Digital Asset Management Systems

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Permalink Reply by Ken on July 11, 2008 at 2:10pm

Our company is thinking about launching a Digital Asset Management system. How can these systems help editors. I really have nothing to compare it to.

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on July 14, 2008 at 10:10am

Hi Ken,

Thank you for raising this question. I think it would be very beneficial for the whole Folio community to have an open and thorough discussion of DAM systems.

Digital asset management is one of the most important components of a complete online publishing strategy. Organizations striving to address this problem have traditionally looked to tools that focus on housing and moving around the binary and text objects of an organization. In practice, this often creates yet another information repository, addressing some of the effects of weak asset management without adequately addressing the underlying business issues.

Traditional asset management focuses on the storage of assets like photos, videos, audio files and such. These tools provide users with interfaces to access these assets and track related metadata about the asset and can be a step above file systems and other dispersed ways of storing assets, but typically do not adequately address the larger business problems. They create one more content repository for organizations to manage and users to access when looking for content, and in practice often create yet another silo of information. While a valuable step towards true digital asset management, they tend to narrow rather than expand the flexibility in distributing assets.

In this overview I will be using our, Nstein DAM as an example. To make this post fair I will mention competing products in the end. I'm not very familiar with their feature sets, thus I can't give a thorough overview of those solutions. I would gladly welcome comments and overview posts from representatives of respective companies. Only open comparison will provide end-users with fair and all-sided view of the systems (it's like a public debate, isn't it?) :)

A good DAM addresses the underlying business considerations that drive the need for digital asset management. It tracks the location and nature of assets using the XML, a format that provides flexibility in how assets are represented and support for nearly any type of integration. The DAM tracks, manages, and distributes assets stored throughout the organization in a central XML repository. Users now have a view into all the connected systems throughout the enterprise without having to log in to numerous systems. Administrators have centralized control over the rights to view and distribute assets without needless disruption of the production process.























The accompanying diagram (click to enlarge) provides a high-level illustration of this approach. Note that integration between the various systems in an organization is through the centralized digital asset manager. This greatly simplifies enterprise architectures, as every system has a single point of integration. Inevitably, organizations will make changes to systems over time. Ideal DAM provides a means to make such software changes while preserving the investment made in the content itself.

The purchase of a new Web CMS would require integration with the DAM - the DAM provides integration to all the other connected systems. This dramatically decreases the difficulty of upgrading connected systems. The DAM also serves as a means to retain knowledge associated with assets and a flexible system to create enterprise-wide workflows with a fine degree of control over the permissions and rights of users participating in these workflows.

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Permalink Reply by OlegR on July 14, 2008 at 10:14am

The centralized representation of the asset is also the ideal place to enhance the asset with additional metadata. Nstein’s DAM has an integrated text mining engine which can extract volumes of metadata in each asset, metadata that provides a much more powerful means to locate assets within the organization. The open architecture allows this metadata to be provided to any connected system if and when needed. This is the crucial point for any publisher, especially B2B since it allows them to connect content to an audience and create meaningful content packages and pathways that allow easy access to published content.

Users can search for assets in any connected system from the central hub, without performing searches in a variety of asset repositories. Permissions in the digital asset manager control what assets users can see and what tasks they can perform with the asset. Centralized workflows in the digital asset manager manage the movement of assets between systems and ensures that the distribution of assets are subject to the policies and procedures of the organization.

This approach to asset management provides:
• a normalized representation of all content assets in the organization, regardless of where the asset is physically located
• a normalization of all metadata associated with the asset
• enhanced metadata through the integrated text mining engine
• a normalization of the workflows that tie the various systems in the enterprise together
• a normalization of the rights and permissions associated with an asset
• a central integration point for databases, content repositories, content managements systems and other data stores
Asset management is one of the larger challenges facing organizations involved in digital publishing. Traditional approaches to asset management approach this problem in a way that often creates yet another silo of information and can even increase complexity of managing assets. Such an approach focuses on the symptoms of a larger asset management problem ignoring many of the fundamental causes. Nstein’s DAM is designed to help organizations address the fundamental needs of asset management.

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