So here’s a little walkthrough of what’s new in Cumulus 10.0.1

Define Your Own Asset Relations

For ages (starting in 2006 with version 7) Cumulus has been able to manage related assets by displaying these relations and allowing the user to determine relationships between assets. The user could only pick from predetermined relation types – variants and alternates. However, each organization has its own needs and our customers asked for additional options. That’s why we decided to introduce custom relation types.

Now you can add your own relation types. See below how it works. A new custom relation type is created via the Catalog Settings. As soon as a custom relation type has been added to a catalog it is available for use. Within the Cumulus Web Client, it can even display a custom icon to represent the relation.

Easily track asset relationships you defined that meet your organization’s needs.

Creation of a custom relation type.

Portals Enhancements

We increased the web performance of Cumulus Portals (minified CSS/JS files, less files to load as files are combined into a few ones) and localized Portals to German.

And the sorting options were enhanced. Via the Portals tab of the CIP Configurator, fields can be configured to simplify the user experience.

See how field sorting works in Cumulus Portals:

Configured fields can be used for sorting within Cumulus Portals.

Resetting Workflows with Web Client

Workflows keep your project on track. But sometimes you may need to reset or remove workflow steps that happened in error.  Now with Cumulus 10.0.1, workflows can be removed from a record – even if the workflow had been started – by a user who has Workflow Administrator permissions. Such a user can cancel a workflow and remove the record from the workflow so that the workflow can e.g. be restarted. Workflow Administrator permissions for users or roles are set via the User Manager.

Message that a started workflow will be removed from a record.

Microsoft Support

Less than a month ago Microsoft released Windows 10 and Edge. And already now Cumulus Web Client and Portals support the new Microsoft Edge browser and Cumulus Admin Clients run on Windows 10.

Cumulus Web Client on Microsoft Edge (released on July 29, 2015)

What is this competition about?

The winner of the competition will receive a 100% free entry ticket for the Henry Stewart Chicago conference on the 24^th of September 2015. The winner will be chosen on the 10th of September 2015. Everyone who owns a Facebook and/or Twitter account can enter the competition.

How can I win?

In order to join the Henry Stewart Chicago conference with us, you need to do the following:

• Like us on Facebook & Follow us on Twitter
• Tell us in a Tweet why you want to join the Henry Stewart using the @Canto handle and #CantoisDAM
• If you don’t have Twitter, respond to our Henry Stewart Facebook Post why you want to join Henry Stewart in Chicago.

We are looking forward to reading your tweets.

About Henry Stewart in Chicago

 Henry Stewart is the conference where the world’s leading Digital Asset Management industry gathers and shares and discusses best practices. Read more here.

In this blog post I will discuss how Digital Asset Management (DAM) can DAM the Digital Transformation pushing your organization to not only make sufficient investment into technology, but also allowing your organization to enable its employees while enhancing customer experience at the same time.

Enhance the customer experience

The way customers and consumers interact with brands has changed in the recent years like never before. Whether it’s virtually or in person, nowadays we use multiple communication channels to engage with brands.

All the content – visual or text – you deliver at these touch points creates the customer experience, which should be consistent across all applied channels. DAM keeps your images, text files and all your brand assets in one place – it’s your single point of truth.

It solves the challenge of keeping your brand communication consistent by providing the right people with the right and up-to-date digital content. Stay true to your brand with the support of a DAM.

Know your customer

Enhancing customer experience needs analysis. How is your customer engaging with your content? In what type of content do you need to invest more time and money? DAM has it all in one place – your assets, your analytics. It provides you with the data to make strategic decisions. DAM will help you understand which of your assets are used and how.

Improve operational processes

Working with an increasing amount of digital assets produced daily, it gets difficult to handle big bulks of digital content.

The challenge is to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs and enable your employees to do what they do best.
A DAM is a technology that improves the efficiency of your entire team –internally, externally, globally – you name it. With your assets all in once place, initiating digital workflows becomes a whole lot easier. Repurposing, reusing und sharing becomes an easy process and the best part is, you can do it from anywhere, from any device without ever leaving your branded environment.

Think out of the box

Having a technology in place that works is good, but what makes it really excellent is if it connects with other technologies. Imagine you don’t ever have to leave your environment to search for files, to download them, to upload them. DAM thinks out of the box and connects with your IT infrastructure to deliver your digital assets where you need them to be –your CMS, PIM, in Adobe creative tools or any other systems and software. A DAM wouldn’t be a DAM without seamless integration allowing your team and your customers to have a great experience delivering and consuming your valuable assets.

Like the pirates who were unrelenting in accumulating riches to fill their treasure boxes, Canto has continuously added a wealth of capabilities to its award-winning

Jack McGannon, CEO at Canto

Cumulus product. Cumulus has always been known to be the leading Digital Asset Management technology in terms of richness of features and the ability to implement these features through configuration without the need for coding. Cumulus X represents a continuation of Canto’s unyielding commitment to providing the breadth and depth of rich capabilities that enterprises require to successfully tackle complex use cases that often have unique and multi-faceted requirements.

At Canto, we recognize that it is critical to expose our digital asset management riches through relevant interfaces. With Cumulus X, we are delivering a new mobile technology to address the way that many users prefer to work today. We are also delivering Cumulus Portals, another mobile-friendly technology that allows for rich branding possibilities.

Of particular note in the Cumulus X release is the even richer API set that we have built. At Canto, we recognize that enterprise deployments of digital asset management projects are often part of broader initiatives. As such, the need to integrate is paramount and we have added some additional treasures to Cumulus to enable ease of integration.

And, of course, we have added a number of other meaningful and cool new treasures to add to our impressive chest of features. Read more here.

If you are looking for a treasure chest of digital asset management, “X” marks the spot.

In this blogpost, we give you an overview of all the new features and functionalities we have included since our release of Cumulus 9.2 last December.

1. Mobile Readiness with Cumulus Portals and the new Cumulus Mobile App
2. API & Technology Enhancements
3. Web Client, Native Client and Server Enhancements

1. Mobile Readiness

With Cumulus X Canto introduces two new Cumulus components that support mobile devices: Cumulus Portals and Cumulus Mobile App.

Cumulus Mobile App

The new Cumulus iOS Mobile App offers smart, collaborative access to your digital content from your iPhone and iPad. The App gives you read & write access. You can comment on your assets, set markups, search, download, crop and share. And what’s best – the interface can be branded based on your individual standards – to make sure your assets look good – wherever they are.

Cumulus Mobile App on iPhone

Cumulus Portals

Portals is Canto’s new web solution that provides read only access to Cumulus. It can be used on desktop computers and laptops as well as on all smartphones and tablets thanks to it’s responsive web design. With this strategy we ensure that those who consume your assets will always have the best user experience – across all possible screen sizes and on any device.

Cumulus Portals is ideal to publish and market your digital assets online. Users with a standard Web browser can comfortably search for cataloged assets, drop them into a collection basket and download them – converted to different formats as needed. Appropriate access rights are always managed by privacy settings and permission controls. Configuring and customizing Cumulus Portals is easy and does not require deep programming knowledge.

Cumulus Portals has endless possibilities. Consider sharing  your images and datasheets with journalists through a press portal. Think of customer portals, retailer portals, partner portals and self-service sales portals. You are free to create several branded portals from your Cumulus installation – perfect for agencies and multi-brand conglomerates.

Let’s take a look at the main features available in the new Cumulus Portals

• Fast and Secure Self-Serve File Access– Cumulus Portals offers fast file access and secure file distribution to anyone on the Web. Web users have access to public catalogs (or private catalogs with login) where they can search, preview, and download files as they choose. For public catalogs, login-free access offers quick browsing and basic downloads. Cumulus account holders can optionally login to see and download more than you provide to guests.
• Searching and Filtering– Users can quickly find what they are looking for by employing a quick search field or filter. Categories and preconfigured filters can be activated to narrow down the number of files.
• Metadata Information – The metadata of a file can be viewed in a short or detailed format. Clicking the thumbnail of a file displays the short version. To get more details an icon or menu entry is provided.
• Visual Previews– Large visual previews are provided for each file – even multipage previews are available.
• Collections– Cumulus server-side stored catalog collections are available to publish asset selections without any hassles for you or your website visitors. Cumulus account holders can create their own collection with Portals.
• Landing Pages– Specific landing pages for “upload collections” or “download collections” that only provide the option to upload or download files. Links to such collections are sent by Cumulus users to external recipients via email, using the Web or Desktop Client. Cumulus users can set the landing pages to require a password or set an expiration date for added security.
• Collection Basket– Simply add files to your temporary collection basket to make ‘shopping’ for images, PDFs, videos and other digital assets a snap. The collection basket is cleared once a session ends.
• Downloading– Download individual files or collect multiple files into the collection basket for group downloading. Prior to download, files can be converted as required. The conversion options are determined based on Cumulus actions that have been set up – which can be configured by your Admin or enlist Canto Professional Services to get your settings just right.
• Integrated Configuration– Cumulus Portals is easily configured via the CIP configuration module of the Cumulus Web Server Console.
• Brandable Publishing Portals– Cumulus Portals offers each customer the possibility to create various brandable portals. You can easily and quickly adapt Portals to various corporate identities via CSS and overwriting style elements with HTML. On the Cumulus Portals welcome page, different products and topics can be visualized and the user may choose from multiple catalogs to begin their experience.
• SEO Support–For faster searching and better finding of digital assets, Cumulus Portals provides automated SEO support.
• Built-in Security– Cumulus Portals is protected against cross-site scripting and request forgery attacks and user input is escaped.

Cumulus Portals auf einem iPad (horizontale Ansicht)

Now let’s take a look at the technology supporting this release – because to build Cumulus Portals and the new Mobile App, we enhanced our API.

2. API and Technology

The Canto Integration Platform (CIP) is our API that enables the development of integrations between Cumulus and other systems – and with Cumulus X has been significantly expanded. For the most important settings a CIP configuration module is now provided with the Web Server Console. This module includes the configuration of Cumulus Portals and the Cumulus Mobile App.

CIP configuration module of the Cumulus Web Server Console

To make your work with our API easier, we have also improved our documentation. You can find more detailed descriptions in the enhanced technical CIP documentation which is now included with the CIP Client SDK.

The main enhancements are:

• Collections– CIP now supports Cumulus server-side collections. Private, shared, upload and download collections are supported and upload or download collections can be opened without a user login, if necessary.
• Catalogs– With Cumulus X CIP provides support for multiple catalogs.
• Filtering– Filters can be easily added and removed. Various filter types have been added: dynamic field-based filters, query-based filters, filters allowing field value range input, collection-based filters. And pre-configured filter sets can be employed.
  

