Why do I need permissions and roles in DAM?

By Henrik de Gryor on Another DAM blog (about Digital Asset Management)
Link to original post : http://anotherdamblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/why-do-i-need-permissions-and-roles-in-dam/
September 28th, 2009

Any Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution worth implementing across an organization should have the following:

• The ability to assign permissions or access to various tasks in the DAM. This includes permission to:
  • access assets and/or collections in the DAM
  • preview assets in the DAM
  • add/append/edit metadata to the assets in the DAM
  • upload assets to the DAM
  • download assets with transformations from the DAM
  • order assets (such as licensed assets in the DAM)
  • delete assets in the DAM
  • version assets in the DAM
  • report on assets in the DAM
  • do specific tasks with these assets from the DAM

• The ability to assign roles or groups of people who share the same permissions to do things in the DAM. At the very least, there should be at least a few roles available to assign any user of the DAM:
  • Administrator role often has full control of the DAM and is empowered with full permissions to do anything necessary including configurations.
  • Regular user role usually has limited permissions to do specific things such as preview assets and maybe download assets directly from the DAM.
  • If you wanted to expand to a third role, there is often a power user role. Typically, power users can do more than the average user, but less than the administrator. Often, a power user can upload assets to the DAM.

Depending on who in your organization is supposed to access what collections of assets and be able to do specific tasks with these assets, you may want to create a role which meets each criteria. Why use roles/groups rather than grant each individual user specific permissions one at a time? Well, how many DAM users do you have? Roles are a simple way to bunch groups of users together who need the same permissions. This way, permissions are granted in a uniform manner to users who fall in a specific user role. This can speed up the process of adding a new user or editing their permissions, instead of visiting each collection and permission for each individual user throughout the DAM.

• You could have user roles which can preview (read-only) specific collections of assets, but not other collections.
• You may have roles which can preview, edit, upload and download assets but not delete assets (such as your power user role).
• You may want a role which can preview and download from only one collection of assets relative to their job function because they often need to use or refer to just these assets.

I would not recommend allowing all users to have all permissions to do everything in the DAM (aka free for all) because that often leads to a lot of inconsistencies, accidents and chaos, particularly deletion.You probably had that before you had a DAM. So, why go back to those times? Do you miss the chaos and headaches for some reason? The idea here is to empower users within each user role to be able to access/do/see what they need in the DAM for their job function. Unless assets are restricted for specific uses or for specific eyes only, there is little reason to limit the access to previewing assets in the DAM, but it is up to the administrator and their management to decide what level of access should be granted to whom. If a user needs to access/do/see more (and is permitted to), permissions and roles can be changed by an administrator to allow more access and usability to users of the DAM.

How do you use permissions and roles within your organization’s DAM?

Canto Cumulus 8.0.2 released

By Chelsi Nakano | Sep 16, 2009
Link to original article: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/canto-cumulus-802-digital-asset-management-for-all-005543.php

Canto, a digital asset management solutions provider that operates out of both San Francisco and Berlin, released the second scheduled update to their Cumulus 8 product line as promised. Canto Cumulus is a cross-platform that enables users to organize and track their digital files. Arguably the coolest part of Canto 8.0.2, the newest version, is its compatibility with Mac OS X Snow Leopard and the forthcoming Microsoft Windows 7.

Canto! Canto!

Though you might not have heard of them, Canto has been in the digital assets game since 1990. Canto Cumulus, their main attraction, has been around since last May and enables companies to organize, find, share and track their digital files no matter the format. And, as with any good platform, Canto’s network offers a grab-bag of plugins and other enhancements for those of you that need more than the stock edition.

With a reported 100 fixes and improvements offered in the new version, including compatibility with two very popular operating systems, Cumulus 8.0.2 might be just what you’re looking for. Other cool new functionality includes:

• Scheduler/Catalog via email
• Automatic report generation
• Automized copy/move/delete
• Cumulus image editor
• Built-in watermarking and noise asset protections
• Enhanced file format support for HTML and RTF
• New field type "table" for metadata

Canto also offers a handy demo video here.

