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With Digital Rights Management from Sharedien, you avoid illegal uses and costly legal disputes by actively managing the licences of your digital content. Keep track of your licences copyright properties of your assets. Protect your assets, your budget and the rights of your creative partners.
Perfect for high-performance digital applications, headless architecture offers a profound way to implement your usual or desired interface without compromise. With a headless architecture, you gain full control over your digital assets and relevant integrations across multiple systems and harness the full power of all your marketing technology.
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Table of Contents
Digital asset management solutions primarily have the task of managing digital content such as images, videos and documents and making them available centrally in the company. In the meantime, however, the requirements of the vast majority of companies have changed considerably. Whereas a few years ago the company's own website and perhaps the print catalogue were the only relevant output channels, today new touchpoints are regularly springing up that have to be taken into account in product and brand communication and that have individual requirements for image and video content.
The situation becomes even more complex the larger the company and the more diverse its target markets. In short, consistent communication on all channels and across national and corporate boundaries is not possible without a central DAM system. But how to find the right system? What are the differences between modern solutions and their approaches, and what needs to be considered when making a selection? This guide answers all that and much more!
One of the first decisions to be made in connection with the implementation of new systems is whether the solution should be operated on its own servers (on-premise) or as software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the cloud. There is also the option of taking a hybrid approach and, for example, only handing over certain functions to cloud services.
Many companies continue to opt for on-premise installations due to security concerns. Here, the responsibility for ensuring data and IT security lies exclusively with the company's IT. Another reason is that the software runs independently of the company's internet connection, which is an important factor especially for companies with weak connections.
On the other hand, there are several advantages of a cloud-based application. As a rule, companies only pay as much as they actually need in terms of capacity and no large investment is necessary as with their own installation. In addition, the provider takes care of updates and system maintenance itself. For companies that work a lot with external agencies, freelancers and photographers and also want to give partners access to their digital assets, a cloud-based application is also advantageous because it is easily accessible via the web browser. User and rights management ensures that each user created can only see and do what they are allowed to and should - this ensures security and reliability of the digital assets.
DAM systems form the core of powerful content hubs. However, it is not only their own functional breadth that matters, but also their ability to integrate with relevant neighbouring systems as well as central creative work applications.
For example, a content hub can only realize its full potential if digital asset management, content management, and product information management are seamlessly connected, providing a comprehensive view of all digital, product, and editorial content.
At the same time, it is very helpful for designers and communication managers if creative applications such as Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, but also external image databases such as Getty Images or Shutterstock are integrated. This way, users can work on creating content without having to constantly jump back and forth between the individual applications. This saves time and significantly enhances the user experience.
DAM systems have a variety of helpful functions - they result from the basic needs that stakeholders have when working with images, videos, graphics and documents in the company.
Probably the most basic function is search. Studies show that marketers waste a lot of time searching for appropriate images, videos and other digital content. This is where a DAM system can help and, thanks to intelligent functions such as auto-completion or a contextual search, bring out relevant content even if employees do not know exactly which keywords to search for. Different users have different requirements when searching for digital assets - this is also where it can be helpful to save individual searches and filters.
Closely related to the search requirement is the system's handling of metadata. The growing importance of visual communication across all channels makes it essential to think about the data structure in the DAM system. An intelligent metadata strategy creates meaningful context and thus organises and structures digital content and describes it clearly for intuitive search. In addition to this descriptive metadata, which plays a role in tagging, for example, digital content itself can also contain metadata. For example, image files automatically contain information about the camera type or resolution, and the photographer and other basic information can also be saved in the asset itself and automatically stored in the DAM system.
Today's DAM systems have a wide range of automation features that can significantly increase the productivity of your marketing team. These include automatic tagging, cropping, categorising or exporting of different file formats already during upload. This ensures, for example, that after a product photo shoot, the right image derivatives are generated directly for the online shop and the right tags are set at the same time. In addition, there are many other functions that increase the comfort when working with digital assets, such as the upload of new content via drag & drop. This increases the user experience and saves a lot of manual effort, and marketers can devote themselves to more creative tasks.