  Filter settings with CIP configuration module of the Cumulus Web Server Console

• Downloading– CIP can now retrieve a direct download URL (e.g. for assets being stored in Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure). Asynchronous download processing is supported as well as downloading of multiple assets.
• Security– The security was massively enhanced. System information is hidden and the use of configured values can be enforced.
• Previews/Thumbnails– Multipage previews are supported and you can retrieve the preview for a specific page. Video playback support was improved. Category thumbnails are dynamically generated.
• User Management– Retrieving information about the current user is now possible. Searching for users by matching a partial name and a session can allow you to switch to another user.

3. Web Client, Native Client and Server Enhancements

Since our last major release of Cumulus 9.2 in December 2014 we have released 3 minor versions, which have added new features to the Web Client as well as to the Admin Client. If you didn’t have a chance to check out the details yet – you can find them here.

• 9.2.1 – Crop images more easily with Cumulus
• 9.2.2 – Cumulus Web Client more powerful and easier to use than ever
• 9.2.3 – Look deeper into your images and more

With Cumulus X, of course we have further enhanced the Cumulus Web Client and our Admin Client as well as the Cumulus Server: the Workflow UI was enhanced and the Web Client got more customization options. More formats are supported, for detailed lists see complete list (Enhanced Metada Support PDF file).

Visit our Cumulus X product page and stay tuned for even more Cumulus X awesomeness!

Responsive Web Design (RWD) Responsive web design can deliver web pages in variable sizes. The layout of the page, and the representation of the content, change depending on the size and capabilities of the device you are using. For example, on a phone, you would see content shown in a single column view; a tablet might show the same content in two columns. Page elements reshuffle as the window size grows or shrinks.
Desktop view	Tablet view	Smartphone view

1. Concept

Imagine you manage project names in your “$Categories” and simple tags and keywords in your $Keywords and when your users search for “Apple” they only want to find apples and not documents from the construction projects on Appletree Road.

In this tutorial we will show you how you can set this up with Cumulus. We will use the Field Linking functionality to accomplish that.
We need to look at three locations your Keywords can reside:

• In your Category Tree in the $Keywords Section in Cumulus
• In your Keywords (String) Record field in Cumulus
• Already existing Keywords from XMP or IPTC metadata.

The most important concept to understand is that Field Linking needs to be set up very specifically to not “confuse” Cumulus which data should go where. So let us define the direction and the linking “conditions” in a little graphic first:

2. Metadata Flow

Let’s now look at the metadata flow from a User’s perspective:

2.1

. 

Assigning a $Keyword Category adds the keyword into the Category Field in your Cumulus Asset Info Window (either you see them as a list or, if you select the Keywords only, you’ll see them as bubbles). This happens automatically.

2.2.

The newly assigned keywords are being written back into the Asset. You can look at the data by opening your file in i.e. Adobe Photoshop >> File >> File Info. You will find the Keywords in the XMP/IPTC field. If configured correctly, this step also happens automatically.

Here are the 2 configuration settings required to make this happen: Preferences >> Asset Handling Set >> Asset Access Enables automatic Write Back from Cumulus to the Asset.

Preferences >> Catalog Settings >> Record Fields >> Categories >> Properties >> Field Linking

2.3.

The next step needs to be done actively by a user: You will need to update your record. Select your records >> Metadata >> Update Advanced (Or right click on the selected records and select Update Record >> ..Advanced) and select the following options:

If you’re an advanced user, you can of course also set up a Trigger or Scheduler Action to update your records automatically.

Let’s look at the Field Linking Option that needs to be configured for this:

2.4.

Now your Keyword Field is properly populated by everything you assign to the $Keywords Category section. Keep in mind that pre-existing (non-Cumulus) keywords may also have made their way into this field. This is unavoidable (and also probably encouraged) because we actively set Cumulus to read out of a standard field which may have been filled by third party application or sites as well (such as stock agencies).

Now we need to limit our search options so that only keywords are used. Go to your Preferences >> User Settings > Search and Sort and switch the Quick Search field list to manual. Only add Keywords (or add other fields you want, but keep Categories out):

3. Limitations

Please keep in mind that this configuration is only working with images and also only with files that are able to be edited/changed on the metadata level. Files that do not have the ability to store any metadata in their header or files not supporting IPTC/XMP standards will not work with this trick.

Our third interview in this series is about implementing DAM in your infrastructure. Realizing a project is an important step – but not the only one. How do you make your DAM project a success?  Carsten Hoffmann, Lead Software Engineer at Canto, explains how implementing a DAM solution works.

I decided on a DAM system. Now where do I start my implementation process?

First: Congratulations, you’ve mastered one important step! To acknowledge your need for digital asset management and to choose a DAM provider is already a big step in the right direction. If you decided on a DAM system you also should have decided on a partner for your DAM project.

Carsten Hoffmann, Lead Software Engineer

So your first step is to get in touch with your consultant. He or she will outline the whole project together with you according to your individual requirements. To get started of course you need someone in your company that collects all relevant information and manages the project internally. When you want to start the implementation process you need to know what digital files are relevant, where they reside and where you will use them.

As always with project management, it is very important to be precise about your targets. Your consultant will help you to lay out your project accordingly, so no need to worry!

What components (goals, processes, users, systems) do I have to consider for a DAM implementation?

Your DAM project is determined by your strategic objectives: What do you want to achieve by implementing a DAM in your IT infrastructure? An example would be to streamline your marketing workflows for faster image and graphic production.

That means, once you know your goal, you know what processes you need to consider. Let’s keep the marketing workflow as an example: You will probably need to look at your image creation workflow. Consider how images are shared and how people are using them. This directly leads to the users, in that case the creatives who are producing the images and the marketers who need the finished materials.

If I look at these workflows I will likely consider how to integrate the Adobe tools into my DAM, so that creatives can be more effective. In general, you should consider all systems and processes that deal with media files to see how those systems and processes can benefit. Often that includes CMS, ERP, Project Management, SAP, PIM and other vital systems.

Let’s say I use a CMS to manage my website. How do I know what kind of implementation I need?

That depends on your philosophy. You may want to connect your CMS to pull media files directly from your DAM image collections. If you want to have dynamic content that changes frequently, it makes sense to implement your website with live image caching. Every implementation is different and based on individual needs.

What implementation phases can I expect and who do I need to work with?

The first step here is to consider external reasons. Do I have a deadline for my implementation? What features do I need and when? When would be a good time for file migration? The key is to prioritize your goals accordingly based on those external parameters.

If I want my CMS to be integrated in my DAM this would be something I might do in phase 1. Other DAM features which are less important could be addressed in phase 2 . The trick is to break down complexity into single steps and not to start all parts of the project at the same time.

A successful DAM project has a good structure that reflects your priorities and does not consume too many resources at the same time.

What’s the best way to communicate a DAM implementation in my company?

There are two things you should communicate: On the one hand you should talk about your reasons for the DAM implementation with everyone who is involved. Why does your company need digital asset management? Be transparent about that! On the other hand you need to address the changes that this implementation brings. Other people will want to know how their workflows are altered by this digital asset management implementation. Implementing a DAM only works when everybody works together so you need to make sure that you have everybody on board.

And of course you should get help from your implementation partner. Your DAM provider should have a lot of experience with similar projects and will be happy to assist you in communicating your vision. Especially if your project is about workflow optimization. It’s helpful to be visual. Text-based documentation is necessary but only when you show the idea of the DAM project people will be able to get the message.

Do individual trainings for all employees make sense in my case?

Training is very helpful when it comes to workflow optimization. After observing the new tool, your DAM, you can start talking about how you would like it to work, what can be better. This means altering existing workflows but not to come up with something completely different. The result is a good mix between existing workflows and your new tool that work together. Training can be very helpful keep communication open while transforming newly streamlined workflows.

Let’s talk about change management. How do I make sure that new workflows and processes are actually used?

Once the software project rolls out and you have the technical infrastructure you wanted, this does not mean that your DAM project is complete.  The change must also be reflected in your daily work. To make sure people understand the importance of the DAM implementation it is good to have someone on board that people already know and trust who can inspire coworkers to explore the opportunities of the new DAM environment.

Usually you have regular users in your DAM team that bring in a real world expertise and make sure your workflow models are as realistic as they can get.

Let’s say your DAM project serves a scientific team of geologists who are working with images for their research. In that case you definitely want somebody from the geological team on board, in addition to the technical staff, to communicate the changes to the rest of the team – simply because the geologists are the ones who are supposed to use the DAM in their everyday work.

How many internal resources do I need to block for a DAM implementation?

That is hard to say and our best answer is: Your consultant can help you to evaluate that. The more you know what you exactly want to do in your project the easier it is to estimate how many resources are needed for your efforts. Having your own understanding of digital asset management doesn’t hurt – Canto offers a lot of educational content about digital asset management that makes it easier to consider the amount of resources you need to block for your project.

Be prepared to allocate employee hours to the project. A successful DAM project requires a great deal of preparation to know exactly the problem with your current workflows, who should be involved and what systems need to be implemented. Additionally, if you plan to install your system in house you may need to invest in technical equipment such as server, as opposed to a Hosted DAM alternative .

The good thing about a successful DAM project is that all of your human and technical resources profit from the ROI and the more time you invest in preparation the more you will get out of your DAM.

Getting a DAM started takes time. How do I manage overall expectations that can be unrealistic?

With good planning and a good consultant at your side! Having an open and honest relationship with the partner you are working together with is the best solution for that. Your DAM provider will have more experience and can save you from unrealistic expectations. That also means that you must be able to take “no” for an answer sometimes. When you demand too much your consultant will be able to warn you and give you another option of how to realize your ideas in multiple phases, for instance. Look for someone you trust and carefully consider his or her advice. That way you can easily realize a successful DAM transformation.

Thank you for the interview, Carsten!

DAM is subject to constant change

My favorite takeaway – for marketing and for digital asset management was mentioned in a talk by Beth Goldstein from Baxter Healthcare:

“The most dangerous phrase: we’ve always done it this way.”

Digital transformation is happening – and still has a long way to go. The customer requirements, technologies and approaches of DAM are constantly changing. Keeping up with new trends, influences and business needs – while keeping a unique vision and company strategy is essential to stay competitive.

The DAM foundation has recognized this as well – and started to evaluate software vendors based on 10 Core Characteristics.

DAM is part of a larger, integrative process

The DAM standalone product is a thing of the past. But it doesn’t stop with system integration – the digital content strategy of an organization starts at a more abstract level. DAM plays a role when it comes to content delivery, deployment, business processes and strategy – or – in the words of DAM expert Mark Davey:

“DAM is not a tool – it’s a strategy.”

