DAM Europe 2012 – London, 25/26 June

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Michael Wells

This year’s DAM Europe conference takes place on Monday 25 and Tuesday 26 June, atLe Meridien Hotel, Piccadily, London W1.

DAM Europe 2012

The conference program highlights important issues including how to get the best out of your DAM solution and the latest developments in DAM – from the challenges of digital workflow to monetising assets in new and innovative ways. There are still places for those who would like to speak as well as attend – details below. A host of interesting speakers from well known organisations are taking part including the BBC, ITN, the British Library and several leading agencies.

Third Light will be attending and will be happy to meet and chat with you there. If you would like to register, you can also receive a £100 discount using the code: THIRDLIGHT100 (register here).

The organisers are working hard to make this event ‘from a DAM user perspective’ rather than a platform for vendors. The programme, including case studies and workshops, is as follows:

Getting More out of DAM: The Latest Technologies and What is Possible Now DAM and its Future for Broadcast, Publishing, Media and Entertainment: An “eye to the enterprise” executive roundtable
The role of digital assets in securing and enhancing Customer Loyalty – workflows, insights and measuring
Rights Management and Digital Assets – Integrating Two Worlds
Vendors & System Integrators Working closely and successfully– making everyone a winner
Social Media and Digital Assets – managing the unmanageable
Selecting the Best DAM for you: Who’s in the Market, and How to Find Your Perfect Match
Brand Strategy and Digital Asset Management – how DAM supports brand management and loyalty.
Integrated Marketing Management The intersection of DAM with other Technologies – with SAP, Oracle and other ERP Systems, as well as other Collaboration Tools
Procurement and Implementation Process – lessons learned
iPad /Tablet – how they have Changed our DAM Consumption
Taxonomy, Metadata and Search – Ongoing Developments
Business Case for DAM – building the case
Leading Your DAM Operation – Round Table Workshop
Adapting DAM to Everyday Working Life – Practical Problems and Everyday Challenges – Round Table Workshop Building blocks that make successful integration of DAM into your organization possible.
Distribution, Protection and Monetisation of Digital Content: The ecosystem around securing and enabling the supply chain.
Predicting the Future – Meeting the Developing Needs of DAM Users – difficult but always fun!

Share your experiences – if you are interested in sharing experiences with your peers at this event let the organisers know: Email patriciac@henrystewart.co.uk with your ideas.

Leap Local – Responsible Tourism and a Global Media Library

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Michael Wells

Leap Local - Supporting Local Communities To Benefit From Tourism

Leap Local is a responsible tourism business, enabling travel with local guides and services, mainly in developing countries. Through an extensive network of vetted guides, Leap Local coordinates a travel network for ethical travellers that covers some of the most sought-after and beautiful locations in the world. As Leap say, “Travelling is fun and enriching, but did you ever think about how your tourism affects the communities you visit?“.

As a travel business, Leap Local needs to have spectacular images as part of its brand. Leap Local sought a way to organise their images amongst a team working in very remote locations.

Third Light IMS provides a central solution with tools for efficiently browsing and searching content, and a fast web-based interface that can easily be used to download files when they are needed, or publish them directly as permanent URL links. Instead of transferring large digital files over slow internet connections, IMS offers a streamlined library that can be used anywhere, and only transfers high quality source files when they are really needed.

Founder, Nicky Dee, explains how Third Light helped Leap Local to deploy a global media library:

“The problem we had was that we could never find the right photos when we needed them – even though these photos were pouring in from our network of guides. New team members were always trying to find great pictures of the right locations, but had little success as there was no definitive source of these kind of files.”

“Our problems were solved as soon we launched the Intelligent Media Server. Third Light helped Leap address the problem of managing our images by centralising them in a secure, shared media library that all of our team could reach, no matter where in the world they were accessing the system.”

“The superb search and mapping tools in Third Light IMS are perfect for finding the right files and locations, and even on connections with limited bandwidth in Peru we have been able to transform our digital marketing with Third Light.”

“Third Light’s team have been a great source of advice and support to Leap Local, including offering us surplus equipment to really go the extra mile. Not only is Third Light IMS a great product, the company’s support and attention to us as a client has been second to none.”

Nicky Dee, Founder, Leap Local

Leap Local map

Read more about Leap Local on their homepage at www.leaplocal.org.