Not only own image and video material can be managed in DAM systems. Licensed digital content is also managed accordingly and provided with metadata. Anyone who works a lot with external material knows the challenges of monitoring licensing rights. Sophisticated licence rights management helps to keep a close eye on licence duration, permitted media use, costs, contact persons and geographical coverage of the licence, thus avoiding potentially expensive infringements. Information on photographers, agencies and models can also be stored and partnerships with valuable image sources can thus be actively cultivated.
In addition to the simple functions that DAM systems have, the solutions' ability to integrate with other communication-relevant systems, but also with creative tools and external image databases, now plays a major role in optimally supporting central processes around the creation and provision of content.
Especially for companies that want to present a multitude of products via a wide range of channels, a close integration of product information with the associated images, videos, other digital and also editorial content is very important. Therefore, DAM, PIM and content management systems must work closely together and provide the online shop, Instagram and online marketplaces such as Amazon with visually attractive product content in an equally reliable and comprehensive manner.
Content creation is another area where many companies face numerous challenges and inefficient workflows. Whether internal communication managers or external designers and agencies: the creation of content involves many individual processes, different tools and creative programmes, feedback and iteration loops as well as different versions of files. In addition, access, reading and editing rights must be clearly regulated, especially when working with external parties.
Modern DAM systems take this complexity into account by providing clear role concepts, ensuring version controls, integrating seamlessly with Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office applications as well as external image databases such as Shutterstock or Getty Images, and offering the possibility to build individual workflows for effective task management that integrates all stakeholders into the processes.
DAM systems therefore differ both in their basic technology and in their functional focus. This makes it particularly important for companies looking for a (new) DAM system to know their requirements. Any system evaluation must therefore be preceded by the following points:
First of all, it must be clear why a DAM system should be purchased at all. In many companies, it is now a big problem that employees first have to laboriously procure relevant assets such as pictures, videos or graphics within the company because there is no central management of this digital content. Other companies work a lot with external parties such as photographers or freelancers and lose a lot of time exchanging data and having to ensure that the latest version is being worked on.
These preliminary considerations already provide information about who the future users of the DAM system are. These can be employees from marketing, management, sales, customer service, product management and also externals. In the next step, these employees and partners such as agencies must be brought on board and provide information about how they come into contact with digital content in their daily work and what would help them to make their work more efficient.
This results in the requirements that a company places on a system that covers all these areas. For the selection process, it is very helpful to clearly name and describe the requirements and, if possible, even prioritise them. The more thoroughly these preliminary considerations have been made and put on paper, the better the project managers can assess the suitability of the different systems and guide them through the selection process.
The list of prioritised requirements results in a kind of guiding principle, which can already help to focus on the right solution approaches when researching suitable systems. For example, companies that expect rapidly increasing complexity in content creation should focus on systems that are based on future-proof technologies and have a high degree of flexibility in connecting other systems and different tools for the creation, editing and distribution of content. The integration capability of DAM systems is one of the most important starting points for this.
But the data model also makes a significant contribution to whether a company can master the challenges of modern visual communication. With complex product structures, diverse target markets, a wide variety of output channels and individual campaigns, the demands on the basic data structure of digital content grow. An intelligent metadata strategy is also a must from a certain level of complexity in communication.
All these considerations about the focus in the search for a suitable system lead to all parties having a common target picture in mind.
In addition to the functional and conceptual aspects, it is the responsibility of corporate IT and management to decide which technological requirements a DAM system must fulfil. This fundamental decision determines whether the system should be operated on-premise or be cloud-native or whether a hybrid solution is the right solution path for the future.
No matter which path is ultimately taken - it is advisable to opt for a solution that is automatically supplied with regular updates and that has all the usual security and data protection certificates.