DAM is management of knowledge and information

DAM and the importance of the user experience have been stretched extensively throughout the last couple of years. But most organizations still give too little thought on what’s below the surface. DAM has always been – and still is – management of knowledge and information.

Creatives are often considered as the main user group for DAM – but it comes down to organizing and structuring information – in order to make a DAM work properly. The role of librarians in that process is still underestimated – and industry analysts consider this one of the reaons so many DAM projects still fail.

DAM needs governance – and project management

Another reason stretched by industry experts – and digital asset managers themselves – why so many DAM initiatives fail is lack of governance – and project management. As we like to say: DAM is more than just software – and the planning, monitoring and change management activities that come with it are underestimated. According to recent industry research, only 44% of all organizations complete DAM projects on time, and only 40% complete them on budget. The only way to prevent the dilemma: partner with a vendor that gives you honest advise – rather than downplaying the project management efforts.

Do you want to learn more about digital asset management and how it can help organizations to ride the wave of change coming along with digital transformation? Check out the Canto DAM Summit we’ll host just outside Frankfurt, Germany on September 21^st & 22^nd, 2015.

Mark Davey, founder and president of the DAM Foundation, explains why the organization started to evaluate DAM providers and what the challenges are to actually become certified as state-of-the-art Digital Asset Management System.

The DAM foundation decided to evaluate vendors to make sure they fulfill the 10 core characteristics of a DAM. What was the fundamental reason to start such an evaluation?

The basic idea of a standard is to force the industry to up their game. I suppose you can link it back to the initial idea of the DAM foundation which was looking at standards and best practices within digital asset management (DAM).

When we first started in 2009 we focused on metadata. But given the complexity of metadata standards, we shifted our focus and started to look at ways to encourage people within the industry and help them understand what they need to get from their “as is” state to the desired “to be” state.

Mark Davey, President and Founder of DAM Foundation

So we got together with some thought leaders and put together the core characteristics of a DAM – or better said – the characteristics you need to get from your “as is” to your “to be” state. The 10 core characteristics formulate what we believe a system must have in order to be called a digital asset management system.

The subsequent idea was a formal protectionism – meaning we wanted users to be sure they were buying a DAM, not just a file repository. I got the idea when I attended an exhibition a few years ago – and I saw a lot of companies calling themselves DAM – and clearly they were little more than file repositories.

Here we are 6 years later – and we all agreed on a basic core. And now we have started to evaluate vendors that call themselves a DAM to see whether they actually fulfill these 10 core characteristics.

Can you tell us a little more about the evaluation process? How many vendors have been evaluated so far and how many of those have passed?

We initially evaluated all vendors that were on the Real Story Group Media and Digital Asset Management report. At the moment, the DAM Foundation is running an outreach program contacting vendors, asking them to look at the characteristics and if they believe they can pass the characteristics we ask them to do a one hour demo. It is not a canned demo because we use our own digital assets – the vendor gets the assets during the demo. At the moment we have evaluated some 20 plus vendors. Within the next 3 to 6 month we hope to double that and throughout the year we hope to get to the magical number of 100 in the next 18 months to two years.

It is hard to set a standard failure rate – but currently we have around 15-20% failures – still surprisingly high for an evaluation process that is voluntary.

During the evaluation, which characteristics where the most critical ones?

The most consistent failure rate is based on version control. A lot of vendors say they do version control, but they actually fudge the way they do it and it is not a true version control, which starts at the single version of the truth, especially with the requirement of UID’s (a unique identifier).

The second highest failure rate is on embeddable metadata – or more precisely the ability to read and ingest metadata out of the box without any configuration. Then we also test vendors on adding metadata, embedding the metadata and sending the asset back to us – so we see if the metadata has actually been embedded.

Another critical characteristic is asset analysis – for example how many people have looked at an asset, or shared an asset, or the analysis of the interaction with assets – internally and externally. Here we have seen large differences. A couple of vendors passed, but the analysis or the way they allow the analysis to happen is not as sophisticated as the options other vendors offer. The more we move the needle towards visualization of data, the better DAM managers will be able to improve the user experiences, through metadata and workflow tools.

What were some of the more qualitative insights that you took from evaluating all the systems? Was there something that surprised you?

What surprised me the most is that there are vendors we all know and have been professing to be DAM actually failed the evaluations.
They have been classified as a DAM considering what was needed some years ago. But the industry has moved on – customer requests have moved on – digital workflows have moved on, the internet has moved on and therefore the industry needs to move on with it. DAM is the foundational point for the journey of digital assets from creation to archive.

What can be done / what are you planning to do to further establish standards in the DAM industry?

The 10 Core is only our initial approach. We are talking about a 12 Core and a 15 Core – which will take into account more of these changes that are taking place. I am not able to talk about that at the moment – but I think for this year we will try to get as many vendors in the pass or fail so we can categorize them – and then we will add a few more cores and test them against those cores in the future.

Where do you see the danger of having so many systems that call themselves a DAM, but do not fulfill those basic requirements?

The DAM Foundation is an industry body focused on free education and oversight. So if you don’t have 10 Core – you can’t really call yourself a DAM. You might be a sophisticated file repository – but you will not help your clients achieve what they are trying to achieve. If you still call yourself a DAM – and people don’t do the necessary research – they will have a system that will fail them – and end up thinking that DAM cannot help them solve their problems. In our industry there is still way too much failure. As a side note, this is not all down to DAM vendors. Successful DAM is as much about people and processes as it is about good clear strategic approaches to digital assets.

You have long expertise as a DAM consultant – why do so many DAM projects fail – and what do you do as a consultant to help companies prevent that failure?

It is an industry-wide problem and I understand it at many levels. As a consultant, my first point is to help the client, their stakeholders, the sponsor and anyone involved in the initiative to understand that DAM is not about a technology. It is about a strategy. And that strategy involves people, process and technology. And lately I have added the analysis as a fourth dimension.

So the 10 Core are relevant to that in terms of the analytics, how you are able to visualize the data in a way that helps you in your business intelligence, in your marketing campaigns, in your product strategy.

It always goes back to the issue that companies have to understand that DAM is much more than technology – and they actually have to invest time and resources. I am finding that often only on the 2nd or 3rd failure do companies invest the time to plan their project out correctly. Then they have success with it – because they understand all the complexities that come with it and they are willing to invest the time to make it successful.

In Germany for instance, the term DAM still is not well established – so we always run into the issue of explaining what digital asset management can do for an organization. How do you explain digital asset management to your kids?

For my kids, there is no DVD/CD drive – when they want their music they just go to the service that has their music – they don’t look at it as an asset – even though it obviously has value – they have it everywhere – on their mobile, on their laptops.

They understand that this is coming somewhere from the internet – but that is where it ends.
DAM is not just about delivery, it is about the organization of the information that gets delivered. My kids use services that have this metadata already embedded. So if kids ask me what I do, I talk to them in terms of Youtube and i-Tunes – rather than talking about assets and metadata.

Thank you very much for the interview!

So here’s a little walkthrough of what’s new in Cumulus 10.0.1

Define Your Own Asset Relations

For ages (starting in 2006 with version 7) Cumulus has been able to manage related assets by displaying these relations and allowing the user to determine relationships between assets. The user could only pick from predetermined relation types – variants and alternates. However, each organization has its own needs and our customers asked for additional options. That’s why we decided to introduce custom relation types.

Now you can add your own relation types. See below how it works. A new custom relation type is created via the Catalog Settings. As soon as a custom relation type has been added to a catalog it is available for use. Within the Cumulus Web Client, it can even display a custom icon to represent the relation.

Easily track asset relationships you defined that meet your organization’s needs.

Creation of a custom relation type.

Portals Enhancements

We increased the web performance of Cumulus Portals (minified CSS/JS files, less files to load as files are combined into a few ones) and localized Portals to German.

And the sorting options were enhanced. Via the Portals tab of the CIP Configurator, fields can be configured to simplify the user experience.

See how field sorting works in Cumulus Portals:

Configured fields can be used for sorting within Cumulus Portals.

Resetting Workflows with Web Client

Workflows keep your project on track. But sometimes you may need to reset or remove workflow steps that happened in error.  Now with Cumulus 10.0.1, workflows can be removed from a record – even if the workflow had been started – by a user who has Workflow Administrator permissions. Such a user can cancel a workflow and remove the record from the workflow so that the workflow can e.g. be restarted. Workflow Administrator permissions for users or roles are set via the User Manager.

Message that a started workflow will be removed from a record.

Microsoft Support

Less than a month ago Microsoft released Windows 10 and Edge. And already now Cumulus Web Client and Portals support the new Microsoft Edge browser and Cumulus Admin Clients run on Windows 10.

Cumulus Web Client on Microsoft Edge (released on July 29, 2015)

What is this competition about?

The winner of the competition will receive a 100% free entry ticket for the Henry Stewart Chicago conference on the 24^th of September 2015. The winner will be chosen on the 10th of September 2015. Everyone who owns a Facebook and/or Twitter account can enter the competition.

How can I win?

In order to join the Henry Stewart Chicago conference with us, you need to do the following:

• Like us on Facebook & Follow us on Twitter
• Tell us in a Tweet why you want to join the Henry Stewart using the @Canto handle and #CantoisDAM
• If you don’t have Twitter, respond to our Henry Stewart Facebook Post why you want to join Henry Stewart in Chicago.

We are looking forward to reading your tweets.

About Henry Stewart in Chicago

 Henry Stewart is the conference where the world’s leading Digital Asset Management industry gathers and shares and discusses best practices. Read more here.

In this blog post I will discuss how Digital Asset Management (DAM) can DAM the Digital Transformation pushing your organization to not only make sufficient investment into technology, but also allowing your organization to enable its employees while enhancing customer experience at the same time.

Enhance the customer experience

The way customers and consumers interact with brands has changed in the recent years like never before. Whether it’s virtually or in person, nowadays we use multiple communication channels to engage with brands.

All the content – visual or text – you deliver at these touch points creates the customer experience, which should be consistent across all applied channels. DAM keeps your images, text files and all your brand assets in one place – it’s your single point of truth.

It solves the challenge of keeping your brand communication consistent by providing the right people with the right and up-to-date digital content. Stay true to your brand with the support of a DAM.

Know your customer

Enhancing customer experience needs analysis. How is your customer engaging with your content? In what type of content do you need to invest more time and money? DAM has it all in one place – your assets, your analytics. It provides you with the data to make strategic decisions. DAM will help you understand which of your assets are used and how.

