Are We There Yet?

This was something I heard a lot this past summer as I steered the minivan along the interstate toward a destination that seemed to be moving further away the closer I seemed to get. I think this can be akin to the process of setting out on the road to a successful DAM implementation. As you make progress the goal may seem to be moving further away.

A DAM is a continuously evolving process, to quote an earlier post..."a DAM is an Eco-system." All parts of this ecosystem are connected and need to work in unison. A successful DAM evolves to a natural balance. So, if it's evolving how will you know when you are done and for that matter...what is the definition of DONE?

"Done-ness" is a state that depends somewhat on the size of the endeavor and the enterprise. Implementing a digital asset management project for a small media archive may have a completion that is defined as when all the existing content that was not previously in a digital environment is now digitized, searchable, accessible in its digital form and available for use within a business unit or enterprise as needed. In a larger environment, it may be defined in phases or stages with milestones tied to timelines, budgets, strategic business initiatives, etc. and may span over the course of many years and budget cycles. In some ways this may be more analogous to highway maintenance...by the time you finish filling potholes, it may be time to start resurfacing the road again.

So does this mean we are on a treadmill that never ends? Do we ever catch up?...or do we continue to repeat the past?

Yes...No... Maybe.

The point is that there are different stages of done and recognizing this, learning from them and reaping the knowledge benefits can make the next phases more effective and easier to accomplish..and so on. You will build on the momentum you generate and want to be able to tap into that energy. It should be easier to evolve than to invent anew. Harness the power of the lessons learned to better at the next steps and beyond.

I believe inherent to a media asset and technology project is the reality that we can reach a balance between objectives and the state of the art. As technologies continue to improve we need to refine, reconfigure, migrate, upgrade, recreate and reprocess, etc. All toward the continuing evolution of the ecosystem we've created. We become the masters of the Darwinism of the process. Dinosaurs evolved then came birds, fish, reptiles and mammals. Could you still be an efficient and competitive player in your industry if you were still using index cards, binders, mimeograph machines, 8086 computers, phone modems and pre-windows software? Maybe...but not likely. We've all evolved as opportunities became available for advancement within the ecosystem.

So are we there yet? We'll we're here now and the view is pretty good...but I bet if we keep driving in the right direction the view will be even better.

___

By Philip Spiegel
PHILIP SPIEGEL - DAM Ideas
October 13, 2009
Link to original post: http://spiegelams.typepad.com/spiegel_ams/2009/10/are-we-there-yet.html

Digital Archiving Tool: Amnesty International’s ADAM

Image via Wikipedia

Link to original post: http://crlgrn.wordpress.com/
October 15, 2009

Amnesty International’s International Secretariat recently released an in-house digital archiving program called ADAM–Amnesty Digital Asset Management. The program, designed in conjunction with Bright Interactive, allows Amnesty field workers to upload digitally created photos, videos, and audio recordings into a central repository that all Amnesty members can access from within the organization. ADAM is a customized application of Bright Interactive’s “Asset Bank” tool which:

is a digital asset management system, enabling your organisation to create a fully searchable, categorised library of digital images, videos and other documents. It is a high-performance, cost-effective server application to enable you to manage digital assets – all that is needed to access it is a web browser (from Asset Bank).

The description for the product goes on to specify that the Asset Bank program that ADAM is built from is customizable, scalable, and multi-lingual.

Because the program is accessible through a web browser, field workers can submit their field materials from anywhere in the world, as long as they have an internet link (sometimes a challenge in the further reaches of the world). As users upload their digital materials, they fill in required fields for metadata and context information. Use and access restrictions are also recorded in the record for each uploaded item. At this point, uploading material into ADAM is voluntary, but according to AI’s digital archivist, response has been enthusiastic. The hope is that uploading material into ADAM will become standard practice for all field workers, thus streamlining archiving processes and making material readily available for AI reports and campaigns. This material could also potentially be available for scholarly and legal work by outside parties–always dependent, of course, on the access agreements that AI holds with the creators of the material and the individuals represented in images, videos, or audio recordings.

Currently, ADAM holds approximately 36,000 records, 159 of which are available for public viewing at the ADAM Web site. Though Web site visitors from outside of AI can’t access the full holdings, the public holdings allow you to see the types of information that ADAM users submit when they upload their digital documentation items. Information ADAM currently collects is as follows:

Descriptive

• Title of the video, image, or audio file
• Description of the content
• Keywords, or terms for searching and cataloging
• Campaigns that the item contributes to or was created for
• Tags
• Copyright type
• Copyright credit

Agreement Type:

• Agreement specifies the level of use that the creator of the piece and individuals represented within the piece permit within Amnesty International. Some items are publicly available and others are highly restricted.
• Agreement Notes specify additional use restrictions not covered in the standard agreements preset in ADAM
• Shotlist/Transcript information for video and/or audio material
• Date Created
• Creation Date Accuracy is a space for stating level of confidence for when the item was created.
• Place Created

Technical

• Size of the digital image, video or audio recording in terms of image density and/or memory space required for the file
• Orientation of images (landscape or portrait)

Admin

• ID, a catalog number assigned to the item by ADAM
• Date Last Modified
• Embedded Data
• Collections
• Categories

Related articles by Zemanta

• DAM software has enabled businesses to store and access all their digital intelligence within a single point of management (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)
• Asset Management for Business in the Digital World (digitalassetmanagement.org.uk)

Karl Fakhreddine Q&A - Digital Asset Management At Orange Logic

Karl Fakhreddine
Company: Orange Logic
Position: CEO
Site: www.orangelogic.com

Describe Orange Logic in one sentence
We help picture libraries and photo agencies go one level higher than the canned licensing solutions.

