DAM--Getting Organized

Digital asset management (DAM) solutions are plentiful, ranging wildly in everything from robustness to flexibility to price. But which offering is right for you? That may be the million-dollar question.

BY MARIE RANOIA ALONSO

The search is on. There are at least 75 DAM technology providers (not a slight on these fine technologists, just a widely tossed about, clever acronym for digital asset management) that are more than happy to visit you, send you materials, access your digital archiving weaknesses, advise you on ways to retool the content management at your operation and probably wash your car if you ask them nice enough.

For the sake of this article, your company is a $25 million general commercial printer specializing in catalog publishing. You need to invest in a competent digital asset management solution, but you are not sure which one is the right fit for your operation. You don't want to spend a fortune, but, at the same time, you are willing to invest the bucks if the right solution presents itself.

Price-wise you have a game plan. You are keeping your mind open to solutions between a $20,000 and $40,000 pricepoint—but you have no intention of limiting yourself if you are absolutely dazzled by a particular asset management solution.

You begin your investigation.

You talk to Canto about Cumulus; you confer with Cascade about MediaSphere; you get information from Imation about MediaManager; you investigate iStore StorageLink from Marcus Technology and TeleScope from North Plains. You heard TeleScope moved to version 1.5, and you're impressed with its new hierarchical searching and added PDF functionality.

You send e-mails requesting a visit with representatives from Inso regarding MediaBank. You wonder what happened to DALiM's Galerie. You consider Xinet's WebNative; after all, the Web image distribution and digital archiving combination in WebNative interests you. You are also curious about Virtual Ticket from Meta Communications, intrigued at its ability to combine both digital asset management and electronic job ticketing.

As if that isn't a big enough field of candidates to decipher, you are also interested in exploring Extensis' Portfolio 4.0, a digital asset management program that can handle the needs of a single user, or a large enterprise. You heard from a colleague that Portfolio 4.0 works in both a standalone and client-server configuration, and includes a plug-in that also lets the user access and distribute assets over the Internet.

Boy, you are one busy person!

"For commercial printers looking to integrate a DAM system, there are many factors that should be considered. Most important, though, is to make sure that the product under strong consideration is flexible and customizable," advises Jay Greenwell of North Plains.

"Each commercial printer has its own set of needs and requirements, needs that a single DAM product may not be able to answer right from the box," Greenwell cautions. "It's critical that commercial printers make sure the DAM product is flexible enough to fit into the company's current workflow and will be expandable in the future through the use of open standards. Proprietary technology may not be a good ticket for future DAM expansion at any given site," he adds.

When evaluating DAM solutions, choose systems that are based on open standards and a package that allows you to provide custom interfaces, so agrees Brad Giles, COO at Digital Art Exchange (DAX).

"Don't be afraid to ask for help from companies like DAX, which have the breadth of experience necessary for proper integration," Giles states. "DAX has found that the reluctance to fully embrace DAM applications has more to do with confusion among printers and prepress providers about the multiple applications on the market—presently more than 75—their resources for formulating a DAM strategy within their organizations and determining how best to fit a DAM solution into their existing workflows."

Additionally, Giles contends, in the past larger manufacturers in the digital prepress and commercial printing industry have stepped up to the plate and assisted customers with technologies such as digital file transfer and other bleeding edge technologies. "This has not yet happened with DAM, keeping this application at the early adopter or infancy stages. Those that do decide to be early adopters are reaping the rewards of molding future DAM products," he asserts.

A DAM solution, Giles continues, is a big picture buy. It requires stepping back, evaluating where this fits in the overall business strategy of any particular commercial printing organization and asking how it integrates into the existing workflow.

"Installing a DAM solution also means letting your staff become digitally oriented and building a mindset before you can move forward," Giles warns. "Improving customer connections is imperative, so DAM providers will get the payback regardless of the learning curve."

Herald Printing has already survived its own DAM learning curve. Investing in Canto's Cumulus asset management software, Joe Fortes, prepress director at Herald Printing, reports that, prior to Cumulus, his company had numerous off-line storage images it just could not keep track of efficiently.

"With gigabytes of storage, no one knew where to find anything," Fortes recalls. "Cumulus centralized our assets, giving us just one place to look for images, which, in turn, reduced unnecessary duplication and smoothed our workflow."

P&H Graphics, of Minneapolis, found its solution in WebNative by Xinet. "WebNative is an ideal setup for P&H. We can use it internally without doing any training and, at the same time, we can open it up to our clients without having to do any extra work," reports Paul Herzing of P&H Graphics.

"Our WebNative target customers are those who use the same images repeatedly. They can now do the image retrieval themselves, and we can spend more time doing production rather than image retrieval—which is what's billable anyway," he continues. WebNative also allows P&H to manage images in a way that its customers understand. Currently P&H's two customers with the largest libraries include a furniture cataloger and a supplier of computer forms.

"The computer forms vendor has an enormous quantity of images and needs some way of actually finding them. They employ a bunch of freelancers scattered all over the place who create sections of the catalog for them," Herzing states. "Each of the freelancers can access images from our WebNative server, which translates to great appreciation on our client's part for our in-house asset archiving capabilities."