“Cumulus 8.0.2 was the perfect time for us to add support for Snow Leopard and Windows 7 in a single update,” says Canto CTO Thomas Schleu. “And now that Cumulus 8 has been tuned twice since its initial release, we can turn our main development focus to taking advantage of all the new capabilities the new architecture makes possible.”

Cloudy Days

Updates are free and available all customers on active service agreements. Otherwise, if you’re new the whole Canto game, you can fill out a simple form and try it for free before you hand over your precious cash.

Statistics that have DAM Meaning

By Matthew Gonnerin, Broadcast Newsroom, Sep 14, 2009
Link to original article: http://software.broadcastnewsroom.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=843071&afterinter=true

While each customer will use DAM and judge its overall effectiveness differently, threads exist which can be measured

We probably have baseball and The Sporting News to thank for the proliferation of statistics in all sports. Yet, Mark Twain once said there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Of course, he was speaking about to the persuasive power of numbers and about how people will either promote or ignore statistics based entirely on whether or not they support a position. This "truth" is the reason many baseball arguments have never been settled. L

et me tell you something. Statistics are not going away. An entire industry of sports fantasy leagues is now flourishing because somebody found a way to get people to "compete" using statistics. It is human nature. You compare your stats to everyone else's to find out where you stand. Marketers and creative folks are no different. They want to know how they compare to others, including their use of digital asset management (DAM). We are well down the path of being able to begin providing this kind of information and have it be meaningful.

As a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, we are in the unique position of having access to an aggregation of all of our customer's data. We know we have more than 50,000 users from 120 different countries. We see the amount of downloads taking place for digital content. We see what content is being used and repurposed. We see how much data is being consumed. We are literally sitting on a goldmine of data. It should be no surprise that marketing or brand managers would be interested in knowing what that data says. It behooves us to be constantly looking at it and to create ways to show our clients what they and others are doing while maintaining customer privacy within our strict security.

The majority of organizations invest in digital asset management solutions to improve interaction with their branded materials to maximize the investments made in the creation of images, videos, audio, creative files and other marketing materials. While each customer will use DAM and judge its overall effectiveness differently, enough common threads exist which can be standardized and measured in ratios, similar to financial statements.

We picked the following four ratios that we feel are most important to digital asset management.

• Digital asset activity ratio
• Repurposing ratio
• User activity ratio
• Digital asset consumption ratio

Digital Asset Activity Ratio: A comparison between the quantity of files that have been ordered and the amount of files stored in the application. This ratio provides insight into the relationship between download activity and all the digital assets stored in the application. For example, a low number for this ratio could mean that a marketing department may need to look at assets with high activity, compared to low activity. For instance, lifestyle images may have higher activity than static product shots. If so, marketing can shift their spending on creating assets.

Repurposing Ratio: A comparison between the active digital assets and the quantity of files ordered. This provides insight into the amount of content repurposing that is taking place over a period of time. Repurposing continues to be a key component of digital asset management value. A high number indicates that the same digital assets are being ordered by various users over a specific time period. A low number may point to a small set of users rarely ordering the same files over a given time period. Either way, this ratio speaks to activity that may call for an adjustment on spending priorities. A change in the number over time also gives you instant feedback whether adjustments you make are working.

User Activity Ratio: A comparison between the total number of logins and the quantity of users that have logged in provides information about visitation frequency. This metric also provides insight into how frequently users visit to browse or check back on new branded materials. These ratios provide confirmation of whether DAM is working in the specific areas of relieving a resources drain by internal staff and increasing brand reach. If the number is low, action should be taken to promote the system's use internally. It may involve a decision to include more training, focus on other types of digital assets, or change the way a client's users are interacting with the system.

Digital Asset Consumption Ratio: Comparing the quantity of files ordered to the users that logged into the system provides information on the amount of data being consumed by each user over a specific time period.

