While digital asset management has been around for quite a few years, some of our customers and prospects still don't completely know how to go about providing the dam functionalities to their end customers. Surely it's better known than web2print or database publishing functionalities, but it's still a good idea to go over some basic steps in digital asset management projects.
The images in the digital asset management system
First of all, try to find out the necessary information about the images that you are going to be hosting. Questions to get answers to include:
- how many images will there be initially
- where are the initial assets coming from? Is it from a previous system that already had some metadata attached?
- how will new assets (after the setup of the solution) be added to the software?
- how large are individual images, what's the size of the complete initial database, and what type of growth do we expect?
- which types of assets will be added to the digital asset management application? Just images (jpeg, tiff, eps, ...) or also other graphical documents (indd, pdf, ..) and office documents (doc, ppt, xls, ...)?
- Will the images be used for single source publishing? Uploading a single high resolution version of the image, and downloading it in the appropriate resolution/color/... as needed?
The users
You will also need to get information about the users of the digital asset management system. On one side you'll use this to set up security, but on the other side, it might also influence some design decisions. Some things to consider:
- What types of users will work with the system? Internal prepress, external marketing, end users, consumers, ...?
- Do the users know what they are looking for? If it's a marketing department of a wholesale company, they are used to working with product numbers. In other cases, you might need a lot more metadata to find the correct assets in the digital asset management repository
- What is allowed? Is everyone an administrator, or will there be divisions?
- Where are the users located? In the same network as the server, remotely, all over the world, ... ? And this for each type of user.
- What is the skill level of the different types of users? Are they used to working with internet applications?
The functionalities
Digital asset management covers a lot of functionalities. Which ones will be included for the current implementation? You'll need to make sure your customer understands what he will be getting. Some things are easily added later on, but others have a bigger impact when they aren't considered during the design phase.
- Will images need to be approved before uploading?
- Are there other workflows for handling of assets?
- Is resampling needed? If so, make sure that the original images are good enough.
- Will end users (or some of the end users) require a simplified interface (Download Center) for some of the images?
- Who will feed the database initially? Importing the thousands of pre-existing images?
- Who will keep the digital asset management content up to date? And what metadata is involved there?
- Will the customer need tracking of the usage of images (e.g. in publications made with the database publishing modules)
The Download Center
Always remember that the interface of the FLO Suite (including the digital asset management module) are completely flexible. The standard assetFLO interface can be finetuned by giving users certain rights (or rather: not giving them the rights). This way, it becomes a very simple interface, in which most users can easily work. But on top of that, it is also possible to create a new interface in our content management system. If this is expected by your end customer, it should definitely become a big part of the analysis of your project. This way, everyone knows exactly what they are getting, and how it will work.
Conclusion
The checklist for digital asset management projects aren't all that complicated. Most of the things you can do with the assets are pretty obvious to graphical "experts". Just thinking about them logically is enough in most cases. And when in doubt: check with your local support channel.