Advances in Digital Asset Management

Digital assets continues to grow in importance as an enterprise asset, but it remains difficult to manage these assets from capture to distribution, as well as subsequent access to stored content.

Huge amount of digital asses are being created by marketing and communications teams that they’re being overwhelmed by the sheer number of media assets.

Many companies don’t have a central repository for their rich media assets. The files are typically scattered in multiple locations, including Dropbox, SharePoint or share drives.

Digital assets have multiple use cases such as training and education, marketing and corporate communication, and different departments have these functions.

Improving management of digital assets can have a rapid and significant return on investment, so organizations should be motivated to address the issue. Moreover, being able to find a particular video and also information within that video is growing in importance.

It is important to be able to find digital assets, re-purpose small parts of them, and keep track of the digital rights for the assets.

Digital Assets Management Systems (DAM) can greatly help to manage and use digital assets.

MediaValet

One of such system is MediaValet.

MediaValet is the Digital Assets Management System that is worth to consider. It is a cloud product and does not need any internal IT support. The system can be up and running very quickly. MediaValet company is very supportive of customers' needs. The system has flexibility both in finding and re-purposing digital assets. The entire user interface was redesigned in Version 3.0.

The latest version of MediaValet has a new menu feature that simplifies the metadata entry process by allowing users to check boxes for the desired metadata. A controlled vocabulary is used for keywords which is highly recommended to use.

The video can be put in a lightbox that allows to structure and sequence the final product. Music is also kept in MediaValet. It is possible to send a link to assets in the system for review by users.

MediaValet handles all media types, including HD video formats, and can manage file sizes up to 200 GB per asset.

There is a new feature that gives users the ability to search a dialog within videos. This allows users to find any spoken word within their video library with a keyword search. Once the word is found, the user is able to jump right to the sequence in a video where the searched word is spoken. The video will start a few seconds before the target word, and continue as long as the user wishes.

Videos Management

Video has been isolated from other enterprise content because it needs to be managed differently. By enabling videos to be checked into DAM systems, organizations can let users gain access to video content along with their other rich-media assets.

Enterprises can gain more if they begin to view video not as a separate entity, but as a knowledge asset just as they do documents, graphics and structured content. Video is a great way to capture tacit knowledge and integrate it with enterprise content.

Portals for knowledge management and training, certification, compliance and many other applications are fueling the need for more efficient management of these assets. Videos need to be as accessible as any other knowledge asset in an organization.

Mediasite

Video content management (VCM) for platforms designed for enterprise use is an emerging market. These platforms are intended not only for management of stored content but also for live streaming.

Mediasite by Sonic Foundry captures and distributes video both live and on demand. This is an extension from technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Mediasite is typically used for a presentation room or lecture hall.

Mediasite is a purpose-built family of hardware and software that creates a workflow from presentation to a URL. It provides software to organize and curate the video, creates metadata automatically and OCRs all the text on the screen. It also provides closed captioning by automatically uploading the video files to the customer’s captioning service provider. The product can operate on premises or in the cloud.

Many companies are using Mediasite for training and corporate communication. The system can support enterprise video initiative that enables employees to create user-generated content. In addition, numerous law schools and medical schools are recording lectures so that students can listen to them again or access the lecture if they missed it at the time it was presented.

University can place Mediasite technology in its classrooms, so every lecture can be recorded. Some have sophisticated tracking cameras or fixed cameras, while others use webcams in the laptop. All have screen capture for the presentations and microphones for audio.

Making video as useful as text in the enterprise has been a challenge. ,Because Mediasite indexes the videos, captures the screen presentations and makes them searchable, users can find topics of interest. By clicking on a slide below the video window, users can sync to the presenter’s spoken presentation.

Enhancing SharePoint Video Management

As a content management and collaboration platform, Microsoft SharePoint is a likely place to store videos, but it is limited in its ability to manage them, including searching for them.

Ramp Video Management for SharePoint

Ramp Video Management for SharePoint is a video content solution that stores, distributes, streams, and automatically creates metadata that facilitates search of video content. Ramp can manage video and audio content from virtually any source, including recordings generated by Web conferencing platforms such as WebEx.

Ramp software ingests video and audio content and uses natural language processing to convert the audio to text, then automatically creates time-coded metadata for the video. That processing allows keyword searching of the content and easy identification of the segments of interest to a user.

Because many enterprise networks do not have wide area networks (WANs) that are adequate to reach outlying regional areas, Ramp has joined the Riverbed-Ready Technology Alliance program. Riverbed technology supports a private caching network within a company. When multiple users are accessing the same content, it is cached locally to relieve traffic on the WAN to improve performance.