This ratio speaks to the original reason for DAM implementation. As mentioned earlier, the reasons vary from company to company. If a company wants to use DAM as a mass distribution tool, they will want to watch this ratio to make sure it is being used properly. If the numbers are low, the DAM application is being treated more as an archive than a "heavy use" application and could be addressed with more internal promotion of DAM.

Additional interpretations of all of these DAM ratios will continue to be developed. But right now, the numbers can be compared (vs. the average & medians) against historical activity within the same system or against historical activity across the entire customer base of the SaaS provider or even against the use of DAM by the provider itself. A SaaS provider should easily be able to supply its natural expertise on how to read and what to do with these ratios. For example, a user may be interacting with the system five times a month and in that month, he or she downloaded approximately ten files and of those ten files, half are being repurposed a hundred times. There is significant value in knowing this and what it means.

Regularly sharing and discussing information like this, in and of itself, should be a SaaS best practice. The ability to do so is a wonderful example of the most important "S" in SaaS : the service "S". It is a major distinction between SaaS and installed DAM software. Installed providers don't have the same kind of control over as much data because systems are deployed at individual sites. An installed provider doesn't automatically set things up to retrieve all of this data from their deployment sites and pull it back in so it can be analyzed. Why? Because doing so can be a pretty significant and costly project. It is a lot of rigmarole that, in many cases gets skipped. Not so with SaaS.

Matthew Gonnering is CEO of Widen Enterprises, a Madison,WI-based SaaS provider of digital asset management technologies.

DAM vendors vs. marketing agencies -- understanding the difference

By Theresa Regli, Analyst, CMS Watch, 14-Sep-2009
Link to original article: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1685-DAM-Vendors-Marketing-Agencies

I'm currently advising two Fortune Global 1000 companies on a vendor short list for their upcoming digital asset management procurement. Both of these companies are focused on centralizing their brand assets, streamlining the cost to create multi-lingual print advertising and catalogs, and addressing light needs around managing video and audio.

Both of these clients heard me speak about the DAM vendor marketplace at recent conferences in New York and London, and once I started working with them in an advisory capacity, the first question both asked was, "Some of the vendors on our list aren't in your research, or you didn't talk about them in your presentation. Why?"

The short lists these companies initially put together included both DAM vendors as well as digital marketing agencies. The former, as we point out in out Digital & Media Asset Management research, are primarily in the business of selling software. They make the majority of their revenues from software licenses and hone products over many years to accommodate common scenarios. Digital marketing agencies, on the other hand, are primarily in the business of providing marketing services. They sell services to create brands, build ad campaigns, manage brand relaunches, and many other marketing needs. Occasionally, they also build custom tools to help their clients manage brand assets. Sometimes they host a common platform for all their clients (often based on the technology of one of the vendors we evaluate), and customize for their various clients as needed.

Digital marketing agencies are often entrenched in organizations for years, and may have a loyal internal client advocate selling them into other parts of any large global company. With one of my current clients, this was the case - one person was vehemently upset that the team wouldn't keep his favorite digital marketing agency on the short list for a DAM procurement, even though they didn't even sell a DAM product.

Understanding a vendor's core competency should be your first step before considering them for any short list. Coupling this understanding with a clear picture of your own needs will allow you to have the right combination to pinpoint vendors. If your needs are very simple brand asset centralization, perhaps your favorite digital marketing agency might be appropriate to host a central repository for you. But for large global organizations -- with dozens of agencies in multiple locations, enterprise integration requirements, and generating varied, multi-lingual and multi-channel output -- you need a serious piece of enterprise software.

Your preferred marketing agency likely has experience with many vendor tools, or might specialize in a few. But you should be sure to pick the tool that fits your scenarios best, and not take shortcuts by simply going with the one your favorite art director has experience with (or the one his company sells). Digital marketing agencies are a very important piece of successful brand management, but be sure to put them into the part of the puzzle where they really and truly fit.

Canto Cumulus 8.0.2 Released

BERLIN, 10 SEP 2009 — Canto® today announced the release of Canto Cumulus 8.0.2, the second scheduled update to the Cumulus 8 product line, released last May.

