DAM News Round-Up – 25th May 2020


A collection of recent DAM-related articles from around the web, sourced from DAM Federation member, Planet DAM.

Three Fibs That Some DAM Vendors Tell (And How To Deal With Them)

DAM News Editor, Ralph Windsor writes about some disingenuous practices that vendors engage in when pitching for new business.  He focuses on three areas: roadmap promises, beta-edition features and trying to talk sales prospect out of requirements on the basis they are obscure or unnecessary.  He also provides some concise methods for tackling vendors who go in for these fibs.

Software Independence

Peter Krogh, who now works for DAM vendor, Tandem Vault has written a short post for their blog about the need to consider the binary data which your digital asset files contain as being independent of your DAM.  Thus to say a digital asset is ‘in the DAM’ is incorrect, the DAM merely provides a pointer to it.  The implication is that when you decide to migrate to another DAM, it should be a simple matter to transfer digital assets.  The thinking that underpins this is quite similar to our own definition of digital assets which view intrinsic (or binary) data and extrinsic data (or metadata) as distinct components of a digital asset (and unrelated to whatever system happens to be managing or adding value to them).

Introducing WoodWing Assets and Studio

DAM vendor, WoodWing, who recently announced they had been acquired by venture capital firm, Main Capital,  have re-branded two of their two key products: as Assets and Studio.  The former was previously known as Elvis DAM (and was an acquisition WoodWing themselves made in 2012).  WoodWing are positioning both products as what they call ‘Content Orchestration’ (which is essentially a marketing technology integration strategy).  The re-branded product names bear comparisons with  Adobe and their Experience Manager suite, where the DAM is also called ‘Assets’.

Navigation Schemes vs. Taxonomies

In this article, Heather Hedden, author of The Accidental Taxonomist (and publisher of the blog of the same name) differentiates between taxonomies and navigation and describes how they should not be treated as though they were synonymous.  Amongst other insights, she the makes observation that although navigation systems are hierarchical, taxonomies are not necessarily always structured in this manner.

Understanding User Mapping in Digital Asset Management (DAM)

James Fox from vendor, Image Relay has written an article about identifying who your key users are, what their business role is and how to translate this into the functionality and digital assets that are provided by (or made available) in a DAM system.  He poses a straightforward set of three questions to contextualise stakeholders, with some in-depth follow up fact finding materials to be used in each case.  Image Relay’s own product is used to illustrate the examples, however, the theory is generally applicable to any DAM solution and the article is both comprehensive and well written.

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