When did you start Orange Logic?
In New York in 1998, then expanded the business in France in 2000.

What were you doing before that?
I loved to study so I spent a lot of time in school: I have two engineering degees and a medical degree. I also spent 4 years on Wall St.

Where are you based?
I am now back in New York.

How many staff do you employ worldwide?
12.

How many developers?
We have 2 project leaders and 4 developers.

Describe your Monday morning?
This morning, I was up at 4am to talk to the team in France and organize the daily workload. I actually spend a lot of time in product architecture because I love it.

Who was your first customer?
While in Med school in Rochester, my 'hobby' between two surgeries was to develop for Magnum Photos on a laptop in scrubs. One could argue that Orange Logic was born out of a cheap trick to impress the nurses.

Who are you running picture library systems for currently?
Photo agencies, news agencies, picture libraries and museums, including Reuters, Image Source, Art Resource, Artists Rights Society, Art and Commerce, George Eastman House, la Réunion des Musées Nationaux (60 French Museums) and others. We also work with well-known global non-profit organizations, it kills me that we can't name them because of their non-endorsement policy.

How are you dealing with customers wanting to add footage to their stills library? Some clients do incorporate videos into their library. Our products can handle various types of assets including HD videos, and audio tracks.

We are told the cost of digital storage is going up at the moment - why?
Hum, at least with us, it is going down.

What new photo library functions are you offering at the moment?
We realized in 2006 that our application had one of the widest functional covers in the industry and decided to focus on usability instead of functionality. The objective was for users to be able to use the application within 2 days of training. So we've rebuilt the application interface from scratch with intuitivity and improved productivity as main targets. This makes for a really enhanced user experience, both for those working with the application back-end and for those searching and licensing pictures on the front-end.

What one feature sets OL ahead of other DAM systems?
I would say the ability of our application to adapt itself to our clients' needs rather than the opposite. This gives our clients the confidence to quickly adapt their business model to the market as needed. We provide a service, not just a software, our clients don't have to buy anything from us and can stop using us any time (it has never happened yet).

If I am a UK based picture library who do I contact first?
You can get in touch with Chantal Muller (chantal.muller@orangelogic.com) or call her on +33 499 58 17 35.

What's the lead time to getting my picture library online?
It pretty much depends on what we're trying to build: a 2-story house or a 200-story skyscraper. The 2-story house requires a lead time of 2 weeks.

Can I design my own front end?
Sure, all our clients do. If you have a look at some of our customers' websites, you'll see they've got completely different front-ends (there is no comparison possible between www.pictures.reuters.com and www.imagesource.com for example). We've also integrated a CMS in the application so our customers have full control on their site's text, look and feel.

What do you do when you are not thinking about OL?
I cherish any moment I get to spend with my wife and 3 kids.

What magazines/newspapers do you subscribe to?
The Economist, Le Monde.

Which websites do you visit daily?
Flickr, Pandora and tech stuff.

Do you write a blog?
If only I had enough interesting things to say...

ENDS

About Orange Logic
Orange Logic story begins in New York in the 90s when the first version of Cortex was born and delivered to Magnum Photos, Art Resource, and the Artist Rights Society.

Our solutions now manage millions of images for photo agencies, picture libraries, media agencies, museums and galleries, NGOs, and other image-intensive organizations distributing and monetizing media assets on the internet.

Cortex3, our latest product, is the result of more than fifteen years of evolutionary solutions for managing photo archives.

By making use of latest technologies and constantly keeping ahead of new trends, we provide our customers with superior user experience, help them lower their operating costs, and increase utilization of their pictures.
www.orangelogic.com

Posted by Will Carleton
Photo Archive News
9/10/2009
http://www.photoarchivenews.com/archives/2009_10.html#003048

How do I explain what I do for a living with DAM?

Posted by Henrik de Gyor on October 6, 2009
Link to original post: http://anotherdamblog.wordpress.com/

People will ask you “What do you do for a living?” If you work with Digital Asset Management on a daily basis as I do, there are a few ways you can answer this question. You could:

• Explain what you do in some detail, sometimes boring and/or confusing the average person.
• Blab on and on, creating more hot air.
• Give your elevator pitch: a simple, concise introduction to what you do for a living.

Before I had a simple explanation meant for the average person, I also confused lots of people (which is unfortunately really easy to do nowadays). It took me a while to come up with this simple analogy. Here is how my DAM elevator pitch often goes whether I am speaking with an executive or someone I just met:

1. An inquiring individual asks the question, “What do you do?”
2. I reply, “I am a Digital Asset Manager. I work on Digital Asset Management.”
3. The inquiring individual often says “What is that?”
4. I say “Are you familiar with the iPod?”
5. They often say “Yes,” unless they admit living in a cave since 2001.
6. Whether that is the case or not, I quickly show them an iPod, scroll through its contents as I explain that “while this is meant for individual consumption of media (such as music, video, photos), I manage similar kinds of media (generally called assets). The big difference is we can share assets across an entire organization legally using a set of more sophisticated tools with a series of workflows, commonly referred to as DAM. This helps the organization save money by being able to search, find, use, reuse or repurpose what we already have in the DAM legally.” I show the how assets can be found using various information called metadata. With the case of music on the iPod by:

• Album
• Artist
• Genre
• Title

I answer any further questions they have, but that is my elevator pitch as to what I do for a living with DAM.