With the phasing out of Microsoft’s Windows Media Server and Silverlight, companies are seeking alternatives for multi-casting video, long accepted as an efficient approach to stream video to multiple recipients.

Ramp introduced the Ramp Multicast Engine (RME), which uses a company’s existing WAN infrastructure to support live video delivery of HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) video to iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices, which standard multicast solutions cannot do.

Digital Asset Management technology helps organizations leverage their existing investment, whether that is their network, their document management system or other resource. On the customer side, understanding the different use cases and the resulting implications for technology requirements should be a priority.

Galaxy Consulting has over 17 years experience in digital asset management. Please contact us for a free consultation.

Digital Assets Management System - Autonomy Virage MediaBin

Autonomy Virage MediaBin is the advanced and comprehensive solution to index, analyze, categorize, manage, retrieve, process, and distribute all types of digital assets within an organization.

Autonomy Virage MediaBin helps organizations with globally distributed teams to effectively manage, distribute, and publish digital assets used to promote their messaging, products, and brands.

Companies would benefit from higher-impact marketing and communications, greater agility, stronger brand equity, increased team productivity, and the security of knowing valuable corporate assets will be fully leveraged and preserved for the future. By providing self-service access to digital assets, marketing personnel no longer have to spend time fulfilling content requests.

Autonomy Virage MediaBin delivers rapid return on investment and can support implementations scaling up to the largest global enterprises.

Major Features:

Unified Management: a single environment which supports standardized and automated tagging to accelerate search and streamline the creation, management, delivery, and archival of all digital assets.

Intelligent Analytics: leverages Autonomy IDOL to automate manual processes such as metadata tagging, summarization, and categorization.

Next-Gen Rich Media Technology: leverages next generation video and speech analytics technology that extracts concepts to enable cross-referencing with other forms of information.

Effective and Agile Content Reuse: provides secure access to all content for all users. Internal and external teams can collaborate more effectively to improve coordination and productivity in all marketing programs.

Transform and Transcode on the Fly: Multi-threaded transformation task engine can handle large quantities of simultaneous complex transformations involving format conversions, color-space conversions, color adjustments, resolution, cropping, sizing, padding, watermarking, and a wide variety of advanced graphics adjustments that would normally require a user to open an editing application on their desktop.

Other Features:

• browser based system;
• permissions can be defined based on users roles or by folders; search incorporates permissions;
• content can be pulled from CMS such as TeamSite and rendered on the fly;
• each asset has unique ID which is passed over to TeamSite; TeamSite "knows" when there is a different or a new revision. If an asset gets updated in MediaBin, TeamSite gets notified;
• has set of workflows such as approval and review, can define set of rules once assets are approved, they move to publishing area; also includes Process Studio which is the workflow tool and Template which is form builder;
• assets can be uploaded by "drag and drop" and it can be Dragged and Dropped to Teamsite from MediaBin;
• there is no limitation to size of the files;
• upload can be automated for assets to go to specific folders;
• after the download, assets will be preserved for individual users;
• how assets are used is reported in Teamsite;
• can pull content from SharePoint;
• metadata is preserved, it is searchable and indexable.
• content is automatically categorized by asset type and resolution; asset type is recognized on ingest, so no entering metadata is required;
• Teamsite pulls images from MediaBin;
• supports 29 languages;
• ability to link assets together (for example: associated assets) using existing metadata;
• ability to create a taxonomy of assets;
• search includes saved searches, recent searches, both preset and executed searches, custom search;
• ability to search for words in video and then go that place in the video;
• once a user finds content, an action can be taken such as download, send it e-mail, send shortcut to content or add it to light-box which is defined by permissions;
• there is Activity Manager which includes all taken actions and an ability to get to users' tasks.

Benefits:

• eliminates human error and ensures quicker access to content through automatic metadata extraction and accurate search results;
• reduces costs by automating the production, review, and distribution of digital assets;
• encreases efficiency by providing users with self-service access at any time;
• greater speed time-to-market while maintaining accuracy and consistency;
• facilitates quick reuse and re-purposing of images, as well as rapid content creation;
• produces higher-impact marketing and communications, greater agility, and stronger brand consistency;
• increases compliance by security controlled access, complete audit trail, and control of licensed content.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is a business process for organizing rich media assets such as pictures, images, video, and audio for storage, retrieval and distribution.

DAM is an increasingly important tool for organizations to protect and grow their brands, control the costs of creating and distributing their digital media content, and maximize the return from their digital assets. Many organizations rely on DAM to provide the much needed centralization, workflow optimization, collaboration, digital media management, and distribution solutions that are becoming an increasingly demanding requirement.

Departments in an organization such as marketing, sales, advertising, public relations benefit most 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.

Organizations face these challenges regarding their digital assets:

• 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, InDesign, PPT, 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.

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 ensure 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.

Full-featured DAM solutions include a variety of tools for organizing, accessing, editing, transforming and working with images, video, audio, presentations, etc. Important features include search, transformation of media into various formats, integration with creative authoring tools, workflow, IP rights functionality, usage tracking, back-up and role-based security.

With a robust DAM solution, organizations can achieve new levels of creative effectiveness and efficiency by enabling marketing teams to quickly find content, easily reuse digital assets, enhance creative productivity, provide visibility into digital asset management usage and processes, improve brand consistency and maintain

security and policy compliance. Digital asset management solutions provide deep integration functionality with creative authoring applications such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 or Quark.

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

There are tools in the market which are specifically designed for DAM. I will describe them in my future posts.

Content Management Systems Reviews - Documentum - Digital Asset Manager

I started to describe Documentum in my last post. I described Enterprise Content Management Platform and Documentum Webtop. The subject of my today's post is Documentum Digital Asset Manager.

Documentum Digital Asset Manager (DAM) allows to manage all digital assets, rich media, and traditional documents in one interface. It provides enhanced capabilities to effectively manage rich media in addition to the complete set of enterprise content management capabilities.

DAM is a part of a total Documentum Enterprise Content Management Platform. It can be used to:

• implement rapid changes to digital assets while maintaining consistency and control; 
• repurpose rich media regardless of platform or file format; 
• perform fast search, retrieval, and delivery of digital assets; 
• deliver enhanced media handling capabilities to your organization.

DAM provides easy to use, web-based interface to the unified Documentum content management platform. When enhanced with EMC Documentum Content Transformation Services (CTS) products, Documentum enables the same automation, control, and availability for images, audio, and video that it provides for traditional enterprise content.

DAM allows user to access it from any Windows or Macintosh browser. Users with appropriate permissions can also access administrative controls from DAM interface.

Digital Asset Manager has the following capabilities:

Content Management Functions - provides essential content management services such as:

• Workflow: View inbox, view and initiate workflows, and route documents. 
• Lifecycle: assign lifecycle stage to any object created within DAM. 
• Search: search the entire Documentum repository using keywords and other metadata. 
• "Quick Search" feature is always available without launching the full search dialog. 
• Version Control: manage and access the versions of any rich media asset or document in the repository. 
• Security: control the set of users, groups or roles that can access content within the repository. 
•  Rendition Management: import, view, and create new renditions such as low resolution JPEG or web-ready GIF. 
• Relation Browsing: user can detect and navigate the relationships between assets. 

Loupe Display: zoomed view of each asset by rolling a mouse over the top of thumbnail.

Multi-size Thumbnail Display: view the contents of any folder or the results of any search as select a thumbnails size – small, medium, large.

Active Preview: view contents of multi-page documents (PDF, Word, PowerPoint) page by page with an optimized, web-based pare preview and storyboard navigation interface.

File Sharing for Macintosh Users: share Mac-created files with Mac and PC users by stripping the resource fork when a Mac file is checked out to a PC user and maintaining it for Mac users.

Collections: create, share, manage, transform into specific formats or download content that is grouped together to allow users to exchange ideas related to a particular task or project.

Intellectual Property Rights Management: capture and communicate intellectual property rights associated with assets and extend this framework to third-party tools. This feature includes the ability to create customized rights objects, view associated objects under rights management, search on rights metadata, assign rights on import, check-in, and apply existing rights to assets.

Asset Usage Tracking: view the history associated with a particular asset including who, when, where, and why it was used.

Comprehensive File Transformation: repurpose or render existing content into new formats and resolutions with an easy to use wizard that controls the features provided by Documentum Content Transformation Services products. You can transform single or multiple documents automatically or on demand. For example, automatically convert high resolution print images to low resolution JPEGs and turn commercial video into streaming formats.

Media Profile Creation and Modification: an easy to use wizard to create new profiles for Documentum Content Transformation Services products that control what transformation are available and what they do; you can also chain multiple profiles for more advanced media processing.

Transformation Queue Monitoring: you can see what tasks are currently being processed Documentum Content Transformation Services products configured against given repository; you an monitor where specific items are in need of priority.

PowerPoint Assembly: search and review PowerPoint presentations without having to download and open them on your desktop. You can use thumbnails to select, assemble, re-template, and save slides into a new presentation.

Video Details: you can preview video and flash content through enhanced previews such as storyboards using SMPTE time codes, embedded video preview with play-from-frame streaming capabilities, and text-track management.

Authoring Tool Support: configure Digital Asset Manager to tightly interoperate with My Documentum for Desktop, resulting in seamless user experience when working with authoring tools such as Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and QuarkXPress.

Next post on Documentum: Documentum Content Transformation Services.