Ever wondered with where to start in searching for a DAM system suited for your needs only? It can be a daunting task to review all tools as there are many DAM solutions out there.

DAM may serve many roles, but what about my needs?
 

In today's fast-paced business environment, Digital Asset Management (DAM) serves many roles, from traditional marketing use cases to being positioned at the center of a complex enterprise-wide digital supply chain. 

Every organisation and department has very different requirements on how to implement a helpful DAM-solution to stakeholders. One single DAM will not serve everyone's needs perfectly, and very few Enterprise DAMs can easily be customised to serve all stakeholders needs at the same time.

There is a plethora of DAM-solutions on the market, and they all have several different advantages, approaches and smart features. Many of them have drawbacks as well, and for the customer it is very hard to see what is important in their own workflows offered by the DAM-vendors.

To add the question of costs, DAMs have the disadvantage of not bringing down costs itself just by being implemented, but only through the actual use and ROI of a working DAM-service in the company. The service price for an implemented DAM-solution vary from say one hundred to thousands of euros per month, so your total budget plays a big role in what to implement.

Guidance through the selection process
 

It can be a daunting task to review all tools on the market thoroughly. You are probably unsure what features and specifics you really need. There are many DAM solutions out there, but no two systems are the same. Sometimes a fast choice is taken by someone in the company who prefers a certain vendor or a convincing sales rep, and the result of implementing a DAM system can turn out wrong.

DAM systems sounds complicated, but it's mostly because they get implemented without the proper pre selection of vendors and without an optimised configuration based on indepth specifications done separately for specific departments needs and workflows.

While the concept of digital asset management itself can be distilled down into easy-to-grasp concepts, it can evolve quite quickly into something rather complex. Maybe complex is what you need, or perhaps you’re looking for something simple, or maybe what you need is something in between. Regardless of what you’re looking for, we as a vendor independent supplier can walk you through the tools and show you how it will help with your requirements.

This is why we use our 25 years of experience in the DAM-business to evaluate what is important in your specific case. We start first with determining what your needs are, who will be using the DAM-system and to what purpose, what types of content needs management and then look at different vendors, if they can deliver on those needs. Your requirements will help us quickly narrow down the search.

The Communication Pro difference
 

We offer expertise in Digital Asset Management (DAM) and different derived databased solutions from DAM. We’re not just your standard out-of-the-box DAM solution, we’re your partner when it comes to Digital Asset Management.

Your business challenges are our business challenges. We’re in the trench with you every single step of the way. After all, an industrial company with international locations has completely different demands on DAM than a museum, government, municipal in the public sector or a brand or regional service provider.

We will do the selection for you vendor independently and choose the best suitable platform to support your priority requirements. We will help you focus on your bottlenecks, solve them and help you identify opportunities where DAM can add real value to your business. We offer assistance with moving and migrating from on-premise DAM to managed hosted cloud or hybrid cloud solutions.

Some systems have too many features, structures and requirements. Communication Pro selections makes it easy to build and customize you perfect DAM, and it will get easy to use. Digital Asset Management done right by using a intuitive full-featured and affordable solution as base.

We make your installation your own with our selction of the most suitable vendor and countless options for customisation, giving you the powerful features of your DAM presented with your own visual brand identity.

We evaluate the selection from Simple to Complex Enterprise DAMs
 

Maybe you need just a simple image repository for now and later, when the content is matured, to serve cross departmental use of content internally and externally. You may later be expanding both your DAM capabilities and your user base globally. You should grow your DAM as your needs grow, not beforehand.

Communication Pro selections gives small and medium sized companies the same tools large global brand, publishers and media companies have paid huge sums for. We can help you be more effective and competitive in today's fast moving market.

No matter the size of your DAM (Digital Asset Management) service, it has incredible power in a simple interface configured to your needs. We select for you a simple and smooth digital asset management tool so that it's intuitive for users and has all needed features in your specific case and it will take days, not months, to implement.

After this selection you can sign up and get running in a preconfigured SaaS-DAM which is specified together with you for the perfect solution for your business cases and hence save you precious time. Furthermore, implementing DAM this way isn’t as difficult as you might think!

The DAM system's ease of use doesn't only apply to the end-user experience, it applies for admins too. Create a simple content admin tool editors, and even creators, actually want to use.

As new features are developed they may become part of the solution for you to use in the future. By this you can position yourself to meet todays and future needs and build smarter solutions for today's content challenges in your chosen order and timeframe.

You can easily manage all kinds of files (called assets) from different sources – like videos, PDF-files, photos, InDesign files and office documents for quick reuse, editing, approval or distribution – in one central system. DAMs are used in various ways: Brand Management, Marketing Asset Management, Publishing, Enterprise Asset Management and Video & Audio Management to name just few general applications.

We focus on your priorities:
Maybe you just need to serve videos to your customers or only manage GDPR-rights of your images, whether the person in the picture agree to use this picture for future purposes? Maybe your personnel needs access to only approved images for Powerpoint presentations directly from their Powerpoint application. Maybe you need just a public brand portal to share content with branded guidelines or just fast template creation online?