Eric Rewitzer, product specialist at Xinet, contends there are two main aspects to consider when evaluating a digital asset management solution: location/tracking of the assets and retrieval/access of the assets. "Solutions that have extensive tracking, but poor distribution capabilities, will not be as effective for increasing workflow productivity," he warns.

"Most DAM products put location/tracking first and distribution second. While these feature-laden products may provide faster searching, actually getting the images to the people who need them will cost time and human resources," Rewitzer contends. "Products that emphasize distribution of assets over cumbersome tracking features will be more effective in increasing overall productivity for graphic arts service providers and, ultimately, their customers."

In addition, Rewitzer continues, solutions that incorporate OPI optimization allow designers to use low-res FPOs for placement, further speeding production cycle times.

"All products designed at Xinet aim to shorten cycle times in the prepress production process, allowing users to increase productivity and get more work out the door," he reports.

"WebNative was designed to eliminate labor-intensive, administrative upkeep required with databases and image catalogs," Rewitzer enthuses. "Because, after all, as one WebNative customer told me—plain and simple—the commercial printer is paid to get film out the door, not to manage a database."

The DAM Market: Where Is It Going?

Jason Taylor, Canto Software
"The DAM market is still a developing industry, with lots of small companies vying for business, shopping around their diverse offerings—making it very difficult for some customers to recognize the ideal solution for their particular prepress or commercial printing operation. Throughout this year, the entry of larger players in the DAM market will signify a major maturing. Watch for a release of a Quark solution, and moves from Heidelberg!"

Sioux Fleming, Extensis
"Printers work with a diverse collection of customers on a daily basis. It is to their advantage to find a digital asset management solution that is customizable and scalable enough to meet their customers' needs, and even the needs of their clients' customers. As the tide of digital content continues to swell, printers should seek a digital asset management system that can grow from single desktops to network-wide installations to the Internet."

Dave Alsbury, WAM!BASE
"Definitions of digital asset management range from the simple cataloging of images stored on a local server, to an enterprise-wide implementation designed to maximize ROI per image through effective reuse and repurposing of each asset. Another simple, yet elegant, definition comes from GISTICS, the San Rafael, CA-based DAM consulting firm: 'The systematic organization of digital media files, enabling an authorized individual to quickly find, retrieve (and or route) an item to an authorized or designated person, or into an automated work process.'

"If we focus on the enterprise definition given above, digital asset management, or DAM, becomes a collaborative exercise—what this can mean is an expensive server and storage system to store and share all of your corporate assets. Take this tip—a digitally savvy commercial printing site will need a wide area network (WAN) solution to make those assets available to all workflow partners. As for the Internet? The Internet seems the obvious choice, until one of the workflow partners browses and requests 500MBs of images at once. "

Xinet's Internet Endeavor: The Assets of WebNative

WebNative, a companion to FullPress—Xinet's prepress OPI server—enables commercial printers and prepress shops to extend the services they provide via distribution of low-res images and high-res digital art over the World Wide Web.

WebNative allows commercial printers to maintain easily accessible digital libraries for their customers, in addition to distributing FullPress For Placement Only (FPO) images to customers over secure Internet sites.

How does WebNative work?

• Customers can use a standard Web browser to access WebNative's search engine, resident on the server at the prepress site. Customers can review all of their images, then download FPOs of the images they select and use them for document layout.
• When customers send documents back to the service provider, via the Internet, Xinet's FPO-relinking Quark XTension, Picture Wrangler, relinks all images to their high-resolution versions on the FullPress server, so correct substitution takes place at print time.
• The WebNative digital archiving search engine allows customers to sort and search images by user, image type, date, name or comments and key words. Customers can browse the archived images like flipping through a catalog, with a condensed browsing option that allows users to see more images on each screen for quicker viewing.

What's the final word? WebNative is a slick, stable tool for Web image distribution and digital archiving—with a digitally nifty feature in Picture Wrangler—allowing customers to have just one more reason to put their digital assets in the capable hands of their commercial printing and prepress operations. For more detail on WebNative, FullPress and PictureWrangler, visit Xinet at www.xinet.com.

Canto Tips: Attention All DAM Shoppers!

Determine your business goals. An asset management system can put you leaps and bounds ahead in both workflow efficiencies and customer relations. But it's important to analyze your needs; are you trying to improve your internal efficiencies? Are you considering offering it as a service to your customers, or both?

Understand your options. Asset management solutions are not "one size fits all." Educate yourself over the solutions available based on your immediate and future needs. Do you want to eventually market your asset management service? Then remote access is critical. Your asset management solution should incorporate a CGI for Web access, be compatible for remote digital connections, or facilitate royalty-free browsing.

Keep your current infrastructure. There is a common misperception that in order to implement an asset management solution, you must do a major overhaul.

Think scalability. It's important to have a cross-platform media asset management solution for when your company grows. Your asset management must be flexible. Remember, every commercial printing facility is unique—different digital needs, requirements and growth horizons.