How do you explain what you do for a living with DAM as a user or administrator?

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?

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

Keywording Lemons - How To Avoid an Inflexible In-house Keywording System

Versatility is the key to a good in-house keywording system, so try not to get hooked into software that limits your options.

Keywording is one of the most important determinants of image sales, yet in software packages designed to run image web sites or provide back end support for photo libraries keywording is often a very basic add-on. Worse, they can be extremely complicated affairs which are difficult and time-consuming to use.

If you ever want to change your keywording system to improve or change the type of keywords you have, or to try outsourcing, you may find yourself unable to do so without spending large amounts of money.

And if you ever decide to change to different web site or back end software, you may find your keywording cannot be transferred to the new system except at great cost.

Many such systems have been designed with little thought as to the cost of entering keywords, the standards of vocabularies and so on. After all, the people writing the software often aren't keyworders and may well have little experience of this unusual science.

Sometimes the keywording interfaces have been designed assuming that the people adding the keywords will be untrained and so limits need to be placed on how words are entered in order to achieve consistency. That has superficial appeal, but in our experience may limit the poor keywording only marginally. More importantly it may limit the ability for professional keyworders to do their job should they be employed in the future.

To help you evaluate the keywording aspects of image management software we've come up with this checklist. If you don't know the answers to these questions, you'll need to find out from your service provider :

1. Where are your keywords stored, and how easy are they to move?

If the keywords are held within IPTC fields of each image, or a database that can easily be exported to a spreadsheet then you are in the best position to move elsewhere or change procedures. If you are locked into using only the database of the service provider, or to export the keywords is costly, then you have a major problem in the making.

2. Does the keywording interface include a lot of check-boxes and drop-down menus to select keywords?

Check-boxes and drop-down menus in themselves aren't a problem, except that if not designed properly they will slow down keywording enormously. We once saw some software written for a client which had hundreds of check-boxes to choose from. It took forever scanning these to make a selection - mindbending and slow. Likewise, drop-down menus of single words are very slow to use. These devices also tend to make if hard to change vocabularies or word selections without lengthy updating of databases, interfaces or the software itself.

3. Can you drop keywords into a single keywording window?

Even if check-boxes and drop-down menus are used, having this feature will give some versatility. It allows different (ie more efficient) systems for generating keywords to be used independently of the software, with the resulting keywords pasted into the field.

4. Do you have to keyword one image at a time?

It seems like the obvious way to keyword images, but it's also the slowest way to work with images. Doing a number of images at once is far faster and tends also to be more consistent and accurate.

5. How easy is it to change keywords already written?

We are often asked to fix up poor keywording, and clients can be frustrated to find out that there is no easy way to do it without ponderously re-keywording using the software they already have. The ideal situation is that the images can be sent for revising with the keywords in IPTC. These can then be amended and resubmitted into the database with the resulting changes overwriting what's already there. Overwriting by re-keywording into a spreadsheet which is imported back into the database is also excellent. Too often, clients are told this cannot be done at all, or only with major, costly, rewriting of the software. Make sure easy overwriting is standard and you'll avoid headaches.

6. How is your keywording vocabulary organised?

To maintain consistency you should be using a vocabulary to assist in selection of keywords. At some time in the future you are likely to want to change that vocabulary, integrate it with a better one from a third party, or replace it altogether. How easy is it to do that? If the vocabulary can be exported and re-imported as a text document or spreadsheet this should be relatively easy. If the vocabulary is held in a series of fields inside the service provider's database and can't be easily exported, you are looking at a lot of time and money to rectify the problem.

7. Are you able to add or amend keywords any other way than by using the service provider's software?

This is the bottom line when assessing this sort of software for keywording purposes. If the answer to the question is "no", then outsourcing, major vocabulary upgrades, or moving to a better service provider are going to be painful if not downright impossible. Even if the answer is "yes", you may still be up for the cost of messy workarounds. And if the method of adding keywords with the existing software is slow, you will keep on paying the price for that slowness with each new image.

By Kevin Townsend, KEEDUP
Link to original article: http://keywordingcentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/keywording-lemonshow-to.html

Cost of storage for ECM & DAM: Part 2

I recently posted a piece regarding storage costs for ECM that seemed to garner some interest, so I thought I might just flesh out some of the assumptions I made in that a little further. The basic premise was that people who buy ECM and DAM systems tend to underestimate the cost of related storage, and typically do so by a wide margin. In addition to underestimating the costs, buyers typically underestimate the volume of storage required. Combined, these miscalculations can, and often do, prove to be very costly.

In my experience these miscalculations are generally due to either a misguided assumption that storage volumes and costs are falling to the point whereby they are not worth worrying about, or that the buyer has previous experience with a web content management system, and assumes that as storage was a minor issue then, so it will be a minor issue with a full blown DAM or ECM implementations. The reality is, nothing could be further from the truth.

First, some basics. Although the cost of 1GB of storage has plummeted over the years, the cost of managing the stored data has not. In fact enterprise storage costs have continued to rise year on year. It is easy, though wrong, to equate the cost of disk space with the overall cost of storage. Disk costs represent a very small part of the overall storage bill. Managing the structure, security and access to and from that stored data is what costs a lot more.