Improve operational processes

Working with an increasing amount of digital assets produced daily, it gets difficult to handle big bulks of digital content.

The challenge is to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs and enable your employees to do what they do best.
A DAM is a technology that improves the efficiency of your entire team –internally, externally, globally – you name it. With your assets all in once place, initiating digital workflows becomes a whole lot easier. Repurposing, reusing und sharing becomes an easy process and the best part is, you can do it from anywhere, from any device without ever leaving your branded environment.

Think out of the box

Having a technology in place that works is good, but what makes it really excellent is if it connects with other technologies. Imagine you don’t ever have to leave your environment to search for files, to download them, to upload them. DAM thinks out of the box and connects with your IT infrastructure to deliver your digital assets where you need them to be –your CMS, PIM, in Adobe creative tools or any other systems and software. A DAM wouldn’t be a DAM without seamless integration allowing your team and your customers to have a great experience delivering and consuming your valuable assets.

Like the pirates who were unrelenting in accumulating riches to fill their treasure boxes, Canto has continuously added a wealth of capabilities to its award-winning

Jack McGannon, CEO at Canto

Cumulus product. Cumulus has always been known to be the leading Digital Asset Management technology in terms of richness of features and the ability to implement these features through configuration without the need for coding. Cumulus X represents a continuation of Canto’s unyielding commitment to providing the breadth and depth of rich capabilities that enterprises require to successfully tackle complex use cases that often have unique and multi-faceted requirements.

At Canto, we recognize that it is critical to expose our digital asset management riches through relevant interfaces. With Cumulus X, we are delivering a new mobile technology to address the way that many users prefer to work today. We are also delivering Cumulus Portals, another mobile-friendly technology that allows for rich branding possibilities.

Of particular note in the Cumulus X release is the even richer API set that we have built. At Canto, we recognize that enterprise deployments of digital asset management projects are often part of broader initiatives. As such, the need to integrate is paramount and we have added some additional treasures to Cumulus to enable ease of integration.

And, of course, we have added a number of other meaningful and cool new treasures to add to our impressive chest of features. Read more here.

If you are looking for a treasure chest of digital asset management, “X” marks the spot.

In this blogpost, we give you an overview of all the new features and functionalities we have included since our release of Cumulus 9.2 last December.

1. Mobile Readiness with Cumulus Portals and the new Cumulus Mobile App
2. API & Technology Enhancements
3. Web Client, Native Client and Server Enhancements

1. Mobile Readiness

With Cumulus X Canto introduces two new Cumulus components that support mobile devices: Cumulus Portals and Cumulus Mobile App.

Cumulus Mobile App

The new Cumulus iOS Mobile App offers smart, collaborative access to your digital content from your iPhone and iPad. The App gives you read & write access. You can comment on your assets, set markups, search, download, crop and share. And what’s best – the interface can be branded based on your individual standards – to make sure your assets look good – wherever they are.

Cumulus Mobile App on iPhone

Cumulus Portals

Portals is Canto’s new web solution that provides read only access to Cumulus. It can be used on desktop computers and laptops as well as on all smartphones and tablets thanks to it’s responsive web design. With this strategy we ensure that those who consume your assets will always have the best user experience – across all possible screen sizes and on any device.

Cumulus Portals is ideal to publish and market your digital assets online. Users with a standard Web browser can comfortably search for cataloged assets, drop them into a collection basket and download them – converted to different formats as needed. Appropriate access rights are always managed by privacy settings and permission controls. Configuring and customizing Cumulus Portals is easy and does not require deep programming knowledge.

Cumulus Portals has endless possibilities. Consider sharing  your images and datasheets with journalists through a press portal. Think of customer portals, retailer portals, partner portals and self-service sales portals. You are free to create several branded portals from your Cumulus installation – perfect for agencies and multi-brand conglomerates.

Let’s take a look at the main features available in the new Cumulus Portals

• Fast and Secure Self-Serve File Access– Cumulus Portals offers fast file access and secure file distribution to anyone on the Web. Web users have access to public catalogs (or private catalogs with login) where they can search, preview, and download files as they choose. For public catalogs, login-free access offers quick browsing and basic downloads. Cumulus account holders can optionally login to see and download more than you provide to guests.
• Searching and Filtering– Users can quickly find what they are looking for by employing a quick search field or filter. Categories and preconfigured filters can be activated to narrow down the number of files.
• Metadata Information – The metadata of a file can be viewed in a short or detailed format. Clicking the thumbnail of a file displays the short version. To get more details an icon or menu entry is provided.
• Visual Previews– Large visual previews are provided for each file – even multipage previews are available.
• Collections– Cumulus server-side stored catalog collections are available to publish asset selections without any hassles for you or your website visitors. Cumulus account holders can create their own collection with Portals.
• Landing Pages– Specific landing pages for “upload collections” or “download collections” that only provide the option to upload or download files. Links to such collections are sent by Cumulus users to external recipients via email, using the Web or Desktop Client. Cumulus users can set the landing pages to require a password or set an expiration date for added security.
• Collection Basket– Simply add files to your temporary collection basket to make ‘shopping’ for images, PDFs, videos and other digital assets a snap. The collection basket is cleared once a session ends.
• Downloading– Download individual files or collect multiple files into the collection basket for group downloading. Prior to download, files can be converted as required. The conversion options are determined based on Cumulus actions that have been set up – which can be configured by your Admin or enlist Canto Professional Services to get your settings just right.
• Integrated Configuration– Cumulus Portals is easily configured via the CIP configuration module of the Cumulus Web Server Console.
• Brandable Publishing Portals– Cumulus Portals offers each customer the possibility to create various brandable portals. You can easily and quickly adapt Portals to various corporate identities via CSS and overwriting style elements with HTML. On the Cumulus Portals welcome page, different products and topics can be visualized and the user may choose from multiple catalogs to begin their experience.
• SEO Support–For faster searching and better finding of digital assets, Cumulus Portals provides automated SEO support.
• Built-in Security– Cumulus Portals is protected against cross-site scripting and request forgery attacks and user input is escaped.

Cumulus Portals auf einem iPad (horizontale Ansicht)

Now let’s take a look at the technology supporting this release – because to build Cumulus Portals and the new Mobile App, we enhanced our API.

2. API and Technology

The Canto Integration Platform (CIP) is our API that enables the development of integrations between Cumulus and other systems – and with Cumulus X has been significantly expanded. For the most important settings a CIP configuration module is now provided with the Web Server Console. This module includes the configuration of Cumulus Portals and the Cumulus Mobile App.

CIP configuration module of the Cumulus Web Server Console

To make your work with our API easier, we have also improved our documentation. You can find more detailed descriptions in the enhanced technical CIP documentation which is now included with the CIP Client SDK.

The main enhancements are:

• Collections– CIP now supports Cumulus server-side collections. Private, shared, upload and download collections are supported and upload or download collections can be opened without a user login, if necessary.
• Catalogs– With Cumulus X CIP provides support for multiple catalogs.
• Filtering– Filters can be easily added and removed. Various filter types have been added: dynamic field-based filters, query-based filters, filters allowing field value range input, collection-based filters. And pre-configured filter sets can be employed.
  

  Filter settings with CIP configuration module of the Cumulus Web Server Console

• Downloading– CIP can now retrieve a direct download URL (e.g. for assets being stored in Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure). Asynchronous download processing is supported as well as downloading of multiple assets.
• Security– The security was massively enhanced. System information is hidden and the use of configured values can be enforced.
• Previews/Thumbnails– Multipage previews are supported and you can retrieve the preview for a specific page. Video playback support was improved. Category thumbnails are dynamically generated.
• User Management– Retrieving information about the current user is now possible. Searching for users by matching a partial name and a session can allow you to switch to another user.

3. Web Client, Native Client and Server Enhancements

Since our last major release of Cumulus 9.2 in December 2014 we have released 3 minor versions, which have added new features to the Web Client as well as to the Admin Client. If you didn’t have a chance to check out the details yet – you can find them here.

• 9.2.1 – Crop images more easily with Cumulus
• 9.2.2 – Cumulus Web Client more powerful and easier to use than ever
• 9.2.3 – Look deeper into your images and more

With Cumulus X, of course we have further enhanced the Cumulus Web Client and our Admin Client as well as the Cumulus Server: the Workflow UI was enhanced and the Web Client got more customization options. More formats are supported, for detailed lists see complete list (Enhanced Metada Support PDF file).

Visit our Cumulus X product page and stay tuned for even more Cumulus X awesomeness!

Responsive Web Design (RWD) Responsive web design can deliver web pages in variable sizes. The layout of the page, and the representation of the content, change depending on the size and capabilities of the device you are using. For example, on a phone, you would see content shown in a single column view; a tablet might show the same content in two columns. Page elements reshuffle as the window size grows or shrinks.
Desktop view	Tablet view	Smartphone view

1. Concept

Imagine you manage project names in your “$Categories” and simple tags and keywords in your $Keywords and when your users search for “Apple” they only want to find apples and not documents from the construction projects on Appletree Road.

In this tutorial we will show you how you can set this up with Cumulus. We will use the Field Linking functionality to accomplish that.
We need to look at three locations your Keywords can reside:

• In your Category Tree in the $Keywords Section in Cumulus
• In your Keywords (String) Record field in Cumulus
• Already existing Keywords from XMP or IPTC metadata.

The most important concept to understand is that Field Linking needs to be set up very specifically to not “confuse” Cumulus which data should go where. So let us define the direction and the linking “conditions” in a little graphic first:

2. Metadata Flow

Let’s now look at the metadata flow from a User’s perspective:

2.1

. 

Assigning a $Keyword Category adds the keyword into the Category Field in your Cumulus Asset Info Window (either you see them as a list or, if you select the Keywords only, you’ll see them as bubbles). This happens automatically.

2.2.

The newly assigned keywords are being written back into the Asset. You can look at the data by opening your file in i.e. Adobe Photoshop >> File >> File Info. You will find the Keywords in the XMP/IPTC field. If configured correctly, this step also happens automatically.

Here are the 2 configuration settings required to make this happen: Preferences >> Asset Handling Set >> Asset Access Enables automatic Write Back from Cumulus to the Asset.

Preferences >> Catalog Settings >> Record Fields >> Categories >> Properties >> Field Linking

2.3.

The next step needs to be done actively by a user: You will need to update your record. Select your records >> Metadata >> Update Advanced (Or right click on the selected records and select Update Record >> ..Advanced) and select the following options:

If you’re an advanced user, you can of course also set up a Trigger or Scheduler Action to update your records automatically.

