Keep track of your digital assets and eliminate your disconnected content silos. Let your content grow and perfect your digital presence thanks to integrations with all relevant systems. From product development to intelligent interaction with your customers in borderless possibilities of the new omni-channel world.
Enter the world of modern digital asset management and eliminate inefficiencies with strong editing and search functions, version controls, user management. All this in addition with integrated and automated intelligence of your assets as well as 100% security in the management of license rights.
Sharedien gives you maximum scalability and flexibility, no matter what volume and types of content you are working with. With our headless approach, there are no limits for you, from R&D to output to the relevant communication channels with the maximum integration capability into existing and future systems. Stay up-to-date with Sharedien with future-proof platform capabilities.
Collaborate agilely instead of following rigid workflows. Automate and optimise your workflows around creative tasks in your marketing processes. Add intelligence not only to your digital content, but also to your processes and collaboration. Get the most out of collaboration between departments, branches, external service providers and partners. And not just regionally, but worldwide.
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
Since its inception, digital asset management has provided centralised management of digital assets such as images and videos. The growing importance of this digital content for an increasing number of channels such as websites, apps, social media and online marketplaces is fuelling the rapid further development of modern DAM systems. In addition, the quality of digital content must meet ever higher expectations and the variety of data formats is also increasing. In the meantime, it's not just about images and videos - digital asset management systems today also manage 3D and 360° photos and videos as well as graphics, presentations and other documents.
In times when it was all about making flyers, posters and perhaps one's own website more visually attractive with digital content, the life cycle of the images or videos used was still quite simple and clear:
Once the requirements for the desired image or video have been determined, the creation is contracted out internally or externally accordingly and a time and monetary framework is defined, based on which the digital asset is created accordingly.
The management of digital content requires certain rules. These include feedback and approval processes as well as structured versioning and access and editing rights. The definition of metadata is also essential for a clean administration.
In order to use digital content, processes must also be established to regulate its distribution and publication. This also includes internal departments, external users such as the press and, of course, the corresponding channels.
After distribution, the images and videos are stored accordingly, along with their derivatives and documentation.
The rapid increase in relevant channels and the corresponding demands on digital assets has meant that the mass of necessary digital assets has increased disproportionately and the creation, provision and distribution is much more complex today than it was a few years ago.
Today, a variety of different users are involved in the creation of digital assets, including, for example, agencies, photographers and freelance designers. But also internally, many different departments need access to and up-to-date information about the existing digital assets as well as the relevant data processes. This includes product management as well as marketing and sales - but also customer success departments and the management level must have access to all digital assets at all times. The cross-departmental and even cross-company work involved in creating product images and videos requires a collaborative platform that supports complex feedback cycles, editing steps, comment functions and versioning, and automatically delivers the finished digital content to any number of channels. The connection to ever new channels must also play no role for modern DAM systems.
Due to the mass of digital content that needs to be produced today, the efficient use of existing data is an important issue for most companies. The reuse of existing material is an important pillar for a more economical handling of image and video material. This requires an intelligent metadata strategy that allows companies to build an easily usable information model.
The beginnings of digital asset management date back to the 1990s. At that time, companies used simple image databases to share their digital images and, if necessary, to print them. In addition to images, video files could also be managed at that time.
From 2000 to 2015, there was primarily an expansion to other visual documents. In addition to images and videos, presentations and other documents could now be managed and shared with trading companies.
Since 2015, for example, the development of digital asset management has increased rapidly due to technological innovations such as the provision of software services via the cloud or headless architectures. Modern DAM systems have evolved into enterprise-wide solutions for a wide range of user groups. This evolution has also meant that the user experience of modern digital asset management systems has become the focus of manufacturers.
Initially, digital asset management systems existed exclusively as on-premise solutions. Some companies still rely on on-premise installations today in order to comply with strict data protection regulations. The common arguments are that the company's own IT department has complete control over the stored data as well as release changes and updates. In this case, the in-house IT is responsible for the maintenance, hosting and security updates of the system.
With the advent of cloud technologies, DAM systems have evolved very quickly. The need to upload, transform and distribute ever larger masses of data requires a level of performance that only a cloud environment can economically provide. This is especially true for companies that have fluctuating workloads - such as large campaigns or seasonal product ranges that need to be communicated accordingly to many different online marketplaces and retailers.
Hosting and maintenance are also taken over by the cloud provider, which additionally relieves the own IT and thus saves costs. Even security and data protection play a vanishing role today, as the common cloud providers now offer reliable security certificates.
In between, there are also hybrid models where, for example, certain types of data are stored on on-premise installations while less sensitive material is made available via the cloud.