DAM has really reached its maturity. There are lots of people writing all kinds of articles about it and the evangelists and consultants who used to be fixtures, have moved on to more cutting edge disciplines. While I like the fact that there is more to read, as often happens, a lot of it is…

There are many different schools of thought on DRM. Publishers and content creators tend to fall on the more severe side of it. Many are proponents of digital locking and are fairly relentless in pursuit of compensation for any type of use. Some are much more similar in stance to the shareware community where they…

Over there years there has been some discussion about valuing digital assets and registering them on the balance sheet like physical assets. Michael Moon discussed this as a sort of holy grail for DAM a number of years back. He posits that the weakest purchase motivator for systems is cost reduction and the strongest is…

We have done many DAM implementations at our company and most succeed. We have also helped a number of clients with dormant or crippled DAM systems bring them back to life. What makes a DAM system succeed? In a word, preparation. There are a number of reasons for DAM systems to fail: no upper level…

We have deployed many DAM systems for clients and these are used for many different purposes. They usually have some common facets to the systems like: They create content that they want to share. The content exists in multiple formats. They have information about the content (metadata) that they also want to share. They want…

I recently read an article on VTLs that stated that the killer app for this technology could be something they called “Data de-duplication”. They appeared to assume savings from not backing up the same file twice. While this is totally valid within the realm of vitualized tape libraries, it misses the main benefits of de-duplication.…

When you may access a file multiple times, the effort required to do so is greatly simplified by naming the file to facilitate finding it when needed. Success is largely determined by two attributes of the file name: uniqueness and meaningfulness. The name must be unique enough that you aren’t presented with a passel of…

I was checking out some DAM products recently at a show and came across a product feature that was highly touted by the company but ran counter to my own opinions. The feature is the ability to have metadata embedded within an asset This feature is not new – MS-Office, PDF, TIFF, IPTC and other…