Edward Smith News & Articles

At the beginning of my DAM career, I consulted on a project for a client who was an absolute pleasure to work with. Not only did they have hot coffee and delicious pastries in the meeting room every morning, they also bought me lunch every day. They were a smart, friendly and polite group of people in dire need of a DAM solution for their collection of over 300,000 photos. Unfortunately, the entire project was a disaster because the only thing I did while onsite with them was drink coffee and eat pastries!

If you want to make Edward Smith's day, ask him about digital asset management. No, really. He takes great pleasure in educating the unknowing masses on the hows, whats and whys of DAM when he's not busy writing poetic tributes. Find out what else Ed has to say about his field. 

‘Twas the night before DAM deployment, when across all workstations

When I was younger I loved taking apart gadgets to see how they worked. I’ve probably ruined thousands of dollars worth of computers and electronics over the years unscrewing and cracking open things just to see how they tick.

Running a digital asset management system without a self-service DAM intranet portal is like buying gas in Oregon -- the “drivers” (end users) must rely on an “attendant” (a person in charge of managing digital assets) just to get to work.

A DAM user I’ve worked with in the past recently emailed asking for a few bullet points on DAM industry trends. He is planning to expand his DAM service in 2013 and wanted to know my thoughts for an upcoming presentation. After giving it some thought and responding, I realized that these bullet points would be useful for anyone involved in a DAM initiative and therefore would make a great CMSWire article. 

Metadata is important because it helps you and other DAM users find the right files (keywords), understand the content of the files you find (descriptions) and use those files correctly (rights management). That sounds great and all, but who is going to enter all that metadata?

The short answer is: hopefully someone else!

Images, videos and documents, oh my!

When you’re in charge of managing a large collection of rich media files it’s easy to become a rich media hoarder. Since data storage is cheap, and image capturing devices and content creation apps are aplenty, many professionals find themselves rapidly amassing an unmanageable stockpile of files.

This week Google launched their long awaited Google Drive service that offers cloud storage of images, videos and documents. The service is free for up to 5 GB of storage, with paid plans offering from 20 gigabytes up to 16 terabytes of storage for a monthly fee.

I’m not going to name any names, but some companies have horrible customer service.

Digital asset management (DAM) helps groups of people manage and find all of their digital media in one location, and APIs promise the same benefits -- but to other computer systems. Is an API integration necessary to improve your workflow?

Are your digital assets liquid? Can you easily move them from one system to another?

 Digital asset management has traditionally been a premise-based solution, meaning the IT department is responsible for setting up and maintaining the hardware inside of their server room or data center. While the buzzword cloud is relatively new, the idea of letting someone else host parts of your company’s IT infrastructure is not. Hosted services have been around before the dot-com bubble, which almost everyone uses to run their websites or other IT applications. Cloud services typically differ from hosting services by using multiple computers instead of one to provide a specific service or application -- in this case, Digital Asset Management.

For most of the companies I’ve worked with, the Marketing Communications department is often the group to spearhead DAM within the organization. DAM is a no brainer for MarCom because staff benefits by quickly finding and reusing rich media for ads, graphic design, web, packaging and other communication projects. Some MarCom departments limit use of DAM to department staff only, but others further increase efficiency by enabling catalog access to the Sales Department.

Is social taking precious time out of your already busy schedule?