Digital Asset Management

Introduction

Digital Asset Management, referred to as DAM, is an increasingly important tool for organizations that are serious about protecting and growing their brands, controlling the costs of creating and distributing their digital media content, and maximizing the return from their digital assets.

Digital Asset Management is quite simply a business process for organizing rich media assets such as pictures, images, video, and audio for storage, retrieval and distribution. Many organizations rely on DAM offerings to provide the much-needed centralization, workflow optimization, virtual collaboration, digital media management, and distribution solutions that are becoming an increasingly demanding requirement.

Print & Publishing, Broadcast, Media & Entertainment, Marketing & Advertising, Education and Public Sector are industries that benefit from digital asset management. Using DAM enables organizations to address their most pressing rich media challenges such as managing video, presentation slide decks, creative design media, as well as marketing collateral and related processes.

The Benefits of DAM

Organizations deploying specialized DAM solutions typically realize the following benefits:

• Cost savings — Organizations gain immediate ROI by eliminating redundant asset creation efforts; quickly retrieving, editing and redistributing assets; redeploying resources to other mission-critical projects.

• Generation of new revenue streams — Organizations derive new revenue by converting and repurposing existing content like book covers to promote their eBooks. Consider an image that costs thousands of dollars to create and recreate multiple times. With DAM, it can be reused. Without DAM, its existence may not be known and the re-creation costs become reoccurring.

• Brand and messaging continuity — Built-in revision control, asset repurposing, and approval processes ensures organizations maintain consistent use and re-expression of digital assets, from brochures and corporate videos to web content.

• Digital Media Management and Distribution — DAM systems enable the efficient organization, indexing, and distribution of digital assets. Advanced DAM systems provide a distributed architecture and multi-site asset storage, as well as the ability to provide multiple repositories for self-synchronization of both assets and their associated metadata. This means professionals can quickly and easily find and create what they need and distribute it to their intended audience with the click of a few buttons.

• Global Web-Based Access — Organizations can distribute digital masters and other types of licensed assets via secure web access. Advanced DAM systems also provide asset ordering and fulfillment modules that can easily integrate with existing ecommerce and transaction servers. Not only can organizations quickly access their files from any web interface, they can create new revenue streams and ‘sell’ their assets via virtual storefronts.

Difference between DAM and ECM

According to Gartner, ECM is really an “umbrella term” representing a vision and framework for integrating a broad range of content management technologies and content formats.

Because digital assets such as audio and video are considered unstructured information, industry experts consider DAM to be a component of ECM. Another point of misconception is the belief that document management (DM) encompasses digital asset management. This unfortunately leads to confusion when selecting the most appropriate solution for organizations. Digital asset management solutions provide deep integration functionality with creative authoring applications such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 or Quark. While it’s true that ECM solutions excel at managing “knowledge”—DAM is king when it comes to managing the creation, editing, publishing and the distribution workflows around rich, multi-media assets.

DAM and ECM share many important similarities, and, as noted above, this may lend to the confusion about their best application. Both solutions offer workflows for managing files, and provide audit histories and version control. They both use metadata for indexing, quick searching and retrieval. However, while the preceding functions may appear similar, it is important to note that DAM specializes in managing rich media assets such as video, audio, and photographs, while ECM is more suited to manage simple office files such as text and Excel documents, email, and scanned images such as faxes.

This whitepaper: “Differentiating DAM from ECM – What Do You Really Need” explores some of the key technology differentiators, including how and when best to apply each one.

Hosted DAM

Hosted DAM Making Enterprise-Class Digital Asset Management Affordable
Hosted DAM is a convenient and cost-effective alternative for organizations that require a fully functional digital asset management solution without the requirement to host and manage their own system. Some features that a good hosted DAM should have are:

• Web-based management of digital assets
• Secure, state-of-the-art data center and full hosting support by Navisite
• Full integration with creative authoring & digital editing suites.
• Complete project management, workflow support, and version control.
• Built on the latest Sun Microsystems platforms and quad-core servers
• A low cost, convenient alternative to the traditional model of installed DAM systems.
• An easy upgrade path to a full licensed TeleScope deployment.

In the informative webinar of “Hosted DAM - Making Enterprise-Class DAM Affordable”, we explore how small, medium and larger Fortune–sized organizations are leveraging North Plains’ powerful, hosted TeleScope OnDemand DAM solution.

Digital Publishing

Print and publishing companies face constant pressure to deliver fresh content to their increasingly demanding audience as consumers discover ever-newer ways to access content. With each passing year, companies must move faster and faster just to stay ahead of the content commoditization curve.
Leading publishers are taking on this challenge by developing an integrated digital services strategy using digital asset management tools to address their creative, operational and workflow challenges, including:

• Disconnected and inefficient production processes
• Lack of unified collaboration and sharing among all contributors, (photographers, authors, editors, designers, marketers and distributors) international offices, third-parties and business partners
• Wasted resources, both human and capital, due to needless searching for media assets, recreating or repurchasing lost images, using incorrect versions, workflow bottlenecks, inefficient file transformation and delivery processes, lack of usage tracking and lack of production automation
• Implementing disaster recovery and archival plans
• Embracing new technologies such as RSS feeds, user-generated content, and Web 2.0 applications
• Identifying efficient ways to move images, video, audio, pdf’s, InDesign, PPT’s, Excel, Word, EPS, GIF and SVG files from where they are created and managed to their ultimate destination in web production, printed magazines, mobile devices or a whole host of other delivery points

By enabling secure access and management of all digital media content throughout an organization, DAM tools for publishers, sets in motion an efficient, centralized and connected publishing workflow environment right from the creative design stage through to production and distribution to all channels.

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