Among almost 100 fixes and improvements offered by the update are compatibility with Microsoft Windows 7, due in October, and Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), released in August.

“Cumulus 8.0.2 was the perfect time for us to add support for Snow Leopard and Windows 7 in a single update,” says Canto CTO Thomas Schleu. “And now that Cumulus 8 has been tuned twice since its initial release, we can turn our main development focus to taking advantage of all the new capabilities the new architecture makes possible.”

Canto recommends the Cumulus 8.0.2 update to all customers.

Updates are available free of charge to all customers on active service agreements. Customers whose service agreements have expired should contact their Canto representative for upgrade information.

Find out more about Canto Cumulus 8.0.2: http://www.canto.com

Extensis Suitcase Fusion™2 Adds Apple® Snow Leopard Compatibility

PORTLAND, Oregon, September 9, 2009 – Extensis, a division of Celartem Inc., today released Suitcase Fusion™ 2 version 13.2, adding support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard to its single-user professional font management product.

This product update will also include:

• Adobe InDesign and Illustrator CS2 plug-ins powered by Font Sense™technology
• Support for TrueType Collection fonts, including the updated Snow Leopard system fonts

Current Suitcase Fusion 2 users on Mac OS X Leopard v 10.5 or higher will receive this maintenance update at no cost. All current users of Suitcase Fusion 1 are eligible for upgrade pricing. English, French, and German versions of Suitcase Fusion 2 version 13.2 are now available for download from the Extensis website at www.extensis.com/SuitcaseFusion2.

About Extensis

Extensis is a software developer that allows creative workgroups and professionals to streamline their workflow and securely manage their digital assets and fonts. Extensis’ award-winning client/server and desktop products include Universal Type Server forserver-based font management, Suitcase for single-user font management and the Portfolio suite for digital asset management. Extensis was founded in 1993 and is based in Portland, Oregon, and the United Kingdom. Extensis is a division of Celartem Inc., which is wholly owned by Celartem Technology Inc., (Hercules: 4330). For additional information, visit www.extensis.com or call 1-800-796-9798.

About Celartem

Celartem Technology Inc. develops and sells innovative technologies for storage, access and distribution of rich media content. Celartem is listed on the Osaka Securities Exchange, Hercules:4330. Established in 1996, Celartem is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and has a wholly owned subsidiary, Celartem Inc. with headquarters in Seattle.

Extensis, Suitcase Fusion, Universal Type Server and Portfolio are trademarks of Extensis, a division of Celartem, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

The FeedRoom Introduces Enterprise Communications Solution Featuring Live and On-Demand Web Video

Affordable Single-Platform Solution Offers Contemporary, Cost-Efficient Approach to Delivering Global Enterprise Communications

NEW YORK, NY (September 2, 2009) - The FeedRoom, a pioneer in online video communications, and a market leader in live streaming video and digital asset management, today announced a new subscription-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) package designed to address the enterprise communications needs of globally dispersed organizations. The affordable offering combines the easy-to-use publishing, distribution and measurement capabilities of FeedRoom Studio with integrated live and on-demand Web video formats for more effective and cost-efficient employee, customer and partner communications in contextual, enterprise video “channels.”

Using Web video in corporate communications enables organizations to “do more with less” by eliminating the considerable limitations of traditional conferencing, satellite, email and event-based delivery methods. Today streaming video is being used to support a variety of internal communications, such as live town hall meetings and corporate TV “channels” that provide a knowledge base of news and information to global employees. External applications include executive presentations, live and recorded corporate events, and programs for sales and customer training and enablement. In all cases, Web video reduces travel costs and provides audiences with searchable, shareable video - available on-demand, across time zones and in multiple languages.