Even as disk space costs have plummeted, our appetite for filling those disks has grown at an even greater rate. ECM and DAM storage costs have risen more than most as they both manage bulky content files. The increased use of rich media, PowerPoint, Flash files, video, audio or even just the use of graphics in typical office documents has bulked up storage demands way beyond anything one could have predicted just a few years ago, lifting many multi-terabyte situations to the petabytes today.

As the sheer volume of content being stored has grown exponentially, so too has the realization that hidden amongst these volumes are actual items of real business value, and/or items that could get us into trouble if lost (or found). The need to address such related issues as backup for basic protection, disaster recovery to ensure that we can survive if everything gets hit in a single location, and of course archiving, ensures that we can separate and actively manage important content over the long term. Enterprises must do this to meet compliance and legal needs. All of these of course add considerably to costs, though they do enable content owners to sleep well at night.

Some buyers just want to push it all to "The Cloud" and if that works for them, great - but that is not necessarily a low-cost option. As a rough guide, 1 petabyte of storage will cost you around $150k per month using Amazon S3, yes, that's $1,800,000 per year. Of course one can argue that "The Cloud" does all the DR and Backup work for you so there could be cost savings there, but its still not exactly cheap. Yes I know not everyone will need a petabyte of storage, but my point remains valid, as you will likely need far more storage space than you think you do. Whether you end up with a fiber channel SAN courtesy of NetApp, Hitachi or EMC or you opt for the Cloud - you are going to pay out a lot of money.

But hold on a second: surely this all assumes that such costs are inevitable and indeed necessary, that the only error is the fact that you, the buyer, underestimated them? In fact the major error here is that most buyers of ECM and DAM systems are not thinking about using storage systems in the way they were designed to be used. Theoretically at least such systems allow you to clear out junk (irrelevant, duplicated or redundant) on an ongoing basis, and only manage key data or files. This behavior is sorely lacking from our content management routines. Moreover, better systems integrate well with most common storage options, providing fairly seamless retention and disposition management, in some cases even going so far as to help in the automation of tiered storage. But few buyers ever make any use of these features and they become little more than electronic buckets, buckets that get filled in random order.

So, what is the lesson here? Well maybe there is more than one lesson, for starters:

• You should always ensure that accurate storage calculations are an early and important of any ECM or DAM project
• Put proper content governance in place to ensure you're not paying for space you don't need (Consider that a business case for ECM and DAM can often be made simply based on the savings derived from an efficient retention and disposal process)
• Finally, the next time you hear somebody say that enterprise storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, hit them, they deserve it.

By: Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Analys, CMS Watch, 24-Aug-2009
Link to original article: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1671-Storage-for-ECM-DAM-Part-2?source=RSS

Storage costs for ECM and DAM Systems

We have had an interesting internal discussion at CMS Watch the past few days, surrounding the cost of storage for content technology systems. It is a discussion that too few buyers have before embarking on costly ECM or DAM projects. Enterprises often assume that storage, just like networking, is simply a corporate IT overhead -- and maybe in your organization it is -- but that doesn't mean it's free.

So how much does storage cost? Well, it's like the answer to the question, how long is a piece of string....."it depends." But a better answer may be "more than you might think." In many cases much more, and quite often more than the cost of the application software and associated services will cost you.

The variables here revolve around the type of content you manage. If it's mostly html files, then the volume will not likely be too high. If on the other hand, it is typically Office files, or worse still Rich Media (such as video files) then your storage needs will shoot up. These days Terabytes of data are the norm; typical ECM installations have 25-50TB of content, and some run into the multiple Petabytes. And these numbers are only likely to grow as rich media and ever richer documents become the norm.

Another factor that can seriously impact your storage costs surrounds the issue of lifecycle management, and version control. If redundant files are moved off the live system to an active archive as and when they become redundant -- and in turn are destroyed when they reach the end of their lifecycle -- your storage costs will become more manageable.

If on the other hand, you just keep everything, the costs will skyrocket. In previous consulting engagements for large enterprises I have found less than 4% of the content sitting in file servers to be relevant: the vast majority of the content is out of date, duplicated, or not even business related (porn, recipes family photo albums, and the like). Good content housekeeping is just common sense.

So how much does storage cost? Well depending on your media of choice, 25TB will cost you anywhere from just under a $100k per year for a hosted service to $350k if you were to buy, install and manage the hardware in-house. If you get into the Petabyte category then you are in the millions to start the discussion.

You of course need to look at all the storage options, and understand that storage costs are not just as simple as calculating disk space. There are trade offs in terms of access, performance, and price between Direct Attached, SAN, and NAS options. You will likely end up with a mixed environment. Just as you also need to consider the cost and need for Disaster Recovery, Back-Up, and Archiving in addition to your primary requirements.

Likewise you will need to consider the physical distance between consumers and stored data. Don't let anyone kid you -- a file accessed in Tokyo sitting in a file server in New York will take longer to render than one sitting in Kyoto...

And yes, just in case you are thinking about it: to back up one Petabyte, you will need another Petabyte at least....soon adds up doesn't it?

There is a myth that storage is cheap; it's not cheap. Just because you see 1GB flash drives going for a song at your local store, does not mean that enterprise storage costs have plummeted. They haven't. Moreover, they are not going to, since our needs remain insatiable and are only set to grow. So next time you are considering investing in a system like SharePoint, FileNet, Artesia, or MediaBin, make sure you think through your storage needs carefully, and cost them realistically from the outset.

