple way to deploy and manage all of the analytics, marketing and advertising solutions necessary to power relevant customer experiences. There is no additional charge for Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection and it's available for any Adobe Experience Cloud customer. A brand could use Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection to:

* Implement Adobe Experience Cloud applications as well as Adobe Experience Platform.
* Manage the different requirements of different parts of the organization by providing each with their own **Property** to manage.
* Allow for testing and lifecycle management.
* Inject custom javascript and 3rd party tags, all managed in one place.

## Explore the UI

Go to [Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection](https://experience.adobe.com/#/data-collection/).

Go to **Tags**. Youre now seeing the **Properties** view. Properties listed here are for tutorial management. These properties represent...

* App and Web properties
* Different websites serving customers in different ways. For example Luma Retail would have one property, Luma Travel would have another
* Legacy as well as current websites
* A specific Adobe Analytics design common to multiple differing websites
* Internal intranet pages alongside external sites

![Launch Properties View](https://858372621-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FpBC8bA57il8Sj47B7QPJ%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-67af14bbab8a61f914f69c0b5feacb86eba006fc%2Flaunch1.png?alt=media)

Now, take a look at the left rail.

![Launch Left Rail](https://858372621-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FpBC8bA57il8Sj47B7QPJ%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-796fa548b54a26beb04377ecd9f4e154d608515b%2Flaunch2.png?alt=media)

* **Tags** gives an overview of all client-side properties
* **App Surfaces** gives an overview of all App Configurations to enable Push Notifications (which is used/enabled in combination with Project Sierra)
* **UICONTROL Datastreams** are explored in the [next exercise](https://docs.adobesandbox.com/comprehensive-technical-tutorial-archive/module1/ex2)
* **Event Forwarding** gives an overview of all server-side properties which are explored in [Module 14 - Real-Time CDP Connections: Event Forwarding](https://github.com/AdobePartnerTechnicalServices/aep-quickstart-guide/blob/main/module14/aep-data-collection-ssf.md)

## Further Information

Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection is a very advanced tool that has scope beyond an Adobe Experience Platform tutorial. Organizations might not use Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection for its tag management capabilities and instead use non-Adobe tag management solutions for injecting code and managing tags. Using a non-Adobe tag management solution is supported by Adobe and Adobe Professional Services. Some further reading for those interested in understanding Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection further are included below.

* [Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection User Guide](https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-platform/tags/home.html)
* [Implement Adobe Experience Cloud with Web SDK tutorial](https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/platform-learn/implement-web-sdk/overview.html)
* [Set-up user permissions](https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-platform/tags/admin/user-permissions.html)
* [API documentation](https://developer.adobelaunch.com/api/)