Digital Assets Management

Business Problems

Media files are generally very large, and often difficult to store and share. Media is rarely used alone. In many cases, media is closely integrated with traditional content for print, storage or distribution. To effectively leverage on multimedia contents the same way as text contents, organisations need to manage the creation, production and delivery of all sorts of content as one coherent process, not as multiple disconnected workflow.

Therefore the business challenge is : How to effectively manage all aspects of content production?

Organisations without a media-enabled enterprise content management system will face the following problems:-

	Productivity is lost searching for existing media and recreating it when it cannot be found
	No way to measure the reuse of rich media assets (esp.. production-quality videos/audio assets) and therefore organisation is unable to understand the costs & benefits of creating it in the first place
	Retrieval of related media & traditional business content is very difficult, if they are housed in different system, using different metadata standards.
	Redundant effort require to convert huge media files into other readable formats
	Time-consuming to search through files when there is no media preview support and no thumbnail representations
	Tedious to integrate media contents with traditional contents physically

Definition

Digital Assets Management solution enables the efficient management , packaging, distribution and repurposing of any types of digital assets - including images, graphics, audio and videos.

DAM solution is market-perceived as an integral component within the ECM solution. Simply because most organisations seldom utilise media assets on their own. They see more value in managing rich media contents in one coherent way, as with rest of the content types.

However there are companies which put more emphasis on the way rich media assets like videos, audio, images are tagged, indexed and stored, so the retrieval process is much more painless.

For example: they want advanced search technologies to assist them to locate a video clip in 10 different ways. These companies are not too concerned with how rich media assets are managed in one coherent way.

Both represent a key requirement for a DAM solution.

Core Product

	Documentum Media Services
	Vidtools' Media Management Suite (VMS)

See also:

	Key Features
	Benefits