Repurposing and resizing digital content in marketing workgroups

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Michael Wells

Using an Intelligent Media Server – the Digital Asset Management (DAM) software solution from Third Light – you can quickly store, track, search, share and retrieve your brand and media assets.

One Central Storage Location

IMS stores all of your media in one central repository. This allows you to avoid silo stores of assets, instead keeping them all together, and to grant users or whole groups of users access to files as necessary. Not only does this mean that you can avoid wasting time searching for files in different locations but it also means you’ll know that they are all efficiently backed-up and catalogued, searchable and traceable. IMS even searches for and eliminates duplicates.

IMS can be accessed from any web browser, meaning that if your organisation operates across multiple sites, everyone can have immediate access to your library. Wherever you are in the world, if you can get online, you can access your assets.

Secure Shared Access

Users are only able to access and view those files to which you have granted them access. IMS offers different options in terms of how you are able to manage these access rights, so that the service can be tailored to your organisation. Departmental groups or brand teams can easily be created, with control over just their part of the system for example.

Logins to IMS can be encrypted using SSL technology or, if required, the entire site can run on a secure (HTTPS) webserver. IMS allows you to require your users to change their passwords regularly and to set minimum levels for password quality, or integrate with Active Directory and OpenID. This process is fully PCI DSS compliant to make IMS a secure addition to your existing computer systems.

Fast and Controlled Retrieval of Assets

While retrieving assets from an Intelligent Media Server you can re-size, re-format and crop files. It is often useful to resize images according to the intended use and it may also shorten the time it takes to download. Other formats such as video, InDesign, Illustrator and Office documents are also supported, and the download process can be automated by pre-defining format settings for single-click selection of popular publishing formats (web banner, press ad, presentation etc.)

Use of predefined formats can make downloading both faster and more efficient by helping ensure files are delivered in the right format for the target media.

User Access Controls

The download process is highly configurable, enabling you to assign various options ad create a productive, creative workflow.

There are a wide range of options to tailor the download process, including watermarking, embedding metadata and requiring the acceptance of Terms and Conditions. Many of these options can be applied to Users so that different types of role within your organisation can be given appropriate capabilities to download content. Users can be given access to all of the download tools, or to selected tools only. You can also limit the options available when using a download tool.

You can specify that a user must gain approval before files can be downloaded and you can specify who should approve. Workflow support is provided with a system of automatic online alerts and emails keeping downloaders and approvers informed about the progress of each download request.

Comparing file servers and digital asset management servers

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Michael Wells

Taking a closer look at the limitations of file servers

Most organisations operate file servers to allow staff to share content, and like digital asset management systems the core benefit of this model is to store the files in a central location reached via the network. However, there are several fundamental problems with digital asset reuse which this a file server can cause.

Here’s a quick summary of what we think are the main problems with file servers.

1. Each file is stored in one place

File servers use folders as a descriptive structure, and filenames as a description. This limits the usefulness of the information (and layout) of the storage. Folders on a file server are too inflexible when digital content needs to be classified in multiple ways (or for multiple user groups). That model forces every file to be classified precisely once, or cloned and copied when it’s needed elsewhere.

For example, storing a file in //media/projects/building site 3/new plaza/img002.jpg may help one user in the engineering team, but when a member of the marketing department needs a selection of images from various projects, they will have to browse, collect and copy these files to their own project area. This means the content is fragmented – creating problems of tracing and managing re-use at a very early stage.

2. Limited metadata and search

Most file servers cannot present or search complex metadata, such as trees, keywords or drop-down menus. Also, filtering is normally limited to a folder’s sort order (by last changed date, media type, file size or filename).

Digital asset management allows a wide range of custom metadata to be added to files, and searched in a more convenient way by providing a purpose-built rather than generic user interface.

3. No workflow or audit

Digital asset management software like Third Light IMS provides workflow – a way of processing content in a logical order, usually involving more than one user. For instance, when a user uploads a file there may be a process for collecting metadata, and the file may also be passed to an administrator for approval. Similar procedures are in place for downloads, with records of the purpose of the downloads captured in simple and unobtrusive forms.

On a file server, though, permissions are generally limited to read-write or read-only, and no records are kept when files are copied, replaced, renamed or deleted. No workflow exists on a file server, so there is no way to involve multiple users in these processes.