By: Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Analyst, CMS Watch
Link to original article: http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1662-ECM-DAM-Storage

SeeFile Announces Version 4.7 DAM Software

Boston, MA – August 5, 2009 - SeeFile Software, the leading developer of web server software for sharing media files, is pleased to announce SeeFile 4.7. This new version offers an elegant web interface, an easy to use media bank and a delivery system accessible from any standard web browser. New development included backend changes, making page loads and image processing faster, optimizing the layout, and adding functionality. SeeFile 4.7 includes the following new features:

• Optimized and easier-to-use user interface
• Email notifications
• Complete log history per user and action
• Annotations on multi-page PDF files
• Full support for current web browsers: Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Internet Explorer 8

The system monitors shared folders and volumes, tracking any changes in the file structure. When a change occurs, SeeFile instantly updates its database and web interface to synchronize with the file structure. Also, while Seefile is detecting changes it automatically renders previews and imports metadata. All of this means that SeeFile customers spend less time uploading files (since there is no uploading required) and less time getting files approved.

A different approach to digital asset management and delivery
Currently available digital asset management systems force users to change their workflow, adding more costs in training and in creating an optimized database. SeeFile offers a solution focused on small and midsize companies. Installing SeeFile takes only minutes, and the solution works like an FTP server (allowing creation of users with home folders) that will fit into nearly any workflow. The system offers all the standard tools available on digital asset management/delivery software. An administrator can create data fields that can be used to tag documents, all the fields, including the imported EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata, are searchable. To respond to greater expectations from a Web 2.0 application, SeeFile offers collaboration features including annotations on selected areas of images and PDFs, and online approval. With SeeFile, companies involved with photography, print, video, brand management and advertising can archive their media files and manage several projects with their customers for a fraction of the price of other solutions.

Pricing and Availability
The software is priced from $499 to $4,995, depending on number of user licenses.

Are we reaching the limits of UI buildout?

By Kas Thomas, Analyst
CMS Watch, 28 July 2009

As you can imagine, in the course of covering more than 200 software products, my colleagues and I get to see and touch a lot of different user interfaces, and one thing we've all noticed lately is the trend toward larger and larger interfaces. To put it bluntly, many products (particularly in the WCM and DAM spaces) now have client UIs that are just plain enormous. By enormous I mean busy and option-rich, with tons of controls, and often with a super high-resolution monitor required just to see the whole UI.

In the WCM world, products like Alterian Morello, SDL Tridion R5.3, Sitecore CMS, and TYPO3Canto Cumulus and Mediabeacon R3volution (among others), which have seen UIs grow in tandem with product functionality. (among others) have seen their user interfaces grow to the point where even power users find it challenging to learn the product -- and then stay current on it. The same is true, in the DAM world, for products like

UI sprawl is not limited to any particular tier or type of product, of course. Creeping featuritis has led to bewilderingly complex UIs for Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, and countless other familiar software tools. In the Web CMS world, the problem seems to be compounded by a recent trend toward re-centralization of control and consolidation of roles in web publishing (just the opposite of the trend toward decentralization and specialization that was so common a few years ago) -- whereby power users dominate systems activity, and often system selection.

Looking forward, it's clear that "UI buildout" cannot continue much longer. For many products, cognitive overload is no longer a threat, but a reality. How many toolbars, tabs, nested menus, and clickable controls (not to mention nav-trees in which you have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to find things) can a mere mortal handle? If a cognitive limit exists, I think we're pretty much there.

The question is, what can be done about it? Is there a way forward?

As a stopgap measure, simply hiding controls based on role can be useful. Many vendors make at least a token attempt to give you control over the visibility of important UI pieces based on a contributor's permissions.

As a whole, though, the industry needs to do a lot better in giving system implementers and admins the power to custom-configure task-based interfaces for different system personas. It can be very difficult (even impossible) in some systems to make a given command just not show up. It's hard to understand why that should be. Not everyone needs every command. Why put controls in a user's face if you don't have to? As noted UI expert Aza Raskin says, "If you notice the interface, that means you're thinking about the interface and not the thing you're trying to do."

It's been said that something like 45% of the features in a typical software system are never used, while another 19% are rarely used. That means the majority of executable code in a product seldom, if ever, executes. Clearly the opportunity exists to scale back UIs. The problem is, products with super-lean UIs don't demo well. In any featuritis arms race, the product that can stand up to the most overspecified RFP has a big advantage.

Maybe there are lessons here for all of us.

Vendors: Strip the UI to a skeleton and make it easy for implementers (and/or administrators, and/or power users) to add functionalities back one by one.

Customers: Stop "requiring the world" in RFPs and PRDs. This only exacerbates the featuritis arms race. And make sure non-tech-savvy casual users (not just power users) are properly represented on product selection teams. It's your non-techies who will push back hardest on hard-to-learn systems -- and ultimately decide the success or failure of the system.

We say it throughout our reports, but: Take time to do some usability testing of your own. Find out up front if a product's UIs are going to be a problem for your organization, and don't assume you can fix the problem with training. Training isn't the answer for users whose tired brains are already, even before you roll out the system, saying, Don't make me think.

More @ http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1652-UI-Bloat?source=RSS

The boondoggle that is software maintenance fees

By Tony Byrne, Analyst
CMS Watch, 28 July 2009

Annual software support and maintenance fees are something every customer loves to hate, and yet, for the most part we keep paying them. Technology managers fear "going naked," right up until they replace the package. Meanwhile, the underlying economics keep vendors keen to promote what has become a major profit center for most.

