What You Should Know About Digital Asset Management
Quickly collecting a library of thousands of digital assets can be easy for any organization. Digital assets include product images, audio files, video files, presentations, and stock photographs. If your company has it stored on a drive for later use, it is a digital asset. More and more companies are realizing that storing these collections of data with file cabinets and drawers full of CDs, transparencies, and photos is no longer cutting it. Digital asset management requires regulating the arrival of new digital assets, assigning and editing the data associated with each, and associating the assets with groups of users with role-based controls. Digital asset management solutions empower administrators to have varying degrees of control over digital assets, permissions, and workflows. A good digital asset management system is critical to bringing consistency across all marketing and communication channels so that users can easily locate and retrieve digital assets for use in campaigns.
The following factors should by evaluated during the digital asset management selection process:
- How long has the vendor’s product been in existence and how has it evolved?
- Implementation timelines – how fast can an organization benefit from digital asset management?
- Product functionality – does the product have all the core features your organization requires?
- Does the cost include setup and annual maintenance, licensing, or monthly subscription?
Important Digital Asset Management Features
Whether your digital asset management solutions are hosted or installed by software, they need to include a few core features. These features should encompass the ability to centralize, retrieve, distribute, and transform digital media. It should also include tools that enable users to preview, transcode, and deliver audio and video files whenever they are needed. Most importantly, a digital asset management system should be able to track project reviews, comments, versions, and approvals to streamline the processes of project collaboration. This gives organizations the ability to coordinate the efforts of project teams that may be separated by different time zones and borders. As a result, no matter how big or widespread the organization may be, projects can be completed by the deadline with minimal headaches.
Hosted Digital Asset Management
Rather than focusing on the technological aspects of digital asset management, a hosted digital asset management allows businesses to focus on the management, distribution, and organization of digital assets. Providers of hosted digital asset management typically release new versions multiple times a year to work out any bugs and provide new features. With hosted digital asset management, access is granted through a customized login page at a specific URL address.
Digital Asset Management Software
With installed digital asset management software, an organization’s technical staff becomes responsible for a number of things. These responsibilities include updating the system as new versions are released, providing security and backup to prepare for disaster recovery, upgrading the hardware, supporting all requests for a cross-platform user base, and providing custom programming on an as-needed basis. If you have an IT team that can handle these duties without a problem, great. If not, your organization may want to stick with hosted digital asset management.