4. Reliance on local tools for resizing and repurposing files

When a file is copied from a file server, the end user must have the necessary tools to resize or reformat the media. This means both extra skill and usually extra software is needed on the part of the user. Variants of existing files begin to accumulate, too – low, medium and high resolution copies, web sizes and print sizes being common sources of duplication and fragmentation of records.

In a digital asset management system, downloads incorporate tools to resize or repurpose media for specific uses without needing any software on the user’s computer. By providing purpose-built user interfaces there is far less complexity and far greater flexibility built into the process of re-using existing content.

5. Lack of portability and sharing features

While a digital asset management system can conveniently transfer lightboxes between users (without attaching full files) and keep a track of comments, changes and prior uses of files, a file server is inherently little more than a generic way to store files.

Digital asset management software unlocks far more of the potential in digital media, while a file server is generally too basic and unhelpful for advanced users.

Can we help?

To give you a taste of how you can use Third Light IMS to improve your day-to-day digital tasks, we’d like to share a video with you. This video explains how you can use metadata to provide a powerful alternative that solves file server problems using a feature we call Smart Folders.

If you’d like to try our software for yourself, you can use our software free for 30-days.

Populating digital asset management systems

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Michael Wells

The case for centralized media storage

The most often cited benefit of digital asset management software is to centralise media in a single store. This has numerous benefits, such as improved record-keeping, reduced duplication and much improved audit and communications side-effects which dramatically improve the usefulness of digital media.

A key part of forming a central digital media library is to have convenient tools to upload files, including the workflow needed to obtain valuable metadata.

Moving Files Into Your Third Light IMS Server

In Third Light Intelligent Media Server, files can be uploaded in numerous different ways:

Java Applets drag-and-drop uploads
HTML 5 upload buttons for compatible browsers
Using our Desktop Upload Tool - a simple drag-and-drop interface for Windows and MacOS
Using plugins for Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom
With industry-standard File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

Here’s a video to show you some of the easy ways you can upload content to IMS and maintain a process that prevents content from sprawling.

iPhone and iPad Video Support in Third Light

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Michael Wells

iOS Video Support Without Flash

As mobile devices continue to evolve, some proprietary technologies have started to be replaced with standards. For example, mainly due to Apple, Inc. there is a generation of devices now in use that is unable to play content using Adobe Flash.

One of the most common reasons for Flash being used was to support more complex applications like games, maps and video players inside a web site. Other technologies like Java Applets were considered too heavy-weight and Flash was the only alternative, without inventing more plugins. In recent times, video standards such as HTML5 have arrived and given users a new alternative that is free from proprietary technology, and in principle can be used in any device with a suitably modern browser.

In the screenshots below, you can see Third Light IMS v6.0 playing video content on an iPhone and on an iPad. With an XHTML user interface, Third Light IMS is accessible from most mobile devices, but for digital asset management the iPad (and other tablet computers) are the most attractive in terms of usability and accessibility.

Playing video on an iPad using Third Light IMS v6.0

Playing a video from Third Light IMS v6.0 on an iPhone

Metadata management and workflow in Third Light IMS v6

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Michael Wells

Uploading a file to your digital media server can be done in one of three ways, allowing you to choose the method which best suits your workflow:

From within the web browser itself;
Using our intuitive Desktop Upload Tool for Windows;
For more advanced users – via FTP;
Using plugins for popular software such as Adobe Creative Suite and Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture.

All administrators can upload and can also grant uploading rights to other users of the system.

To allow extra flexibility, our digital asset management software includes the facility to set up an unlimited number of upload accounts, which can be allocated to your customers, suppliers and colleagues directly. When new data is uploaded, IMS will alert you, leaving the media in a convenient holding area, awaiting approval. A sophisticated system of approvals or metadata requirements can be used where required (see below).

Upload and download approvals workflow

Not only can you control who can view a file but, if required, requesting administrator approval can be made a compulsory part of both the upload and download processes.

Workflow means that steps exist that lead to other steps; conditions triggering processes, just like a manufacturing process but applied to digital files. The nature of these processes will depend on the features that are configured to suit your organisation. In a generic sense, in digital asset management the upload workflow is about tagging activities and peer review.

Users simply give a reason for the upload or download and a nominated Administrator can then take a judgement on whether the request is appropriate for the stated purpose. Automated emails keep both parties up-to-date with progress, ensuring that the process is clearly communicated and efficient.

