So another DAM Henry Stewart Symposium has come around and we see that people talk about what is going on in the world of DAM, lets first look at the predictions made by people there. I have to say, I agree with them as I have myself been an advocator of these changes for some years now. This will be one of many posts as there are a lot of trends to list.
XMP has finally become a key driver for the DAM vendors to start leveraging on, we as endusers have wanted to be able to transport of content across our sites, maintaining the information about it for years. Adobe introduced XMP in 2001 with metadata for PDF file through Acrobat 5, admittedly they only made it available in toolkit form a few years back, but why did it take so long! We were crying out for this! Any company working on a global level would have instantly reaped the benefits across their different business units.
Rich User Interfaces Now come on, if you scout the web like I do (and I’m just Joe average) you will want your DAM solution to be engaging even if you are using the vanilla DAM, even if you are not and have put your own skin on it then using the latest web user experience technologies such as Flex, Ajax, Silverlight, Air etc etc to increase user operability and productivity it is just a must do for any company!
Creative Suite Integration I have to say this one disappoints me a little, it’s like the DAM industry is neglecting the fact that our companies have heaps of back catalogue of Quark documents, and their saying that Adobe has won the race…. well a little unfair in my opinion, both Quark & Indesign have their place and by neglecting the Quark users out their I think your missing out on a potential revenue stream. On the flip side, yes I have seen some create integrations and was working on one myself last year that would have taken DAM/File Server/Desktop User to the next level.
Video Management We all know that moving images captivate our attention, so why again has it taken so long for DAM to capture this enduser requirement, my guess is that the explosion of self video publishing and greater non broadcast video advertising as bought this to their attention. Or maybe more businesses are becoming multi-facetted in their client offerings and thus this has been moved to the top of the pile…
Web 2 Print So many web 2 print solutions available now, so the focus must be on making the DAM’s API available for any system to pull content from, the trend for W2P companies to put a DAM in is no new idea, most companies that purchased a W2P system quickly discover that the embedded asset management has little to no power and most will probably just use a file system to store the assets with no database management.
More on trends tomorrow where I’ll be commenting on the integration elements of DAM systems.
Author: Gary George
Tunicca Pre-Media Blog 