And which vendor has perfected the maintenance fee profit engine? You guessed it: Oracle. InformationWeek's Bob Evans explains in an excellent column, "Global CIO: How 22% Annual Fees For You Equals 51% Operating Margins For Oracle."

I think Oracle's success has had a huge influence on the technology marketplace. In the ten years that I've been covering content management, portals, search, et. al., I've seen many other vendors deliberately mimic Oracle's model.

And we're not just talking about commercial vendors here. A new breed of "commercial open source" vendors has also explicitly copied Oracle's approach: if a lion's share of the profits lies in customers paying annual fees, why charge for the software up front at all? Simply invest a little R&D to get started, use consulting projects and whatever the community can muster to drive ongoing innovation, carefully collar tech support costs, grow the company, and then sell it to a larger firm looking to acquire reliable revenue streams...such as Oracle.

These fees would feel less galling if you received great support in return. You've told us over the years that some vendors do indeed excel here. But most do not.

Then there's the thorny issue of supporting the software versus supporting (and upgrading) the implementation. In most sizable projects, someone (either your developers, a consulting firm, or a vendor's professional services arm) has so heavily customized the software that your vendor's tech support can quickly become impotent, save for addressing common bugs or very low-level problems. We've been advising buyers to take a close look at warranties and tech support within any consulting contracts, including those signed with a vendor. Remain particularly alert when buying software via a re-seller -- an increasingly prevalent model in the Web CMS market, as well as several others we cover.

Is there anything to like about maintenance fees? Some observers pointed out on Twitter yesterday that we should at least value the predictability of such expenses, even as we decry the rates (@lehawes). Annual fees help provide a kind of insurance for the customer and enable the vendor to invest in long-term support for the core codebase. And they put less pressure on vendors to front-load their total costs+ profit (@damtrends). Presumably vendors can break-even now, then profit later.

But oh, the profits. As part of our evaluations of publicly-traded vendors, we often listen in on quarterly financial analyst calls, which as Evans notes, can be quite revealing. One of my favorite vendor boasts to equity markets is, "obtaining a higher yield from existing customers." How much should financial performance matter to you the buyer? A little. It's good to know your vendor won't go bankrupt. Nonetheless, I think traditional technology analyst firms do enterprise buyers an injustice by too often conflating a software vendor's financial success with technical acumen or product development skill. (Some analysts also mis-identify vendor marketing and sales acumen with customer value, but that's another story....) I'm quite certain that in the software world, there's no definite correlation between profits and quality. According to Oracle's CFO, there is a correlation between profits and size of maintenance base.

There's some good news, though. We're seeing increasingly better peer-based, community support. This trend is surely more advanced in the open source world, but commercial vendors have been catching on here, too. The availability of peer support has become an important criterion for our evaluations in recent years, and enlightened suppliers are fostering active communication among customers.

Our research reports also instruct technology buyers how to negotiate down annual maintenance rates. In the field, we sometimes receive slack-jawed responses from both the customer ("you mean we can do that?") and the vendor ("you want to carve up our golden calf?"). Yes, on both counts.

Optimizing Digital Asset Management

Reblog from Business Management
E-Magazine

In an exclusive interview the IDC’s Melissa Webster talks to Business Management about the increasing emergence of digital asset management and the potential for the future of the sector.

“Increasingly what we see is companies wanting to design media and career assets that can be used online and in print, digital asset management can play an important role along that repository”
-Melissa Webster, IDC

Perhaps you could give us an indication of the types of challenges enterprises face when managing their digital assets?
Melissa Webster. First of all it’s a really fragmented market, mainly because there are so many different use cases. For example, if you are talking about the enterprise, typically the needs of the enterprise are revolving around management and marketing and you need to manage a library or repository of assets, which can be shared for worldwide marketing programs and that can be taken and reused by regional or local groups when they kick off their own campaigns. The assets can be marketing collateral, designed for print, web or radio, or they could be brand materials such as logos.

So, depending on what your business is, if you are a large brand manufacturer or consumer goods manufacturer, you are going to have a tremendous amount of content – some of it will be product photos, some of it will be rich media, such as video, audio or multimedia. You need to have expert metadata about your assets so that you can serve up the appropriate version to the right person, in context. Of course the digital asset management (DAM) system also provides the security, authorization and control over who actually says what. That’s part of the equation and it has worked for us for interesting assets and cataloguing them, but also when people use them and implement things like notification and approval workflows and so forth.

How does digital asset management refer to enterprise content management? Are the to related? Do they have unique functions and features?
MW. The difference really lies in the unique workflows, which need to be extremely specific in the case of digital asset management. The digital asset management system hopefully takes apart the asset into its component parts and storing these as separate assets in order that they can be reused in other creative ways without being redundant and then putting those assets back together when need be.

A digital asset management system can be used to help with problems around logo changing. For example, if I need to change the logo in 2000 brochures in 75 places than you can change the logo in one place and reflect that change throughout your current set of print brochures and on to websites. There is this notion that were used and the extensive linking of assets to each other, and we can call that level. There is the unique workforce for the creative process, which is a little different from what we do on the enterprise national side.

