Digital Asset Management News & Articles

Paul Boag wrote an article a while back entitled "The 5 hidden costs of running a CMS" over on Vitamin/Carsonified and I really thought it was a useful item to ponder over as a CMS user. Then I thought, "This totally applies to digital asset management software as well, somebody should write up the same thing for DAM." So here goes (with all due respect to Mr. Boag).

As promised late last year, and after weeks of public beta, Nuxeo (news, site) has released the GA version of its new Digital Asset Management (DAM) product.

In addition to extensible architecture and a decent feature set, one of the main selling points seems to be Nuxeo DAM’s compliance with the CMIS spec.

Continuing to build up on the bright developments that we saw in CQ 5.1 and 5.2, Day Software (news, site) released the newest version of their Communiqué Web CMS/DAM/Social Collaboration product.

Day’s CTO David Nüscheler and CMO Kevin Cochrane gave us a tour of the top new features in CQ 5.3.

The topic of digital asset management (DAM) is increasingly coming to the foreground as we information age types make greater use of video, images and audio. The use of digital assets on our websites opens the door to a larger, more engaged audience. But it also causes some trouble, if the related systems are not managed well.

Are you struggling with a DAM system, or in the process of selecting and implementing one? Tell us what your most pressing challenge currently is.

Open source Enterprise CMS and Document Management vendor Nuxeo (news, site) is extending the value of its Nuxeo Connect support and maintenance service with a new product named Nuxeo Studio.

Most of us apply various forms of metadata when we create or manage content. This metadata helps make our brilliant creations findable. But text-based content has life easy -- search engines can also accurately index it. So findability is not so big of a challenge for text assets and parsable documents.

But the content we manage is not all text-based or parsable. We use a lot of opaque assets like video, audio and images. Indexing technologies cannot (yet) effectively crawl these items directly -- they must rely on the explicit application of metadata in order to derive the semantics and context which make the assets findable.

Choosing a great DAM solution is fine, but it's not going to solve all your findability and reuse problems. Thoughtful taxonomy development and the practical application of metadata is critical for such success. Towards this end, Earley & Associates are holding a free webinar -- part of their Digital Asset Management Jumpstart Series -- this Thursday.

Running on January 28 at 2pm ET the Practical Asset Reuse – The Role of Taxonomy and Metadata webinar will walk you through the ins and outs of taxonomies and metadata for digital assets. Stephanie Lemieux, Taxonomy Practice Lead at Earley and Associates and Diane Burley, Industry Specialist working with Nstein Technologies are two of the speakers in this session.

If making DAM work better is a priority in your organization, then head on over and register now.

With ever shrinking budgets, many organizations are finding digital asset reuse a growing organization imperative. Effective use of metadata and taxonomies in the context of a DAM solution can facilitate great reuse patterns. Here's a start down that path.

ADAM (news, site) raises private capital to expand its growth and develop new markets, including the opening of a US office.

What's the chance that your digital assets -- images, videos, music, etc. -- are spread across multiple desktops, file shares, websites and more? If you are in this situation then you are at best likely duplicating your assets and at worst losing them.

A modern digital asset management strategy is becoming increasingly essential. But it's not as simple as going out and picking the first DAM product you see. Things you need to consider include:

• Building a business case
• The role of taxonomy and metadata
• If you need a marketing resource management system (a specialized flavor of DAM)

Once you define your strategy and your needs, you must to examine the DAM market closely to see what tools and technologies are appropriate.

If this sounds like just your can of worms, then the upcoming (and free) Digital Asset Management Jumpstart series from Earley and Associates can help. Starting tomorrow January 14, this series will provide you with some key info and tools needed for an intelligent approach to DAM.

There are 4 webinars in the series with the fourth being a CMS Watch review of DAM software options. You can sign up here, just in time for part one tomorrow afternoon.

Becoming aware of an issue is one thing. Choosing a solution is another. Once you're aware of how crucial Digital Asset Management, or DAM, is to your organization, you have the fun of trying to sort out which software offerings on the market really are DAM solutions and which suit your particular needs.

You can't afford to ignore the issue of Digital Asset Management, or DAM. It's more than a fun acronym. Solid DAM can make your business more efficient. Poor DAM can result in waste, confusion and many lost opportunities.

Some web publishing and content management vendors choose to develop their native DAM products, others acquire DAM companies, and some choose to integrate.

WoodWing Software (news, site) followed the latter path and partnered with celum to add some Digital Asset Management capabilities to its web publishing platform Content Station.

Atex’s baby, Polopoly Web CMS (news, site), came around for round 9.14 last week. The highlight of the new version is the inclusion of widget plug-in framework, which aims to make tacking on third-party website components that much easier.

Many of us these days are Google lovers, including MediaBeacon (news, site), who just announced that the next release of their Digital Asset Management suite will utilize the latest version of the Google Web Toolkit.

The Google Web Toolkit aims to do handy things like make it easier for developers to build faster apps and to speed up the overall development cycle. For MediaBeacon, the incorporation aims at four specific areas:

• User Experience: This one is stock. With the kit customers to change their environments in a reported 30 minutes.
• Portability: Thanks to Google's popularity, the solution will be supported by all major operating systems and internet browers.
• Open and Easy: MediaBeacon customer can now plug-and-play into a widget environment. For example, a user can now add Google Docs as a widget into a MediaBeacon environment.
• Scalability: MediaBeacon reports better server scalability and network efficiencies because of how Google Web Toolkit serves up the widgets in a client's workspace.

"Google Web Tooklit radically improves the web experience for users by allowing developers to create exactly what MediaBeacon has done in the next release of their product," said Andrew Bowers, Product Manager for GWT for Google. "We are pleased about MediaBeacon using our web framework in an enterprise solution with such a rich user experience."

MediaBeacon DAM 3.0 is scheduled to ship at the end of this year, but if you're dying to get more information before then, hit up the webcast about the implementation on December 17th.

Open source Enterprise CMS provider Nuxeo (news, site) continues to grow its product suite by adding DAM (Digital Asset Management) to the existing ECM and DM (Document Management) capabilities.

This announcement came out at the just wrapped Gilbane Boston conference (see our coverage here, check Twitter activity).