Let’s look at the Field Linking Option that needs to be configured for this:

2.4.

Now your Keyword Field is properly populated by everything you assign to the $Keywords Category section. Keep in mind that pre-existing (non-Cumulus) keywords may also have made their way into this field. This is unavoidable (and also probably encouraged) because we actively set Cumulus to read out of a standard field which may have been filled by third party application or sites as well (such as stock agencies).

Now we need to limit our search options so that only keywords are used. Go to your Preferences >> User Settings > Search and Sort and switch the Quick Search field list to manual. Only add Keywords (or add other fields you want, but keep Categories out):

3. Limitations

Please keep in mind that this configuration is only working with images and also only with files that are able to be edited/changed on the metadata level. Files that do not have the ability to store any metadata in their header or files not supporting IPTC/XMP standards will not work with this trick.

Our third interview in this series is about implementing DAM in your infrastructure. Realizing a project is an important step – but not the only one. How do you make your DAM project a success?  Carsten Hoffmann, Lead Software Engineer at Canto, explains how implementing a DAM solution works.

I decided on a DAM system. Now where do I start my implementation process?

First: Congratulations, you’ve mastered one important step! To acknowledge your need for digital asset management and to choose a DAM provider is already a big step in the right direction. If you decided on a DAM system you also should have decided on a partner for your DAM project.

Carsten Hoffmann, Lead Software Engineer

So your first step is to get in touch with your consultant. He or she will outline the whole project together with you according to your individual requirements. To get started of course you need someone in your company that collects all relevant information and manages the project internally. When you want to start the implementation process you need to know what digital files are relevant, where they reside and where you will use them.

As always with project management, it is very important to be precise about your targets. Your consultant will help you to lay out your project accordingly, so no need to worry!

What components (goals, processes, users, systems) do I have to consider for a DAM implementation?

Your DAM project is determined by your strategic objectives: What do you want to achieve by implementing a DAM in your IT infrastructure? An example would be to streamline your marketing workflows for faster image and graphic production.

That means, once you know your goal, you know what processes you need to consider. Let’s keep the marketing workflow as an example: You will probably need to look at your image creation workflow. Consider how images are shared and how people are using them. This directly leads to the users, in that case the creatives who are producing the images and the marketers who need the finished materials.

If I look at these workflows I will likely consider how to integrate the Adobe tools into my DAM, so that creatives can be more effective. In general, you should consider all systems and processes that deal with media files to see how those systems and processes can benefit. Often that includes CMS, ERP, Project Management, SAP, PIM and other vital systems.

Let’s say I use a CMS to manage my website. How do I know what kind of implementation I need?

That depends on your philosophy. You may want to connect your CMS to pull media files directly from your DAM image collections. If you want to have dynamic content that changes frequently, it makes sense to implement your website with live image caching. Every implementation is different and based on individual needs.

What implementation phases can I expect and who do I need to work with?

The first step here is to consider external reasons. Do I have a deadline for my implementation? What features do I need and when? When would be a good time for file migration? The key is to prioritize your goals accordingly based on those external parameters.

If I want my CMS to be integrated in my DAM this would be something I might do in phase 1. Other DAM features which are less important could be addressed in phase 2 . The trick is to break down complexity into single steps and not to start all parts of the project at the same time.

A successful DAM project has a good structure that reflects your priorities and does not consume too many resources at the same time.

What’s the best way to communicate a DAM implementation in my company?

There are two things you should communicate: On the one hand you should talk about your reasons for the DAM implementation with everyone who is involved. Why does your company need digital asset management? Be transparent about that! On the other hand you need to address the changes that this implementation brings. Other people will want to know how their workflows are altered by this digital asset management implementation. Implementing a DAM only works when everybody works together so you need to make sure that you have everybody on board.

And of course you should get help from your implementation partner. Your DAM provider should have a lot of experience with similar projects and will be happy to assist you in communicating your vision. Especially if your project is about workflow optimization. It’s helpful to be visual. Text-based documentation is necessary but only when you show the idea of the DAM project people will be able to get the message.

Do individual trainings for all employees make sense in my case?

Training is very helpful when it comes to workflow optimization. After observing the new tool, your DAM, you can start talking about how you would like it to work, what can be better. This means altering existing workflows but not to come up with something completely different. The result is a good mix between existing workflows and your new tool that work together. Training can be very helpful keep communication open while transforming newly streamlined workflows.

Let’s talk about change management. How do I make sure that new workflows and processes are actually used?

Once the software project rolls out and you have the technical infrastructure you wanted, this does not mean that your DAM project is complete.  The change must also be reflected in your daily work. To make sure people understand the importance of the DAM implementation it is good to have someone on board that people already know and trust who can inspire coworkers to explore the opportunities of the new DAM environment.

Usually you have regular users in your DAM team that bring in a real world expertise and make sure your workflow models are as realistic as they can get.

Let’s say your DAM project serves a scientific team of geologists who are working with images for their research. In that case you definitely want somebody from the geological team on board, in addition to the technical staff, to communicate the changes to the rest of the team – simply because the geologists are the ones who are supposed to use the DAM in their everyday work.

How many internal resources do I need to block for a DAM implementation?

That is hard to say and our best answer is: Your consultant can help you to evaluate that. The more you know what you exactly want to do in your project the easier it is to estimate how many resources are needed for your efforts. Having your own understanding of digital asset management doesn’t hurt – Canto offers a lot of educational content about digital asset management that makes it easier to consider the amount of resources you need to block for your project.

Be prepared to allocate employee hours to the project. A successful DAM project requires a great deal of preparation to know exactly the problem with your current workflows, who should be involved and what systems need to be implemented. Additionally, if you plan to install your system in house you may need to invest in technical equipment such as server, as opposed to a Hosted DAM alternative .

The good thing about a successful DAM project is that all of your human and technical resources profit from the ROI and the more time you invest in preparation the more you will get out of your DAM.

Getting a DAM started takes time. How do I manage overall expectations that can be unrealistic?

With good planning and a good consultant at your side! Having an open and honest relationship with the partner you are working together with is the best solution for that. Your DAM provider will have more experience and can save you from unrealistic expectations. That also means that you must be able to take “no” for an answer sometimes. When you demand too much your consultant will be able to warn you and give you another option of how to realize your ideas in multiple phases, for instance. Look for someone you trust and carefully consider his or her advice. That way you can easily realize a successful DAM transformation.

Thank you for the interview, Carsten!

DAM is subject to constant change

My favorite takeaway – for marketing and for digital asset management was mentioned in a talk by Beth Goldstein from Baxter Healthcare:

“The most dangerous phrase: we’ve always done it this way.”

Digital transformation is happening – and still has a long way to go. The customer requirements, technologies and approaches of DAM are constantly changing. Keeping up with new trends, influences and business needs – while keeping a unique vision and company strategy is essential to stay competitive.

The DAM foundation has recognized this as well – and started to evaluate software vendors based on 10 Core Characteristics.

DAM is part of a larger, integrative process

The DAM standalone product is a thing of the past. But it doesn’t stop with system integration – the digital content strategy of an organization starts at a more abstract level. DAM plays a role when it comes to content delivery, deployment, business processes and strategy – or – in the words of DAM expert Mark Davey:

“DAM is not a tool – it’s a strategy.”

DAM is management of knowledge and information

DAM and the importance of the user experience have been stretched extensively throughout the last couple of years. But most organizations still give too little thought on what’s below the surface. DAM has always been – and still is – management of knowledge and information.

Creatives are often considered as the main user group for DAM – but it comes down to organizing and structuring information – in order to make a DAM work properly. The role of librarians in that process is still underestimated – and industry analysts consider this one of the reaons so many DAM projects still fail.

DAM needs governance – and project management

Another reason stretched by industry experts – and digital asset managers themselves – why so many DAM initiatives fail is lack of governance – and project management. As we like to say: DAM is more than just software – and the planning, monitoring and change management activities that come with it are underestimated. According to recent industry research, only 44% of all organizations complete DAM projects on time, and only 40% complete them on budget. The only way to prevent the dilemma: partner with a vendor that gives you honest advise – rather than downplaying the project management efforts.

Do you want to learn more about digital asset management and how it can help organizations to ride the wave of change coming along with digital transformation? Check out the Canto DAM Summit we’ll host just outside Frankfurt, Germany on September 21^st & 22^nd, 2015.

Mark Davey, founder and president of the DAM Foundation, explains why the organization started to evaluate DAM providers and what the challenges are to actually become certified as state-of-the-art Digital Asset Management System.

The DAM foundation decided to evaluate vendors to make sure they fulfill the 10 core characteristics of a DAM. What was the fundamental reason to start such an evaluation?

The basic idea of a standard is to force the industry to up their game. I suppose you can link it back to the initial idea of the DAM foundation which was looking at standards and best practices within digital asset management (DAM).

When we first started in 2009 we focused on metadata. But given the complexity of metadata standards, we shifted our focus and started to look at ways to encourage people within the industry and help them understand what they need to get from their “as is” state to the desired “to be” state.

Mark Davey, President and Founder of DAM Foundation

So we got together with some thought leaders and put together the core characteristics of a DAM – or better said – the characteristics you need to get from your “as is” to your “to be” state. The 10 core characteristics formulate what we believe a system must have in order to be called a digital asset management system.

The subsequent idea was a formal protectionism – meaning we wanted users to be sure they were buying a DAM, not just a file repository. I got the idea when I attended an exhibition a few years ago – and I saw a lot of companies calling themselves DAM – and clearly they were little more than file repositories.

Here we are 6 years later – and we all agreed on a basic core. And now we have started to evaluate vendors that call themselves a DAM to see whether they actually fulfill these 10 core characteristics.

Can you tell us a little more about the evaluation process? How many vendors have been evaluated so far and how many of those have passed?

We initially evaluated all vendors that were on the Real Story Group Media and Digital Asset Management report. At the moment, the DAM Foundation is running an outreach program contacting vendors, asking them to look at the characteristics and if they believe they can pass the characteristics we ask them to do a one hour demo. It is not a canned demo because we use our own digital assets – the vendor gets the assets during the demo. At the moment we have evaluated some 20 plus vendors. Within the next 3 to 6 month we hope to double that and throughout the year we hope to get to the magical number of 100 in the next 18 months to two years.

It is hard to set a standard failure rate – but currently we have around 15-20% failures – still surprisingly high for an evaluation process that is voluntary.

During the evaluation, which characteristics where the most critical ones?

The most consistent failure rate is based on version control. A lot of vendors say they do version control, but they actually fudge the way they do it and it is not a true version control, which starts at the single version of the truth, especially with the requirement of UID’s (a unique identifier).