Workflow And Engaging Your Staff

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Michael Wells

How to get metadata at the point of upload

In digital asset management, the phrase ‘peer sourcing’ is particularly relevant. When a new file or collection of files is uploaded, you will want to capture the specialist information and awareness of the content. This is most probably known to the person doing the uploading.

When a user copies a file from their workstation to a simple network store, only the file – and perhaps some technical data or local metadata from the user’s own graphics package – will be uploaded.

This is not a good strategy for digital asset management, since it means that files are accumulating in folders as they always have in the past.

If only the files are stored, there must be a digital librarian who separately opens each new file at a later date and reviews what it is, how to categorise it and tag it with metadata. Otherwise, the file cannot be searched and is probably better deleted or returned to the user to keep on their workstation.

Stepping up to workflow

For more sophisticated setups, the upload workflow tools in your digital asset management tool can provide an automatic intervention to capture metadata from the user performing the upload.

Metadata tagging can be completed with the aid of controlled vocabularies, or by assigning defaults at the point of upload in templates. This can alleviate the pressure of providing a lot of metadata and encourage occasional users to use the software effectively.

Digital asset management workflow - review, approval and metadata collection

Peer review (approval and rejection) usually means that the finished, tagged content is passed to an administrator or another group of users for their review. Until the requisite steps are completed the uploaded files stay in an unapproved state, rather than appearing in the digital asset management system to other users.

Tips for improving participation in digital workflow

One thing that must be achieved is adoption. Users should not be left behind by accident or by designing metadata requirements that are too onerous to be practical.

Participation in metadata is the right way to activate the highly attractive power of the search engine and does need some extra commitment. So, if you can, it is a good idea to require only the minimum of metadata, especially at the earliest stages.

Try Third Light IMS now to implement a digital asset management workflow

Hosted DAM

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Michael Wells

Hosting your Digital Asset Management system

Owning and managing a large, valuable content store means finding the right location to host your service. While it would often be ideal to store media in house, unless you have a good internet connection and DMZ for hosting services, this will limit your ability to interact with customers, suppliers and partners.

Another option is to place the DAM server on the internet. Third Light can supply and host a complete solution so you can run your new digital asset management system on a high-performance internet connection, with reliable storage and backups.

Digital Asset Management Software hosting - DAM SaaS

We operate facilities in two UK-based data centres. Our main server farm is in Berkshire, UK and our secondary data centre is in Milton Keynes for geographical redundancy.

These facilities are connected to diverse parts of the UK national grid, and are linked by independent internet connections.

Servers: Third Light can supply and maintain your fault-tolerant server equipment with no in-house requirements for your organisation.

Power: All equipment is connect to fully redundant, uninterruptible power supplies, including diesel generator backups.

Bandwidth: We provide high performance 400Mb/s networks for your Third Light server to connect to the internet.Your server will be connected to an independent switch port at 1Gb/s.

Rack space: We provide the physical space in a locked data cabinet for the servers.

Management time (including remote maintenance): on-site and off-site intelligent management by skilled systems administrators at Third Light.

Fire suppression: Inert gas suppression prevents fires in the data centres.

Cooling: Air inside each data centre is kept at 21 degrees Celsius year round.

Physical security: physical, electronic and manual confirmation of identity is required for clearance to enter the data centre.

Cloud Resources, Backups and Storage: We can supply storage and cloud computing resources. Our Storage Area Network isavailable to provide high-speed production storage capacity, with daily backups and daily off-site replication.

Co-located Hosting

Co-location is charged annually per 2U server rack space. Our co-location price includes your IP address allocation and up to 400GB transfer per month, as well as all power and cooling services. Backups for co-located servers are available on the basis of the number of gigabytes needed.

Cloud Hosting

If you prefer not to own the equipment, cloud hosting is offered. An annual charge provides you with the Third Light software on our shared platform and includes support, maintenance and backups. 75GB of storage is included in the annual fee. Additional storage can be added at any time, and all storage used includes backups.

Would you like to know more?

To find out if we can help you with a hosted DAM solution, please get in touch today. We’ll be happy to scope your requirements and provide a solution with the right amount of storage and capacity for your digital asset management project.

Contact Third Light now

Digital Asset Management software

Technology blog by Third Light, The Digital Asset Management Specialists

Category Archives: DAM