Do you see digital asset management as a subset of an enterprise content management system or something completely separate? Is it within an enterprise content management (ECM) solution or is it something that companies will be looking to purchase separately?
MW. That depends on the requirements. Certainly the enterprise content management vendors have for some time offered digital asset management systems. However, there is still a place for DAM solutions, even in organizations that have these ECM offerings from the top ECM vendors if your requirements are specialized. If you are a large print publisher, for example, it may be that your enterprise content management vendors digital asset management solution does not deal well in designed documents and doesn’t manage those components. If you are doing a lot of print publishing, perhaps you need to buy a DAM that is tailored to managing that kind of content because you need to manage the component level so that you can print different renditions or need to dynamically resize things for the web.

How does the increasing digitization of many different types of content and information add to this challenge?
MW. Well, on the one hand we have this tremendous explosion of digital content and that is the case inside the enterprise as well as on the consumer side – we all take more photos with our digital cameras for example. There is a huge distortion of digital content and one of the things that happens is that because everything is digital it is relatively cheap and everybody keeps everything.

On the flipside, having digital makes it so much easier to catalogue, find and search. You can immediately call information based on a search, watch a preview and verify that that is the asset you want, which makes life so much easier. The other thing that is so great about the digital world is that it is easy to create variance of that asset, it just takes a little code, whether that is a transcoding video or audio or whether you are taking a brochure apart and putting it back together in a new way with new ingredients. It is so easy to take, edit and revise different assets.

One of the things we are talking about in this issue is the idea of managing the customer experience across different platforms and channels. What role does DAM play in helping manage that customer experience for companies?
MW. The digital asset management system is a source of direct images, video, audio, the rich media and multimedia formats assets. It might be used in the context on a website with mass logos and text or the applications to enable transaction on that website and other commerce. The DAM is managing ingredients for that process. Increasingly what we see if companies wanting to design media and career assets that can be used be online and in print, so the digital asset management system can play an important role along that repository and surface the right assets for the right publishing point, although they it is not itself providing the web publishing capabilities, that is the job of the web content management system.

Where do you see the market heading next? Is there a major trend that you think will have a big impact on this particular sector?
MW. I certainly think that the trend seems to tightly connect the digital asset management system and the web content management system as an important trend. Increasingly among smaller web content management vendors are integrations with DAM systems and I believe we are going to see that more and more between the web publishing side and the digital asset management side.

We are seeing grand management applications on top of digital asst management systems to provide some of the out-of-the-box workflows that the marketing department needs, either to work internally across a large globally distributed marketing organization or to facilitate collaboration with their advertising and interactive agencies and stakeholders to help in their marketing.

Types of DAM
There are several broad categories of digital asset management systems, including:

• Brand asset management systems: With a focus on facilitation of content re-use within large organizations, here the content is largely marketing or sales related. For example, product imagery, logos, marketing collateral or fonts
• Library asset management systems: With a focus on storage and retrieval of large amounts of infrequently changing media assets. For example, video or photo archiving
• Production asset management systems: With a focus on storage, organization and revision control of frequently changing digital assets. For example, digital media production
• Digital supply chain services: With a focus on pushing digital content out to digital retailers. For example, music, videos and games

The FeedRoom Introduces Comprehensive Online Video Solution for Media Relations and Public Affairs

SaaS Offering Enables Fortune 1000 Enterprises and Government Agencies to Add Streaming Video and Broadcast-quality Downloads to Online Press Rooms in Minutes – at Half the Cost of Branded News Sites

NEW YORK, NY (July 22, 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) offering designed to address the needs of media relations and public affairs professionals looking to add high-quality video to their Web sites and online press rooms. The value-priced offering combines the unique publishing, distribution and measurement capabilities that Fortune 1000 and government communicators require to ensure greater transparency, control and global reach within the changing news distribution landscape, including social networking sites, bloggers, mobile applications and other new media.

A recent study of more than 12,000 journalists and media representatives published by the Institute of Public Relations shows that corporate communicators remain key to helping journalists and editors identify and develop stories, with 94 percent reporting that they rely heavily on organizational Web sites for information. At the same time, the 2009 Online Newsroom Survey reveals that the desire for video by media has increased substantially over the previous year, with more than 80 percent of journalists now wanting to see video files.

“Using online video, in both live and on-demand formats, companies can aid journalists, bloggers and others in building stories, particularly if the video is easily accessible in the resolution and in the format required for broadcast or embedding,” said Mark Portu, President and CEO of The FeedRoom. “One method for addressing this has been the use of siloed, Internet TV channels. What communications professionals sacrifice with this approach, however, is a truly integrated strategy that ties together the marketing, branding and PR initiatives of an organization in more creative and controlled ways – and at significantly lower cost.”

The ability to quickly add video to a virtual press room, produce live news conferences or enable media to directly download high-resolution, broadcast-quality video from an organization’s own site provides greater context, as well as measurement in the form of real-time data on traffic, audience and views. Available immediately, the comprehensive offering includes capabilities for:

• Fully customizable user experiences, including a range of player templates;
• Secure media download features for podcast, Web and broadcast-quality video;
• Syndication support via XML and video RSS feeds;
• Support for high-quality, on-demand and live streaming video;
• Registration capabilities with approval and communications processes;
• Advanced reporting integration with industry standard measurement services and tools.

The new solution is based on the extensive capabilities of FeedRoom 4.0 Enterprise Video Platform^TM, a scalable enterprise video solution that integrates seamlessly with existing content management systems, social media distribution and community tools, and leading Web analytics solutions. The flexible system supports a variety of highly customizable, lightweight video players and the powerful, easy-to-use FeedRoom Studio^TM 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 for marketing, public relations and corporate communications.