The second highest failure rate is on embeddable metadata – or more precisely the ability to read and ingest metadata out of the box without any configuration. Then we also test vendors on adding metadata, embedding the metadata and sending the asset back to us – so we see if the metadata has actually been embedded.

Another critical characteristic is asset analysis – for example how many people have looked at an asset, or shared an asset, or the analysis of the interaction with assets – internally and externally. Here we have seen large differences. A couple of vendors passed, but the analysis or the way they allow the analysis to happen is not as sophisticated as the options other vendors offer. The more we move the needle towards visualization of data, the better DAM managers will be able to improve the user experiences, through metadata and workflow tools.

What were some of the more qualitative insights that you took from evaluating all the systems? Was there something that surprised you?

What surprised me the most is that there are vendors we all know and have been professing to be DAM actually failed the evaluations.
They have been classified as a DAM considering what was needed some years ago. But the industry has moved on – customer requests have moved on – digital workflows have moved on, the internet has moved on and therefore the industry needs to move on with it. DAM is the foundational point for the journey of digital assets from creation to archive.

What can be done / what are you planning to do to further establish standards in the DAM industry?

The 10 Core is only our initial approach. We are talking about a 12 Core and a 15 Core – which will take into account more of these changes that are taking place. I am not able to talk about that at the moment – but I think for this year we will try to get as many vendors in the pass or fail so we can categorize them – and then we will add a few more cores and test them against those cores in the future.

Where do you see the danger of having so many systems that call themselves a DAM, but do not fulfill those basic requirements?

The DAM Foundation is an industry body focused on free education and oversight. So if you don’t have 10 Core – you can’t really call yourself a DAM. You might be a sophisticated file repository – but you will not help your clients achieve what they are trying to achieve. If you still call yourself a DAM – and people don’t do the necessary research – they will have a system that will fail them – and end up thinking that DAM cannot help them solve their problems. In our industry there is still way too much failure. As a side note, this is not all down to DAM vendors. Successful DAM is as much about people and processes as it is about good clear strategic approaches to digital assets.

You have long expertise as a DAM consultant – why do so many DAM projects fail – and what do you do as a consultant to help companies prevent that failure?

It is an industry-wide problem and I understand it at many levels. As a consultant, my first point is to help the client, their stakeholders, the sponsor and anyone involved in the initiative to understand that DAM is not about a technology. It is about a strategy. And that strategy involves people, process and technology. And lately I have added the analysis as a fourth dimension.

So the 10 Core are relevant to that in terms of the analytics, how you are able to visualize the data in a way that helps you in your business intelligence, in your marketing campaigns, in your product strategy.

It always goes back to the issue that companies have to understand that DAM is much more than technology – and they actually have to invest time and resources. I am finding that often only on the 2nd or 3rd failure do companies invest the time to plan their project out correctly. Then they have success with it – because they understand all the complexities that come with it and they are willing to invest the time to make it successful.

In Germany for instance, the term DAM still is not well established – so we always run into the issue of explaining what digital asset management can do for an organization. How do you explain digital asset management to your kids?

For my kids, there is no DVD/CD drive – when they want their music they just go to the service that has their music – they don’t look at it as an asset – even though it obviously has value – they have it everywhere – on their mobile, on their laptops.

They understand that this is coming somewhere from the internet – but that is where it ends.
DAM is not just about delivery, it is about the organization of the information that gets delivered. My kids use services that have this metadata already embedded. So if kids ask me what I do, I talk to them in terms of Youtube and i-Tunes – rather than talking about assets and metadata.

Thank you very much for the interview!

So here’s a little walkthrough of what’s new in Cumulus 10.0.1

Define Your Own Asset Relations

For ages (starting in 2006 with version 7) Cumulus has been able to manage related assets by displaying these relations and allowing the user to determine relationships between assets. The user could only pick from predetermined relation types – variants and alternates. However, each organization has its own needs and our customers asked for additional options. That’s why we decided to introduce custom relation types.

Now you can add your own relation types. See below how it works. A new custom relation type is created via the Catalog Settings. As soon as a custom relation type has been added to a catalog it is available for use. Within the Cumulus Web Client, it can even display a custom icon to represent the relation.

Easily track asset relationships you defined that meet your organization’s needs.

Creation of a custom relation type.

Portals Enhancements

We increased the web performance of Cumulus Portals (minified CSS/JS files, less files to load as files are combined into a few ones) and localized Portals to German.

And the sorting options were enhanced. Via the Portals tab of the CIP Configurator, fields can be configured to simplify the user experience.

See how field sorting works in Cumulus Portals:

Configured fields can be used for sorting within Cumulus Portals.

Resetting Workflows with Web Client

Workflows keep your project on track. But sometimes you may need to reset or remove workflow steps that happened in error.  Now with Cumulus 10.0.1, workflows can be removed from a record – even if the workflow had been started – by a user who has Workflow Administrator permissions. Such a user can cancel a workflow and remove the record from the workflow so that the workflow can e.g. be restarted. Workflow Administrator permissions for users or roles are set via the User Manager.

Message that a started workflow will be removed from a record.

Microsoft Support

Less than a month ago Microsoft released Windows 10 and Edge. And already now Cumulus Web Client and Portals support the new Microsoft Edge browser and Cumulus Admin Clients run on Windows 10.

Cumulus Web Client on Microsoft Edge (released on July 29, 2015)

What is this competition about?

The winner of the competition will receive a 100% free entry ticket for the Henry Stewart Chicago conference on the 24^th of September 2015. The winner will be chosen on the 10th of September 2015. Everyone who owns a Facebook and/or Twitter account can enter the competition.

How can I win?

In order to join the Henry Stewart Chicago conference with us, you need to do the following:

• Like us on Facebook & Follow us on Twitter
• Tell us in a Tweet why you want to join the Henry Stewart using the @Canto handle and #CantoisDAM
• If you don’t have Twitter, respond to our Henry Stewart Facebook Post why you want to join Henry Stewart in Chicago.

We are looking forward to reading your tweets.

About Henry Stewart in Chicago

 Henry Stewart is the conference where the world’s leading Digital Asset Management industry gathers and shares and discusses best practices. Read more here.

In this blog post I will discuss how Digital Asset Management (DAM) can DAM the Digital Transformation pushing your organization to not only make sufficient investment into technology, but also allowing your organization to enable its employees while enhancing customer experience at the same time.

Enhance the customer experience

The way customers and consumers interact with brands has changed in the recent years like never before. Whether it’s virtually or in person, nowadays we use multiple communication channels to engage with brands.

All the content – visual or text – you deliver at these touch points creates the customer experience, which should be consistent across all applied channels. DAM keeps your images, text files and all your brand assets in one place – it’s your single point of truth.

It solves the challenge of keeping your brand communication consistent by providing the right people with the right and up-to-date digital content. Stay true to your brand with the support of a DAM.

Know your customer

Enhancing customer experience needs analysis. How is your customer engaging with your content? In what type of content do you need to invest more time and money? DAM has it all in one place – your assets, your analytics. It provides you with the data to make strategic decisions. DAM will help you understand which of your assets are used and how.

Improve operational processes

Working with an increasing amount of digital assets produced daily, it gets difficult to handle big bulks of digital content.

The challenge is to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs and enable your employees to do what they do best.
A DAM is a technology that improves the efficiency of your entire team –internally, externally, globally – you name it. With your assets all in once place, initiating digital workflows becomes a whole lot easier. Repurposing, reusing und sharing becomes an easy process and the best part is, you can do it from anywhere, from any device without ever leaving your branded environment.

Think out of the box

Having a technology in place that works is good, but what makes it really excellent is if it connects with other technologies. Imagine you don’t ever have to leave your environment to search for files, to download them, to upload them. DAM thinks out of the box and connects with your IT infrastructure to deliver your digital assets where you need them to be –your CMS, PIM, in Adobe creative tools or any other systems and software. A DAM wouldn’t be a DAM without seamless integration allowing your team and your customers to have a great experience delivering and consuming your valuable assets.

Like the pirates who were unrelenting in accumulating riches to fill their treasure boxes, Canto has continuously added a wealth of capabilities to its award-winning

Jack McGannon, CEO at Canto

Cumulus product. Cumulus has always been known to be the leading Digital Asset Management technology in terms of richness of features and the ability to implement these features through configuration without the need for coding. Cumulus X represents a continuation of Canto’s unyielding commitment to providing the breadth and depth of rich capabilities that enterprises require to successfully tackle complex use cases that often have unique and multi-faceted requirements.

At Canto, we recognize that it is critical to expose our digital asset management riches through relevant interfaces. With Cumulus X, we are delivering a new mobile technology to address the way that many users prefer to work today. We are also delivering Cumulus Portals, another mobile-friendly technology that allows for rich branding possibilities.

Of particular note in the Cumulus X release is the even richer API set that we have built. At Canto, we recognize that enterprise deployments of digital asset management projects are often part of broader initiatives. As such, the need to integrate is paramount and we have added some additional treasures to Cumulus to enable ease of integration.

And, of course, we have added a number of other meaningful and cool new treasures to add to our impressive chest of features. Read more here.

If you are looking for a treasure chest of digital asset management, “X” marks the spot.

In this blogpost, we give you an overview of all the new features and functionalities we have included since our release of Cumulus 9.2 last December.

1. Mobile Readiness with Cumulus Portals and the new Cumulus Mobile App
2. API & Technology Enhancements
3. Web Client, Native Client and Server Enhancements

1. Mobile Readiness

With Cumulus X Canto introduces two new Cumulus components that support mobile devices: Cumulus Portals and Cumulus Mobile App.

Cumulus Mobile App

The new Cumulus iOS Mobile App offers smart, collaborative access to your digital content from your iPhone and iPad. The App gives you read & write access. You can comment on your assets, set markups, search, download, crop and share. And what’s best – the interface can be branded based on your individual standards – to make sure your assets look good – wherever they are.

Cumulus Mobile App on iPhone

Cumulus Portals

Portals is Canto’s new web solution that provides read only access to Cumulus. It can be used on desktop computers and laptops as well as on all smartphones and tablets thanks to it’s responsive web design. With this strategy we ensure that those who consume your assets will always have the best user experience – across all possible screen sizes and on any device.

Cumulus Portals is ideal to publish and market your digital assets online. Users with a standard Web browser can comfortably search for cataloged assets, drop them into a collection basket and download them – converted to different formats as needed. Appropriate access rights are always managed by privacy settings and permission controls. Configuring and customizing Cumulus Portals is easy and does not require deep programming knowledge.

