Latest Digital Asset Management News & Articles

With all the talk of new solutions, new technologies and new versions of technologies, it would be hard to imagine that a considerable number of companies are still having problems with the basics of digital asset management (DAM).

That would appear to be one of the primary conclusions of a new report released by the Aberdeen Group (news, site) for Widen, a provider of web-based digital asset management applications. The report says that only half of Best-in-Class organizations (53%) indicated they currently have searchable access to content.

Despite going through turbulent times, Vignette announced upcoming availability of an update to its Vignette Media product. We covered Vignette Media last year, when it just came out. And yes, we expressed a bit of skepticism then.

The new Vignette Media 7.1 is still positioned as a digital media publishing platform aimed at TMEs (telecommunications, media and entertainment) and CMEs (communications, media and entertainment).

Using this platform, organizations can upload, publish and manage rich media, video, editorial and marketing content across multiple websites. The goal is still to be able to manage, promote and sell digital assets; as well as capture advertising revenue.

There doesn’t seem to be much detail yet on what new and/or improved functionality will be available in the upcoming release, but there’s a microsite here if you want to poke around.

Some of the known Vignette Media 7.1 features seem to include improved DAM and ingestion of large volumes of media assets. Plus — some visual mechanisms to better manage data.

Vignette Video Services module remains to be part of this offering. So we, probably, should expect some improvements related to management of video assets.

Vignette Media 7.1 should be available in the second half of 2009. By then, all logistics of the Vignette acquisition by Open Text should be sorted out, but we don’t expect Open Text to have much influence on the upcoming release.

Earlier this year in an interview, George Grippo, VP Media Asset Management at North Plains, indicated that many Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors are struggling to cope with the special requirements of video asset management.

While he didn’t explicitly say in the interview that North Plains (news, site), a rich media and DAM solution vendor, was working on a solution to do just this, this week’s release of their latest version of Telescope Video Manager shows that they were.

Available as an on-site or SaaS solution, the Telescope Video Manager provides a relatively inexpensive solution that even novices can use in the creation, editing and distribution of short and long form video across multiple platforms like YouTube and other social networks.

It's been a busy few months for Autonomy Interwoven (news, site).Last week, it unveiled a new solution that provides analytics for social media.

This week, it's turn for MediaBin — their Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution — to get a once-over, which comes in the form of meaning-based Virage MediaBin 7, a solution that automatically retrieves, analyzes and processes audio, video and graphic content.

Equilibrium (news, site) is a company pushing for a slice of the rich media ecosystem developing around SharePoint. They are just one of many companies finding both innovative and obvious ways to leverage SharePoint as a platform. Let's have a gander at their approach.

A new software product that provides content and visual management for the retail industry has just been released by Arigo as part of its Product Information Management (PIM) suite.

Arigo Collective untangles jumbled content in email, spreadsheet and file servers. Combined with with two other embedded solutions — Concept and Flow — that create product records and real-time resource and logistics management respectively, you get an end-to-end PIM solution.

Equilibrium (news, site) is making big waves in the DAM segment with its MediaRich for SharePoint solution. The product allows enterprise users to manage massive amounts of video, images and other rich media. Adding a thumbnail view and metadata search to SharePoint, with batch processing and web connectivity, creates a productive system for managing a company's digital assets.

In a content management world obsessed with the dual goals of cutting costs and maintaining — or improving — quality in an ever tightening marketplace, the latest partnership between Open Text (news, site) and Endeca (news, site) should help achieve both.

Announced during the week, the two have teamed up to deliver Endeca’s Digital Asset Navigator solution on Open Text’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform.

Everyone wants to be in the movies – but not everyone has the cash to break in.

With this basic thought in mind, Qumu, a California-based provider of rich-media solutions for enterprises, came up with Qumu Kodiak.

The new suite, which has just been released, provides global enterprises with the ability to create, manage and distribute video communications without straining financial or network resources.

Extend Media (site) — a provider of software for managing digital media and high-volume commercial video services — is about to take off with a new offering based on their OpenCASE CMS that should make flying much more entertaining.

Today, Open Text (news, site) announced yet another acquisition. Not as material as some of the previous ones, this one falls in a different category — a quest for "sizzling technology."

This time around, it's the Toronto-based Vizible Corporation, a maker of 3D technology and digital media interface solutions.

We talked to Scott Bowen, president of Open Text's Digital Media Group, to get the scoop on this deal.

Riding the CQ 5 and CRX momentum waves, Day Software (site, news) just released CQ 5.2 featuring new Social Collaboration (SoCo) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) applications.

While marrying web content management with social media, web 2.0 and DAM is hardly revolutionary — nowadays, it’s more about execution than the idea itself.

To enable users of their digital publishing solution the ability to conduct faster, more accurate image searches, enterprise content management provider, Nstein (news, site), will integrate the Imprezzeo image-based search engine with its Text Mining and search products.

ADAM Software has been busy working on a new set of features for its .NET-based Digital Asset Management platform. Finally released, ADAM 4.4 offers a set of data source controls in ASP.NET, automated standardized classification and more.

CMS Watch studies the content management industry very closely. It's their job. They write a number of good research reports on technologies like web content management, enterprise content management, social software and SharePoint. Every so often they take all that knowledge and wrap it up into a neat little subway map, giving us a bird's eye view of who's who and where they fit in the industry. 

An updated version of that Subway map has been released and it is certainly worth taking a look at — if not using some of that color printer ink you hold so dear.

Trying to organize and implement Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions is a bit like wrestling a morphing blob of goo. Squeeze one part of the blob to get it under control and another section bulges out and falls on top of you.

For two years, a quartet of industry players has worked on ECM3 — an ECM Maturity Model created to help organizations tame the mighty blob. Let's take a look at what they came up with.

Digital Asset Management is an important part of any organization's content management strategy. Whether it's used to support web content management or enterprise content management, the requirements for a DAM solution have gone far beyond just a solution for storing digital assets.

With more and more organizations focusing on the Internet to attract, maintain and support their customers, CMSWire thought it was time to take a closer look at what is in store for digital asset management this year. And we went to some DAM providers to seek our answers.

Last week was the first face-to-face meeting of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC). From my perspective, it was a very productive gathering and allowed for a number of highly constructive discussions. In the following write-up I do my best to retrace the gist of the conversations around the topics I found most interesting, which in some cases were conversations I had with just one or two people.

The outlook from these discussions, and from the scope of the spec itself, is very positive. I believe that within a year CMIS will start to actively redefine the world of content management systems, which will be an opportunity both for big vendors who will see easier adoption of their solutions by customers concerned by lock-in or interoperability issues, and for smaller vendors whose products will be able to take advantage of a much broader spectrum of connectors to third-party systems.

According to North Plains, 2008 was a record year for them in terms of revenues and adoption of their Digital Asset Management platform. With the expected increase in the need for DAM solutions in the next few years, and the continued growth of online publishers, is North Plains set to grab a big chunk of the DAM market?

If your preference is for open source solutions, here's one that may interest you. They didn't make it to the list of Digitial Asset Management Systems in the CMS Watch Digital Asset Management Report for 2009, but that may be because they are a solution for smaller businesses who are just starting to examine their DAM needs.