“A well-thought out, online press room can be a great resource to both journalists and PR teams alike,” adds Portu. “With ten years of experience working with leading brands to support their news and crisis communications efforts, we’ve seen a growing number of customers, such as General Motors, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Yum! Brands, The Pentagon and others, able to address the new media landscape more efficiently, while also significantly enhancing the value of their sites for journalists by creating an integrated online media experience.”

White Paper: The Benefits of Video-Enabling Your Virtual Press Room

Download a complimentary copy of “The Benefits of Video-Enabling Your Virtual Press Room: Capitalizing on Digital Media in the Age of Transparency, Social Networking and the 24/x News Cycle ” at www.feedroom.com. This paper discusses methods for making online video an essential part of an integrated, cross-media communications strategy.

http://www.feedroom.com/page/07_09_PR_Solution

Growing need for digital asset management

Reblog from ZDNet News: Jul 21, 2009
By Hassan Kotob, President and CEO of North Plains Systems

Commentary - Digital asset management, or DAM, has often been described as a process or a tool for organizing the creation, management, distribution, and archiving of rich media assets. In the DAM world, the term “assets” generally refers to rich media files such as images, photos, video and audio, whereas a “file” generally refers to email, documents, records, or scanned images. Creative agencies, publishers and media outlets have long realized the wisdom of utilizing DAM solutions for producing media assets, managing digital rights, conferring with clients, handling review cycles, retouching images, and editing photos and videos.

The growing need for digital asset management
Today, it’s increasingly common for businesses of all kinds to produce corporate videos and podcasts, e-Learning modules, YouTube clips, training materials, brand identity graphics, and more. DAM systems bring order to the creative process involved with producing and leveraging these assets to their fullest extent.

A recent Forrester report noted, “With technologies like digital cameras and inexpensive authoring tools driving asset creation costs down, digital assets are greatly increasing in number and these rich media are being used across a wider range of enterprises. Inadequate management of these growing libraries, however, will make reusing and repurposing difficult, leading many organizations to take another look at DAM.”1 Analysts at IDC concur: “IDC believes the digital asset management market will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of more than 25 percent during the period of 2006-2010, outperforming the overall content management market…and the software market as a whole, by a wide margin…DAM will remain an independent and lively market…given the specialized requirements of DAM solutions.”2

The benefits of DAM
Organizations deploying specialized DAM solutions typically realize the following benefits:

• Consistent messaging and brand — With built-in revision control, asset repurposing, and approval processes, DAM systems enable organizations to maintain consistent use and re-expression of digital assets, from brochures to corporate videos to web content.
• Generation of new revenue streams — Many organizations have built new business opportunities around the creation of high-value content for internal and external clients by repurposing their assets such as using book covers to promote books online. Consider a photo that costs tens of thousands of dollars to create each and every time. With DAM, it can be reused. Without DAM, its existence may not be known and the re-creation costs are incurred once again.
• Cost savings — Organizations gain a return on their investment through the elimination of redundant asset creation efforts and the ability to quickly retrieve assets.
• Digital media management and distribution — DAM systems enable the efficient organization, indexing, and distribution of digital assets. Advanced DAM systems provide a distributed architecture and multi-site asset storage, as well as the ability to provide multiple repositories for self-synchronization of both assets and their associated metadata.
• Global web-based access — Organizations can distribute digital masters and other types of licensed assets via secure web access. Advanced DAM systems also provide asset ordering and fulfillment modules, and can easily integrate with existing e-commerce and transaction servers.

Vetting DAM solutions
Select a digital asset management system based on your creative needs. This may include management of your organization’s creative assets, managing broadcast and post-production workflows, media enhanced e-learning, video-on-demand repositories, multi-channel distribution, personalized publishing on-demand, and more. Most businesses today will find it beneficial to use a solution that also manages the video creation, editing, collaboration, and management process. This involves ease of integration with video editing applications, video usage standards, and broadcast workflows. Questions you may want to consider before investing in a digital asset management solution include:

• Does the DAM solution provide seamless integration with creative authoring tools such as Adobe Creative Suite and Quark or digital editing suites such as Avid and Apple's Final Cut Pro?
• Is “work-in-progress” supported by this DAM solution, or does it simply provide the ability to archive your organization’s assets? Some DAM and ECM solutions provide only the archiving capabilities.
• Is this a “best of breed” DAM solution? Be wary of vendors who try to be all things to all customers. Give preference to a best of breed DAM solution over an ECM or MRM (Marketing Resource Management) solution that also offers limited DAM functionality which may not meet your requirements.
• Can the solution scale? Be sure to select a DAM solution that has the ability to keep up with the growth of your organization and its requirements. And of course, if you are thinking of an enterprise-wide or global implementation, the ability for your DAM solution to easily scale is a necessity.

Conclusion
Until recently, many enterprises have not realized the great need for DAM solutions. The ability that DAM has to manage both documents and digital assets is extraordinary. While many general content management vendors offer basic DAM functionality, they have lost touch with the collaborative process that is so integral to the creation and management of rich media assets. These systems may support the ability to attach static images or even short video clips. However, the proper management of rich media assets requires a more sophisticated approach.

Forward-thinking organizations recognize the need for solutions designed from the ground up to support the creative process. Selecting the best solution that meets your requirements enables organizations to leverage the expertise of both knowledge management and artistic teams to their fullest extent.