Cumulus Portals has endless possibilities. Consider sharing  your images and datasheets with journalists through a press portal. Think of customer portals, retailer portals, partner portals and self-service sales portals. You are free to create several branded portals from your Cumulus installation – perfect for agencies and multi-brand conglomerates.

Let’s take a look at the main features available in the new Cumulus Portals

• Fast and Secure Self-Serve File Access– Cumulus Portals offers fast file access and secure file distribution to anyone on the Web. Web users have access to public catalogs (or private catalogs with login) where they can search, preview, and download files as they choose. For public catalogs, login-free access offers quick browsing and basic downloads. Cumulus account holders can optionally login to see and download more than you provide to guests.
• Searching and Filtering– Users can quickly find what they are looking for by employing a quick search field or filter. Categories and preconfigured filters can be activated to narrow down the number of files.
• Metadata Information – The metadata of a file can be viewed in a short or detailed format. Clicking the thumbnail of a file displays the short version. To get more details an icon or menu entry is provided.
• Visual Previews– Large visual previews are provided for each file – even multipage previews are available.
• Collections– Cumulus server-side stored catalog collections are available to publish asset selections without any hassles for you or your website visitors. Cumulus account holders can create their own collection with Portals.
• Landing Pages– Specific landing pages for “upload collections” or “download collections” that only provide the option to upload or download files. Links to such collections are sent by Cumulus users to external recipients via email, using the Web or Desktop Client. Cumulus users can set the landing pages to require a password or set an expiration date for added security.
• Collection Basket– Simply add files to your temporary collection basket to make ‘shopping’ for images, PDFs, videos and other digital assets a snap. The collection basket is cleared once a session ends.
• Downloading– Download individual files or collect multiple files into the collection basket for group downloading. Prior to download, files can be converted as required. The conversion options are determined based on Cumulus actions that have been set up – which can be configured by your Admin or enlist Canto Professional Services to get your settings just right.
• Integrated Configuration– Cumulus Portals is easily configured via the CIP configuration module of the Cumulus Web Server Console.
• Brandable Publishing Portals– Cumulus Portals offers each customer the possibility to create various brandable portals. You can easily and quickly adapt Portals to various corporate identities via CSS and overwriting style elements with HTML. On the Cumulus Portals welcome page, different products and topics can be visualized and the user may choose from multiple catalogs to begin their experience.
• SEO Support–For faster searching and better finding of digital assets, Cumulus Portals provides automated SEO support.
• Built-in Security– Cumulus Portals is protected against cross-site scripting and request forgery attacks and user input is escaped.

Cumulus Portals auf einem iPad (horizontale Ansicht)

Now let’s take a look at the technology supporting this release – because to build Cumulus Portals and the new Mobile App, we enhanced our API.

2. API and Technology

The Canto Integration Platform (CIP) is our API that enables the development of integrations between Cumulus and other systems – and with Cumulus X has been significantly expanded. For the most important settings a CIP configuration module is now provided with the Web Server Console. This module includes the configuration of Cumulus Portals and the Cumulus Mobile App.

CIP configuration module of the Cumulus Web Server Console

To make your work with our API easier, we have also improved our documentation. You can find more detailed descriptions in the enhanced technical CIP documentation which is now included with the CIP Client SDK.

The main enhancements are:

• Collections– CIP now supports Cumulus server-side collections. Private, shared, upload and download collections are supported and upload or download collections can be opened without a user login, if necessary.
• Catalogs– With Cumulus X CIP provides support for multiple catalogs.
• Filtering– Filters can be easily added and removed. Various filter types have been added: dynamic field-based filters, query-based filters, filters allowing field value range input, collection-based filters. And pre-configured filter sets can be employed.
  

  Filter settings with CIP configuration module of the Cumulus Web Server Console

• Downloading– CIP can now retrieve a direct download URL (e.g. for assets being stored in Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure). Asynchronous download processing is supported as well as downloading of multiple assets.
• Security– The security was massively enhanced. System information is hidden and the use of configured values can be enforced.
• Previews/Thumbnails– Multipage previews are supported and you can retrieve the preview for a specific page. Video playback support was improved. Category thumbnails are dynamically generated.
• User Management– Retrieving information about the current user is now possible. Searching for users by matching a partial name and a session can allow you to switch to another user.

3. Web Client, Native Client and Server Enhancements

Since our last major release of Cumulus 9.2 in December 2014 we have released 3 minor versions, which have added new features to the Web Client as well as to the Admin Client. If you didn’t have a chance to check out the details yet – you can find them here.

• 9.2.1 – Crop images more easily with Cumulus
• 9.2.2 – Cumulus Web Client more powerful and easier to use than ever
• 9.2.3 – Look deeper into your images and more

With Cumulus X, of course we have further enhanced the Cumulus Web Client and our Admin Client as well as the Cumulus Server: the Workflow UI was enhanced and the Web Client got more customization options. More formats are supported, for detailed lists see complete list (Enhanced Metada Support PDF file).

Visit our Cumulus X product page and stay tuned for even more Cumulus X awesomeness!

Responsive Web Design (RWD) Responsive web design can deliver web pages in variable sizes. The layout of the page, and the representation of the content, change depending on the size and capabilities of the device you are using. For example, on a phone, you would see content shown in a single column view; a tablet might show the same content in two columns. Page elements reshuffle as the window size grows or shrinks.
Desktop view	Tablet view	Smartphone view

1. Concept

Imagine you manage project names in your “$Categories” and simple tags and keywords in your $Keywords and when your users search for “Apple” they only want to find apples and not documents from the construction projects on Appletree Road.

In this tutorial we will show you how you can set this up with Cumulus. We will use the Field Linking functionality to accomplish that.
We need to look at three locations your Keywords can reside:

• In your Category Tree in the $Keywords Section in Cumulus
• In your Keywords (String) Record field in Cumulus
• Already existing Keywords from XMP or IPTC metadata.

The most important concept to understand is that Field Linking needs to be set up very specifically to not “confuse” Cumulus which data should go where. So let us define the direction and the linking “conditions” in a little graphic first:

2. Metadata Flow

Let’s now look at the metadata flow from a User’s perspective:

2.1

. 

Assigning a $Keyword Category adds the keyword into the Category Field in your Cumulus Asset Info Window (either you see them as a list or, if you select the Keywords only, you’ll see them as bubbles). This happens automatically.

2.2.

The newly assigned keywords are being written back into the Asset. You can look at the data by opening your file in i.e. Adobe Photoshop >> File >> File Info. You will find the Keywords in the XMP/IPTC field. If configured correctly, this step also happens automatically.

Here are the 2 configuration settings required to make this happen: Preferences >> Asset Handling Set >> Asset Access Enables automatic Write Back from Cumulus to the Asset.

Preferences >> Catalog Settings >> Record Fields >> Categories >> Properties >> Field Linking

2.3.

The next step needs to be done actively by a user: You will need to update your record. Select your records >> Metadata >> Update Advanced (Or right click on the selected records and select Update Record >> ..Advanced) and select the following options:

If you’re an advanced user, you can of course also set up a Trigger or Scheduler Action to update your records automatically.

Let’s look at the Field Linking Option that needs to be configured for this:

2.4.

Now your Keyword Field is properly populated by everything you assign to the $Keywords Category section. Keep in mind that pre-existing (non-Cumulus) keywords may also have made their way into this field. This is unavoidable (and also probably encouraged) because we actively set Cumulus to read out of a standard field which may have been filled by third party application or sites as well (such as stock agencies).

Now we need to limit our search options so that only keywords are used. Go to your Preferences >> User Settings > Search and Sort and switch the Quick Search field list to manual. Only add Keywords (or add other fields you want, but keep Categories out):

3. Limitations

Please keep in mind that this configuration is only working with images and also only with files that are able to be edited/changed on the metadata level. Files that do not have the ability to store any metadata in their header or files not supporting IPTC/XMP standards will not work with this trick.

Our third interview in this series is about implementing DAM in your infrastructure. Realizing a project is an important step – but not the only one. How do you make your DAM project a success?  Carsten Hoffmann, Lead Software Engineer at Canto, explains how implementing a DAM solution works.

I decided on a DAM system. Now where do I start my implementation process?

First: Congratulations, you’ve mastered one important step! To acknowledge your need for digital asset management and to choose a DAM provider is already a big step in the right direction. If you decided on a DAM system you also should have decided on a partner for your DAM project.

Carsten Hoffmann, Lead Software Engineer

So your first step is to get in touch with your consultant. He or she will outline the whole project together with you according to your individual requirements. To get started of course you need someone in your company that collects all relevant information and manages the project internally. When you want to start the implementation process you need to know what digital files are relevant, where they reside and where you will use them.

As always with project management, it is very important to be precise about your targets. Your consultant will help you to lay out your project accordingly, so no need to worry!

What components (goals, processes, users, systems) do I have to consider for a DAM implementation?

Your DAM project is determined by your strategic objectives: What do you want to achieve by implementing a DAM in your IT infrastructure? An example would be to streamline your marketing workflows for faster image and graphic production.

That means, once you know your goal, you know what processes you need to consider. Let’s keep the marketing workflow as an example: You will probably need to look at your image creation workflow. Consider how images are shared and how people are using them. This directly leads to the users, in that case the creatives who are producing the images and the marketers who need the finished materials.

If I look at these workflows I will likely consider how to integrate the Adobe tools into my DAM, so that creatives can be more effective. In general, you should consider all systems and processes that deal with media files to see how those systems and processes can benefit. Often that includes CMS, ERP, Project Management, SAP, PIM and other vital systems.

Let’s say I use a CMS to manage my website. How do I know what kind of implementation I need?

That depends on your philosophy. You may want to connect your CMS to pull media files directly from your DAM image collections. If you want to have dynamic content that changes frequently, it makes sense to implement your website with live image caching. Every implementation is different and based on individual needs.

What implementation phases can I expect and who do I need to work with?

The first step here is to consider external reasons. Do I have a deadline for my implementation? What features do I need and when? When would be a good time for file migration? The key is to prioritize your goals accordingly based on those external parameters.

If I want my CMS to be integrated in my DAM this would be something I might do in phase 1. Other DAM features which are less important could be addressed in phase 2 . The trick is to break down complexity into single steps and not to start all parts of the project at the same time.

A successful DAM project has a good structure that reflects your priorities and does not consume too many resources at the same time.

What’s the best way to communicate a DAM implementation in my company?

There are two things you should communicate: On the one hand you should talk about your reasons for the DAM implementation with everyone who is involved. Why does your company need digital asset management? Be transparent about that! On the other hand you need to address the changes that this implementation brings. Other people will want to know how their workflows are altered by this digital asset management implementation. Implementing a DAM only works when everybody works together so you need to make sure that you have everybody on board.

