Implementing An Effective Digital Asset Management System By Tony Bailey and Jon Borg-Breen, Acquity Group

Every organization has a trove of digital assets—including photographs, images, videos, and multimedia files. But these digital assets may be tricky to access, distribute, or manage if they are associated with any special instructions or rights that limit their use. An organization that struggles with this issue requires a process that can:

• Transform content into multiple formats.
• Allow users to natively edit and manipulate content (e.g. change image color or contrast, edit audio and extract images from video).
• Easily preview content, even at low a bandwidth.
• Provide better integration with the existing tools of the creative desktop and provide richer capabilities to tag and collaborate on content, not simply check in and check out.

Companies that take an ad-hoc approach to managing their digital assets typically waste time and money duplicating work, sending physical media from office to office and using outdated images. Instead, any company seeking better control and management of their digital assets can make sure of Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions.

Marketing and creative departments are large users of DAM for both brand protection and managing the creative process. After all, a corporation's brand and associated imagery is a very valuable commodity.

What is currently exciting is that outside of marketing exist new audiences -including retailers, manufacturers and IT professionals - that require similar capabilities.