Digital asset management consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets. Digital photographs, animations, videos and music exemplify the target-areas of media asset management
This is the definition as seen on Wikipedia, and does indeed encapsulate the fundamentals of digital asset management, but what does that me to you and me?
Business has changed. The days where a simple marketing piece was mailed out to the ether in the hopes that the 2% ROI would make the campaign a success are behind us. Media is king, and the ability to delivery timely messages in the many formats of today’s Internet is key. So how do we manage the ever-growing demands for media in it’s many guises? Enter the Digital Asset Management System.
There are generally three broad categories of digital asset management systems.
Brand asset management systems focus more on the frequently used content largely related to sales or marketing campaigns. Consisting of company logos, product information and imagery and marketing collateral, these systems help appropriate assets while helping to maintain a consistent message.
Library asset management systems are used more for archival purposes. For want of a better term, they act as a search engine, allowing for rapid retrieval of associated files.
Production asset management systems aid in the production and deign process. They can often include workflow and project management components. Used predominantly within the video and film industry, these systems can easily be adapted to any market.
At BOOTIT we approach this in a different way. We understand that not all business fall into a neat category and often require parts of each solution. That is exactly what we have done. Although we can and have delivered more traditional digital asset management systems by request, we pride ourselves on thinking outside the box and anticipating what our clients will need tomorrow. What emerged was our latest digital asset management system of DAM 2.0. With the ability to add Meta information to any file. The custom PDF module that retrieves all text based content from a PDF and makes it fully searchable. The ability to store long-term ALL media while working within a collaborative environment offers the best of all three approaches. Couple this with user access levels, custom collections and public archival download, DAM 2.0 will not only help to streamline your design and management process but could also be used to manage and populate online content.