“Capitalizing on rapidly declining video production costs and the explosion of user-generated content, companies such as Bausch & Lomb, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and others are seeing the added benefits of delivering information to employees, customers and partners in the same way they already consume it on the Internet, which is largely through Web video,” said Mark Portu, President and CEO of The FeedRoom. “High-quality video, whether it’s live or on-demand, is an effective way for business leaders to connect with global audiences; it’s measurable and allows viewers to fully engage in the experience by having the opportunity to watch, listen, rate and refer video to others.”

The new Enterprise Communication Channel Package is based on the extensive capabilities of the FeedRoom 4.0 Enterprise Video Platform, a scalable enterprise solution that integrates with content management systems, social and mobile media distribution tools, and popular Web analytics packages. The solution offers a variety of lightweight, user-customizable video players and the powerful FeedRoom Studio publishing application. Unlike consumer video-sharing sites, FeedRoom 4.0 ensures positive online brand experiences by providing maximum control over the distribution and measurement of video content.

Available immediately, the comprehensive Enterprise Communications Channel package provides capabilities for:

• Built-in video upload, transcode and podcast extraction;
• Optional Really Simple Upload (RSU) interface for publishing video created across the enterprise;
• Support for high-quality, on-demand and live streaming video, including the ability to record live events for later viewing;
• Highly customizable user experiences, featuring a range of player templates;
• Player embed capabilities to share and distribute video content to other sites and blogs;
• Configurable, password-protected podcast, Web and high-quality video downloads;
• Enterprise security module for limiting access to authenticated intranet and/or extranet users only;
• Syndication support via XML and RSS feeds to alert audiences that new content is available; and
• Full-service reporting to know what was watched and for how long.

FeedRoom 4.0 is flexible and upgradable to support all types of internal or external communications - or both - in a single-platform solution. Delivered in a SaaS model, the benefits of FeedRoom 4.0 for Fortune 1000 enterprises and government agencies include faster time to deployment, no additional infrastructure costs, reduced dependence on internal IT services for communications support, and access to The FeedRoom’s latest software releases and on-staff video experts. For an online demo of FeedRoom 4.0 Enterprise Video Platform, visit www.feedroom.com/page/request_evp_4.0_demo.

Henry Stewart Business Briefing on DAM - Chicago, October 29th 2009

Managing Digital Assets is increasingly a core management discipline for both commercial companies and not for profit organisations alike. Henry Stewart Events is the leading provider of briefings for DAM managers worldwide - satisfying the need to know what is possible, how to achieve it and how to avoid the mistakes others have made. It covers the fundamentals, the new opportunities and the latest thinking on best practice – all from the user’s perspective. Clear, comprehensive, detailed briefings and case studies on “how to ….” and, “how we …” covering:

• Key Trends in DAM Today
• Metadata, Taxonomy and Search
• DAM Services Groups: the essential roles, accountabilities, and skills of a DAM Operation
• Rights management and enforcement
• Building a Business Case for DAM
• Developments in technology
• Internal training
• DAM in Marketing Operations Management
• Setting expectations for next generation DAM
• Real world case studies from Tribune Company, Motorola, Northwestern University, Wunderman and Willow Creek Community Church.

Who should Attend?

For everyone involved or likely to become involved in the management of digital assets in:
Airlines • Accountancy and Audit • Advertising and Marketing • Automotive manufacturing • Broadcasting • Construction, Architecture, Engineering and Real Estate • Defense • Education • Energy Supply • Financial & Insurance Services • Film • Food and Beverage • Gaming • Government and the Public Sector • IT • Legal Services • Leisure and Sport • Libraries, Museums, Galleries & Archives • Manufacturing in all its forms • Maritime trade • Media & Entertainment • Medical, Healthcare • Music • Pharmaceutical Development and Manufacturing • Publishing & Printing • Rail • Retail • Television • Telecoms • Transport • Utilities

Full documentation will be provided to all delegates and adequate time set aside for questions and discussion.

The Problem Panel

Submit your problem in writing prior to the briefing or on the day and have the expert panel members address it. Confidentiality fully respected if requested by you.

Link to Henry Stewart website for registration and information on optional tutorials pre- and post-event:

http://www.damusers.com/events/about.php?eventid=31&showme