Digital Asset Management: Buying Guide: Page 2

4. Which DAM features are most important to your organization?

For Warner Bros. Entertainment, unification was a major challenge. With a sprawling library of entertainment holdings and marketing materials, a large image repository, and worldwide distribution, the common goal was to share digital media both now and in the future.

In looking at various products, they honed in on features that would reduce the need for extensive customization, facilitate metadata customizations, secure and control access for disparate users, and scale to accommodate growth, while also catering to a largely Mac-based development environment.

Warner Bros. Entertainment evaluated vendors based on these priorities and selected North Plains TeleScope to centralize their repository; accelerate the creation, approval and distribution of assets, and increase security and standards.

Your organization may value different features, such as increasing search functionalities, creating increased production efficiency, or more streamlined ingestion and metadata creation. Identifying and ranking those features will help narrow your focus when looking at the extensive list of potential solution providers, directing you towards vendors whose strengths best match your needs.

5. Do you have the manpower (and the know-how) to see a solution succeed?

Implementing a full DAM solution can be a formidable task – one that overburdened IT departments may not have the manpower and resources to accomplish. When evaluating different vendors, take into consideration the time and effort it will take to plan, execute, and evaluate a given solution.

To manage assets for Coldwell Banker Real Estate’s social learning portal, Birnbaum noted that he and his staff consulted various experts and consultants to help in not only selecting a solution, but configuring and deploying their chosen solution.

He stressed that, “there’s a lot of work that goes into customizing, organizing assets, making them fit with a portal or website. Sometimes the focus is on customization instead of just configuration. Customization takes longer. It takes time.”

For organizations like Birnbaum’s, their anticipated needs far exceeded in-house resources. Getting expert guidance early on helped to ensure solid ROI – both in dollars spend and resources invested.