And of course you should get help from your implementation partner. Your DAM provider should have a lot of experience with similar projects and will be happy to assist you in communicating your vision. Especially if your project is about workflow optimization. It’s helpful to be visual. Text-based documentation is necessary but only when you show the idea of the DAM project people will be able to get the message.

Do individual trainings for all employees make sense in my case?

Training is very helpful when it comes to workflow optimization. After observing the new tool, your DAM, you can start talking about how you would like it to work, what can be better. This means altering existing workflows but not to come up with something completely different. The result is a good mix between existing workflows and your new tool that work together. Training can be very helpful keep communication open while transforming newly streamlined workflows.

Let’s talk about change management. How do I make sure that new workflows and processes are actually used?

Once the software project rolls out and you have the technical infrastructure you wanted, this does not mean that your DAM project is complete.  The change must also be reflected in your daily work. To make sure people understand the importance of the DAM implementation it is good to have someone on board that people already know and trust who can inspire coworkers to explore the opportunities of the new DAM environment.

Usually you have regular users in your DAM team that bring in a real world expertise and make sure your workflow models are as realistic as they can get.

Let’s say your DAM project serves a scientific team of geologists who are working with images for their research. In that case you definitely want somebody from the geological team on board, in addition to the technical staff, to communicate the changes to the rest of the team – simply because the geologists are the ones who are supposed to use the DAM in their everyday work.

How many internal resources do I need to block for a DAM implementation?

That is hard to say and our best answer is: Your consultant can help you to evaluate that. The more you know what you exactly want to do in your project the easier it is to estimate how many resources are needed for your efforts. Having your own understanding of digital asset management doesn’t hurt – Canto offers a lot of educational content about digital asset management that makes it easier to consider the amount of resources you need to block for your project.

Be prepared to allocate employee hours to the project. A successful DAM project requires a great deal of preparation to know exactly the problem with your current workflows, who should be involved and what systems need to be implemented. Additionally, if you plan to install your system in house you may need to invest in technical equipment such as server, as opposed to a Hosted DAM alternative .

The good thing about a successful DAM project is that all of your human and technical resources profit from the ROI and the more time you invest in preparation the more you will get out of your DAM.

Getting a DAM started takes time. How do I manage overall expectations that can be unrealistic?

With good planning and a good consultant at your side! Having an open and honest relationship with the partner you are working together with is the best solution for that. Your DAM provider will have more experience and can save you from unrealistic expectations. That also means that you must be able to take “no” for an answer sometimes. When you demand too much your consultant will be able to warn you and give you another option of how to realize your ideas in multiple phases, for instance. Look for someone you trust and carefully consider his or her advice. That way you can easily realize a successful DAM transformation.

Thank you for the interview, Carsten!

DAM is subject to constant change

My favorite takeaway – for marketing and for digital asset management was mentioned in a talk by Beth Goldstein from Baxter Healthcare:

“The most dangerous phrase: we’ve always done it this way.”

Digital transformation is happening – and still has a long way to go. The customer requirements, technologies and approaches of DAM are constantly changing. Keeping up with new trends, influences and business needs – while keeping a unique vision and company strategy is essential to stay competitive.

The DAM foundation has recognized this as well – and started to evaluate software vendors based on 10 Core Characteristics.

DAM is part of a larger, integrative process

The DAM standalone product is a thing of the past. But it doesn’t stop with system integration – the digital content strategy of an organization starts at a more abstract level. DAM plays a role when it comes to content delivery, deployment, business processes and strategy – or – in the words of DAM expert Mark Davey:

“DAM is not a tool – it’s a strategy.”

DAM is management of knowledge and information

DAM and the importance of the user experience have been stretched extensively throughout the last couple of years. But most organizations still give too little thought on what’s below the surface. DAM has always been – and still is – management of knowledge and information.

Creatives are often considered as the main user group for DAM – but it comes down to organizing and structuring information – in order to make a DAM work properly. The role of librarians in that process is still underestimated – and industry analysts consider this one of the reaons so many DAM projects still fail.

DAM needs governance – and project management

Another reason stretched by industry experts – and digital asset managers themselves – why so many DAM initiatives fail is lack of governance – and project management. As we like to say: DAM is more than just software – and the planning, monitoring and change management activities that come with it are underestimated. According to recent industry research, only 44% of all organizations complete DAM projects on time, and only 40% complete them on budget. The only way to prevent the dilemma: partner with a vendor that gives you honest advise – rather than downplaying the project management efforts.

Do you want to learn more about digital asset management and how it can help organizations to ride the wave of change coming along with digital transformation? Check out the Canto DAM Summit we’ll host just outside Frankfurt, Germany on September 21^st & 22^nd, 2015.

Mark Davey, founder and president of the DAM Foundation, explains why the organization started to evaluate DAM providers and what the challenges are to actually become certified as state-of-the-art Digital Asset Management System.

The DAM foundation decided to evaluate vendors to make sure they fulfill the 10 core characteristics of a DAM. What was the fundamental reason to start such an evaluation?

The basic idea of a standard is to force the industry to up their game. I suppose you can link it back to the initial idea of the DAM foundation which was looking at standards and best practices within digital asset management (DAM).

When we first started in 2009 we focused on metadata. But given the complexity of metadata standards, we shifted our focus and started to look at ways to encourage people within the industry and help them understand what they need to get from their “as is” state to the desired “to be” state.

Mark Davey, President and Founder of DAM Foundation

So we got together with some thought leaders and put together the core characteristics of a DAM – or better said – the characteristics you need to get from your “as is” to your “to be” state. The 10 core characteristics formulate what we believe a system must have in order to be called a digital asset management system.

The subsequent idea was a formal protectionism – meaning we wanted users to be sure they were buying a DAM, not just a file repository. I got the idea when I attended an exhibition a few years ago – and I saw a lot of companies calling themselves DAM – and clearly they were little more than file repositories.

Here we are 6 years later – and we all agreed on a basic core. And now we have started to evaluate vendors that call themselves a DAM to see whether they actually fulfill these 10 core characteristics.

Can you tell us a little more about the evaluation process? How many vendors have been evaluated so far and how many of those have passed?

We initially evaluated all vendors that were on the Real Story Group Media and Digital Asset Management report. At the moment, the DAM Foundation is running an outreach program contacting vendors, asking them to look at the characteristics and if they believe they can pass the characteristics we ask them to do a one hour demo. It is not a canned demo because we use our own digital assets – the vendor gets the assets during the demo. At the moment we have evaluated some 20 plus vendors. Within the next 3 to 6 month we hope to double that and throughout the year we hope to get to the magical number of 100 in the next 18 months to two years.

It is hard to set a standard failure rate – but currently we have around 15-20% failures – still surprisingly high for an evaluation process that is voluntary.

During the evaluation, which characteristics where the most critical ones?

The most consistent failure rate is based on version control. A lot of vendors say they do version control, but they actually fudge the way they do it and it is not a true version control, which starts at the single version of the truth, especially with the requirement of UID’s (a unique identifier).

The second highest failure rate is on embeddable metadata – or more precisely the ability to read and ingest metadata out of the box without any configuration. Then we also test vendors on adding metadata, embedding the metadata and sending the asset back to us – so we see if the metadata has actually been embedded.

Another critical characteristic is asset analysis – for example how many people have looked at an asset, or shared an asset, or the analysis of the interaction with assets – internally and externally. Here we have seen large differences. A couple of vendors passed, but the analysis or the way they allow the analysis to happen is not as sophisticated as the options other vendors offer. The more we move the needle towards visualization of data, the better DAM managers will be able to improve the user experiences, through metadata and workflow tools.

What were some of the more qualitative insights that you took from evaluating all the systems? Was there something that surprised you?

What surprised me the most is that there are vendors we all know and have been professing to be DAM actually failed the evaluations.
They have been classified as a DAM considering what was needed some years ago. But the industry has moved on – customer requests have moved on – digital workflows have moved on, the internet has moved on and therefore the industry needs to move on with it. DAM is the foundational point for the journey of digital assets from creation to archive.

What can be done / what are you planning to do to further establish standards in the DAM industry?

The 10 Core is only our initial approach. We are talking about a 12 Core and a 15 Core – which will take into account more of these changes that are taking place. I am not able to talk about that at the moment – but I think for this year we will try to get as many vendors in the pass or fail so we can categorize them – and then we will add a few more cores and test them against those cores in the future.

Where do you see the danger of having so many systems that call themselves a DAM, but do not fulfill those basic requirements?

The DAM Foundation is an industry body focused on free education and oversight. So if you don’t have 10 Core – you can’t really call yourself a DAM. You might be a sophisticated file repository – but you will not help your clients achieve what they are trying to achieve. If you still call yourself a DAM – and people don’t do the necessary research – they will have a system that will fail them – and end up thinking that DAM cannot help them solve their problems. In our industry there is still way too much failure. As a side note, this is not all down to DAM vendors. Successful DAM is as much about people and processes as it is about good clear strategic approaches to digital assets.

You have long expertise as a DAM consultant – why do so many DAM projects fail – and what do you do as a consultant to help companies prevent that failure?

It is an industry-wide problem and I understand it at many levels. As a consultant, my first point is to help the client, their stakeholders, the sponsor and anyone involved in the initiative to understand that DAM is not about a technology. It is about a strategy. And that strategy involves people, process and technology. And lately I have added the analysis as a fourth dimension.

So the 10 Core are relevant to that in terms of the analytics, how you are able to visualize the data in a way that helps you in your business intelligence, in your marketing campaigns, in your product strategy.

It always goes back to the issue that companies have to understand that DAM is much more than technology – and they actually have to invest time and resources. I am finding that often only on the 2nd or 3rd failure do companies invest the time to plan their project out correctly. Then they have success with it – because they understand all the complexities that come with it and they are willing to invest the time to make it successful.

In Germany for instance, the term DAM still is not well established – so we always run into the issue of explaining what digital asset management can do for an organization. How do you explain digital asset management to your kids?

For my kids, there is no DVD/CD drive – when they want their music they just go to the service that has their music – they don’t look at it as an asset – even though it obviously has value – they have it everywhere – on their mobile, on their laptops.

They understand that this is coming somewhere from the internet – but that is where it ends.
DAM is not just about delivery, it is about the organization of the information that gets delivered. My kids use services that have this metadata already embedded. So if kids ask me what I do, I talk to them in terms of Youtube and i-Tunes – rather than talking about assets and metadata.

Thank you very much for the interview!