This list of priority needs can get very long or can be as short as you wish it to be to start implementing your DAM.

Get up and running quickly focusing on core workflows and metadata
 

You can work with our professional consultants and have your digital asset management system up and running even within a week, if needed. We understand that if the solution is difficult to use, or takes a long time to get up and running, the chances of employees bypassing the system and it becoming shelfware are very high.

This is why we focus on the specification process together with the stakeholders and evaluate access rights and needed structured metadata around your needs, also enabling the use of advanced tagging and categorisations in the workflows if desired.

Metadata is the backbone of findability for your assets within a DAM. You can use advanced filtering that is specifically designed to fit your businesses pictures and videos.   

But we need to accept the fact that it takes time and effort to properly organize your assets before a DAM becomes a respository of findable assets for your company.

Maybe it might in some cases be worth to enable AI for data-tagging assets using both out-of-the-box and custom AI models.

We will simplify your use and distribution of content
 

What we do with DAM is to make it easy for groups to capture, organize and share all the information that matters. Clearly, an easy to navigate visual interface in your DAM-solution combined with a powerful search engine to easily get assets to those who need them the most, is vital.

Who has access to your valuable content is imperative while building your DAM-workflows. Using a DAM-system you’re able to grant and restrict access for specific users, giving you control over your digital assets.

In most cases, you can restrict users from viewing, downloading, editing or even allow you block visibility entirely. Follow up by adding permissions and create specific user-profiles and roles, so the assets for a specific group will only be shown to that group.

Self-Service UI:s support your business
 

Self-Service access boosts content distribution, making the process less time-consuming, which will have a positive impact on your business. Customers use DAM portals to provide easy self-service access to imagery for retailers and distributors worldwide, virtually eliminating image requests. 

When users successfully adapt to the culture of ‘want it now’, you leave the customer feeling as if you value their time and loyalty. By granting or restricting access to specific assets, you may prevent an incorrect use that could lead to harm to your brand.

Fast, precise searching using any web browser (mobile friendly) allows users express access to everything from virtually anywhere. Scroll through hundreds or thousands of items with no waiting. Regardless of the size of your collection, you will quickly find exactly what you’re looking for.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) empowers marketers, creative teams, archivists and more to effectively organise and manage their digital files so teams can get their content to market faster. Aimed to make visual storytelling easier, DAMs allows express access to digital assets from virtually anywhere.

DAM technology provides teams quick access to important assets, enhancing interactions with customers, partners, co-workers, advertisers and social media. Using a DAM system puts you in total control of who uses your digital assets and how. 

With DAM assets gets easily accessible from anywhere
 

Solving the problem of working with assets that are spread out across an ocean of different systems and providers is a very interesting possibility for DAM Users, among others. Some solutions can integrate many of the world's leading platforms, all under one convenient umbrella like seamlessly connect with cloud storage providers, presentation and document creation tools, stock image providers and messaging apps.

You do not necessarily need to always log in to a software every time you need an image or a file. You might want to access all images directly from the PowerPoint app instead of opening a folder to search or scroll through. You can connect your digital assets to Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite applications or PIM, CMS, Sharepoint, Salesforce, Wordpress etc. As a DAM connects with everything through integrations, you don’t even need know that you have an actual DAM platform serving your file management. 

You can edit, save, post and share all your content from your DAM or other integrated applications without ever downloading a single file on your laptop. With a modern DAM you can reduce constant exporting, importing, downloading, uploading, rendering etc. This reduces headaches, and also increases security, free up space and helps everyone work remotely. 

Learn more about DAMs at the DAM Helsinki 2021 Event: https://www.helsinkidam.com/

Do not underestimate the need of marketing and training for proper DAM-usage!
 

Implementing a new DAM-system is exciting and could save your team time and energy. A well implemented DAM allows your team to be efficient, consistent and best of all, on brand. But DAM adoption isn’t always seamless or straightforward. Even after implementing the DAM that’s absolutely right for your business.

The basic easy workflow for DAM are mostly the thress following steps:
1. Upload your assets into the DAM individually or in batches.
2. Apply custom metadata to the assets and collections for easy of use.
3. After this search, find, discover and distribute files easily to all devices.

As proper ingestion is crucial for finding content, the usage of a DAM depends strongly on a correctly prepared workflow and intensive initial training for editors. Still, sometimes usage isn’t where you would like it to be despite of countless efforts. DAM adoption within the company requires ongoing additional internal marketing and refreshed internal training and ongoing presenting of new small updates and tips to users.  

Read from our blog: How to manage accurate digital files and content within a company in a hybrid working environment?

Take your workflows and DAM-platform to the next level with Communication Pro. To learn more about fast access to your DAM's content, contact us. https://www.communicationpro.com/en/digital-asset-management-expertise/

Please check our website for more information www.communicationpro.com