Extensis Integrate With Workfront
Legacy DAM vendor, Extensis, have announced a recent partnership with workflow vendor, Workfront (who were formerly known as AtTask). Workfront is essentially a project management tool for keeping track of various types of work packages, with a focus on specific business activities, one of which is marketing, which is presumably where the DAM connection comes in. The press release is light on details of what all this means for a user of their products (which is usually the case with these things) but this appears to be about the most useful paragraph:
“By linking the Extensis and Workfront systems using Portfolio’s open API, users can pull digital assets into their larger workflow, enabling a comprehensive and highly efficient solution for managing and completing work from start to completion.” [Read More]
Extensis are certainly not the first DAM vendor to integrate with Workfront, as we reported in April last year, Widen and WebDAM have already done this, I am not sure if there are others, but I would expect there to be.
In the original article, I observed that AtTask (now Workfront) hand-picked their DAM partners through some kind of reverse selection procedure. I am not sure whether they are as choosy about who to do deals with these days, but a big advantage for ancillary tool vendors about the DAM market is their eagerness to all copy each other’s ideas, such that if you secure a couple of relatively well-known names and generate enough PR about it, the rest of them duly oblige by queuing up to do the same. As we have noted before on DAM News, being in the DAM ancillary tools game is a bit like selling the shovels in the DAM gold -rush and the vendors helpfully give you lots of free introductions to all their best customers too (although you do have to expect some of their worst ones to also be included in that bargain).
Setting aside the corporate manoeuvring, integrations have to be a positive trend for DAM users since they expand the scope of what is possible, but with a lot lower risk (and generally lower cost) than vendors trying to do all this kind of highly specialised implementation work in-house entirely under their own steam – what little of it is still left, at least. DAM vendors tend to be highly operationally geared (i.e. they employ a relatively small number of staff when measured against the total number of their end users) so each new item of functionality that has to be implemented in-house generates a drag effect on further product development unless they can secure additional capital investment to expand capacity (which they usually can’t). Over-ambition without the resources to deliver over the longer-term is one of the big reasons why innovation is currently stalling in DAM and integration offers a credible method for alleviating the bottlenecks that vendors have created for themselves in recent years.
Share this Article: