Heading into 2025, the tools your teams use can make or break productivity. Complicated software can create bottlenecks. If users struggle to navigate a system or complete simple tasks, it leads to frustration, wasted time, and ultimately, lower adoption rates.

When employees are reluctant to use software due to its complexity, organizations face decreased productivity and misaligned workflows. In contrast, an intuitive interface empowers teams to focus on what matters most: executing projects, collaborating efficiently, and delivering high-quality results.

Why User-Friendly Interfaces Matter in Digital Workflows

A user-friendly interface is no longer just a nice-to-have; it’s essential for ensuring efficient workflows and high team engagement. When software is intuitive, team members can get up to speed quickly, reducing the need for extensive training and minimizing downtime. This is especially crucial for growing organizations where new hires need to integrate into existing processes without a steep learning curve.

For growing teams, a simplified, easy-to-use platform is key to scalability. As organizations expand, they need systems that adapt to increased demands without adding unnecessary complexity. A well-designed interface not only keeps existing workflows smooth but also ensures that as teams grow, the digital tools in place support—not hinder—continued success.

And that’s why we’re so excited to launch V5, our new HotDAM! Experience (HTX). This new, intuitive digital asset management system user face has been built on customer feedback and ensures that teams across the globe can easily discover, streamline, and control their assets, no matter where they are or what device they’re using.

Introducing the New MediaValet Experience

At MediaValet, we’re constantly listening to feedback from our customers to make digital asset management simpler, faster, and more efficient. Today, we’re excited to introduce our brand-new user experience, The HotDAM! Experience (HDX).

This revamped UI takes DAM to the next level, offering an intuitive, streamlined experience that anyone can master—whether they’re a seasoned DAM professional or just getting started.

And HDX goes beyond just ease of use. MediaValet combines user-friendly design with powerful functionality and industry-leading accessibility, providing teams with the tools they need to work smarter, faster, and more collaboratively.

Let’s deep dive into how HDX can help you!

Seamless Navigation for Faster, Smarter Workflows

With HDX, you’ll notice an immediate improvement in how quickly and efficiently you can navigate the platform. The intuitive design, paired with lightning-fast response and upload times, ensures everything is right where you expect it to be—no more wasting time on complex workflows or multiple clicks.

Whether you’re organizing digital assets or managing a new project, HDX delivers a seamless, enjoyable experience that helps you stay productive and focused on what truly matters.

Inclusive and Accessible for Every Team Member

We believe that every team member should have the tools to manage digital assets confidently and efficiently. That’s why MediaValet is wholly accessible. HDX is fully compliant with WCAG AA standards and ISO27001 certified, ensuring accessibility and industry-leading DAM security for all users.

Whether your team is large or small, or whether users have varying levels of technical expertise, HDX offers an inclusive design that removes barriers and simplifies asset management. With mobile access and intuitive navigation, your team can manage content, launch campaigns, or analyze performance—on any device—keeping productivity high and frustrations low.

Discover, Collaborate, and Create with Cutting-Edge Tools

Finding the right asset just got a whole lot easier. MediaValet’s latest AI-powered feature, Smart Image Search allows you to go beyond keywords by understanding the context of your search, letting you quickly discover relevant content even if you don’t remember the exact file name or tags. This advanced search capability dramatically reduces the time spent hunting for assets, keeping your team on track and focused.

Interested in our other AI-powered features? Face Recognition, and Audio Visual Intelligence (AVI) facilitate even more DAM power. You can learn about them here!

When it’s time to collaborate, HDX streamlines every step. With built-in Templating and Proofing tools, teams can seamlessly preview, share, and gather feedback on assets within the platform—no more switching between apps or juggling email threads. From internal collaboration to working with external partners, MediaValet makes the review process smoother and faster, helping your team get the job done efficiently.

Save Time, Stay in Control

Time is one of your most valuable resources, and our new DAM user interface, HDX, helps you make the most of it. With faster navigation, smarter search through semantic technology, and integrated proofing tools, HDX significantly cuts down the time spent managing and organizing assets—giving your team more freedom to focus on what really matters: creating great content.

But efficiency doesn’t come at the cost of control. HDX offers robust features for managing user permissions, metadata, and organizational structures, ensuring your assets are always secure and accessible to the right users. With MediaValet’s Multi-SSO, MFA, and Category Level Permissions, you maintain full control over your content library, keeping everything organized and easily retrievable, no matter how large your collection grows.

Ready to Experience the Best DAM User Interface?

We’re confident that once you try the HotDAM! Experience, you’ll wonder how you ever managed assets without it. Want to see for yourself? Book a demo today or try the new DAM user interface firsthand—and discover just how easy digital asset management can be.

Already using HDX and want some pointers? Check out the Support Centre to find more information on how to successfully navigate HDX or watch our MediaValet Academy session on HDX here.

The speed and performance of web content have a major impact on user experience. Whether it be a customer browsing your e-commerce photo gallery, new hires watching company training videos, or a potential customer looking to download an information sheet, you want to deliver the fastest experience possible for your users. As the number of online platforms needed by organizations continues to grow, it’s getting harder and harder to ensure the fluidity of your company’s information, data, services, and/or product accuracy across the board. As a result of this growing demand, companies need a solution to help push updated assets to all platforms efficiently and serve them in the fastest way possible: That’s where MediaValet’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) Linking feature comes in.

In this post, we will dive into the benefits of CDN Linking with digital asset management (DAM), and help determine if it is something that your organization is missing.

Top 3 Benefits of CDN Linking

To put it simply, MediaValet’s CDN Linking feature creates a single source of truth for all your published assets. It helps enable different teams and departments to manage and track their digital content across various platforms and channels (both internally and externally) all from within the DAM. This not only creates a simple, seamless way to grab direct links for all file types, update versions from within the DAM, and embed codes for images, videos, and audio files, but it also helps with keeping track of who has access to what. Three benefits of CDN Linking include:

1. Enhanced Speed and Performace,
2. Secure Web Experience, and
3. Maximum Asset Performance

Let’s dive into each benefit in more detail below.

1. Enhanced Speed and Performance

Instead of trying to locate the right content, and wasting valuable time manually updating their outdated branding, organizations need an easy way to manage their digital assets across the several websites and channels their audience visits. With MediaValet’s CDN Linking feature, teams can publish their assets (documents, videos, photos, and more) across the web directly from their DAM library. This allows organizations to experience faster load times by providing end users with the content from their closest cache server to ensure the best website performance.

2. Secure Web Experience

In order to maintain good conversion rates, brand reputation, and generally steady traffic, organizations must provide a fast and reliable web experience for users at all times. With CDN Linking, your content will be delivered faster, more reliably, and securely than ever before and provide a superior online experience thanks to MediaValet’s enterprise-grade infrastructure. Microsoft’s network ensures there are always surrounding servers ready to serve assets immediately in the rare event of an outage and has more security certifications than other cloud providers.

3. Maximum Asset Performance

Content plays an important role in communication, advertising, education, and more, which is why it is important to ensure the quality of your assets when sharing them across various channels. CDN Linking helps to maximize your asset performance and ensure consistency throughout your content. With this feature you can:

• Track asset performance across various channels by creating multiple unique links for specific assets,
• Learn how your audience engages with content by monitoring asset views from within the DAM, and
• Ensure assets are delivered to end-users in the fastest load time possible by serving cache content from a distributed network.

Additional benefits of CDN Linking include being able to:

• Generate asset links or embed codes from within the DAM to post in the platform of your choice,
• Configure settings for a CDN link—including format and asset size,
• Monitor asset performance with the number of views recorded into the DAM,
• View when and who generated CDN links, and
• Deliver assets to end-users with the fastest load time possible.

Use Case: Web–Serving Video Files

Nicole is the front-end developer at Acme Association, a company that produces personal health devices. As part of developing the public-facing and the partner-facing websites, she combs through the DAM looking for assets appropriate for their various web properties. Once she has found an informational product video suitable for their audiences, she uses CDN Linking to generate an embed code that can be input onto the webpage she’s developing. By using CDN Linking, there is no need to find and apply a video/media player onto their website as it’s already hosted by MediaValet.

What Are You Waiting For?

CDN Linking is already a best practice for any organization that relies on online content, especially those that market globally, providing the fastest and most reliably served content to your customers should be a standard practice in today’s market. For a maximized ROI on CDN Linking, it’s best to use a DAM system as the connection allows seamless asset updates and dramatically improves workflows for anyone working with your company’s online platforms. Not only that, but it also makes for the best end-user experience for prospective clients as it ensures content about your company is always up-to-date and reliably served.

To learn more about CDN Linking, check out our product page or reach out to contact us with any questions, we’re happy to help!

When deciding to invest in a digital asset management (DAM) system, it is important to consider the future needs of your company in addition to your existing priorities. Regardless of the challenges that your organization is facing today, your needs will inevitably change down the road—and you’ll want a system that will scale and adapt with you.

As a solution to help companies better manage their digital assets and solve an array of major pain points, MediaValet offers an unlimited model, designed to allow you to grow and change with minimal constraints. In this post, we’ll look at the unlimited model features that are included with MediaValet’s enterprise subscriptions, namely:

• Unlimited users and user groups,
• Unlimited product training, and
• Unlimited product support.

After taking a closer look at these features, you’ll be able to better understand why an unlimited model is a great option when looking for a DAM solution. Read more to find out if it’s the right choice for your organization.

Unlimited Users and User Groups

Unlimited users and user groups allow you to scale your DAM across your entire organization – everyone can access what they need, whenever they need it. This feature also increases the security of your assets, as user access parameters are based on the permissions you set up and control. Since user permissions are highly customizable for each user and user group, you never have to worry about assets getting into the wrong hands.

Benefits of Unlimited Users and User Groups

The unlimited users and user groups feature ensures:

1. Better Scalability: Being able to extend your solution to the entire organization without having to worry about any extra user costs gives you the freedom to address additional use cases and grow with your DAM.
2. Streamlined Productivity: Since everyone is able to access what they need, whenever they need it on their own, your marketing team can spend less time sharing assets and more time on core work and projects.
3. Improved Asset Security: Not only are you able to provide access to your entire organization—you can also set up each user, team, department, and location with a tailored view of the DAM to ensure they only have access to assets that are relevant to them.

Finding a solution that offers unlimited users and user groups opens a realm of possibility for your organization in terms of what you can do with a DAM as your company changes and evolves.

Unlimited Product Training

Unlimited training is an empowering feature that keeps all users up-to-speed and feeling comfortable with the DAM. When everyone is using the system efficiently and effectively, it helps increase overall productivity—companywide. Additionally, with customer success managers keeping everyone updated on the latest features and how to use them, your IT team can spend less time and energy on DAM training.

Benefits of Unlimited Product Training

When your system is working with you, there are several benefits that follow:

1. Improved Efficiency: Training is taken on by the vendor’s customer success managers, so you don’t have to spend hours training everyone individually. This means marketing and IT resources can be used more effectively.
2. Increased Adoption: When everyone is confident in using the DAM, it becomes a part of their daily workflow, rather than “just another tool”. This allows your organization to better ensure brand consistency and high asset ROI.
3. Maintain DAM Health: With unlimited training, users are able to correctly use the DAM, which ensures the DAM stays clean and accurate. This, in turn, makes for a much more organized solution and allows DAM auditing to be easier for your team down the line.

By prioritizing a DAM that offers unlimited product training, you’re able to take away the burden of ongoing training for your team, saving valuable time and resources.

Unlimited Product Support

Unlimited product support ensures that you’ll never have to face any technical challenges with your solution on your own. Whether it’s a small question or a large issue that you’re facing, your DAM vendor’s support team will walk you through how to fix it and help you to understand what went wrong. When technical problems arise, support professionals are always ready to help you find quick resolutions, whenever you need them.

Benefits of Unlimited Product Support

Unlimited support features can help your organization to:

1. Reduce Overall Costs: Support costs can add up very quickly, so unlimited support features are always good to look out for. Complimentary, 24/7 support allows you to rest assured knowing you’re always covered by your DAM vendor.
2. Enhance Vendor Support: Whether you have a small or large issue, you never have to worry about potential challenges with your DAM. No matter the problem, your DAM vendor will support you in finding quick resolutions, every time.
3. Use Less Internal IT Resources: When your company doesn’t have to deal with technical issues on your own, your IT team can focus on other areas of the business, and save valuable time.

DAM vendors that offer unlimited product support help your team to spend more time on high-value tasks and less time trying to figure things out on your own. With unlimited support, you can take your time, reach out whenever you need help, and ask as many questions as you need – without any constraints.

The Unlimited Model is About More than Features

MediaValet’s unlimited model offers a scalable amount of users and user groups while providing unlimited training and support—at no extra cost. Our clients have found that this model not only helps them use the DAM to its full potential but it also keeps the DAM clean and efficient to use.

Learn more here about MediaValet’s unlimited model and how it can help your organization, today.

Understandably, the digital asset management (DAM) space has always been a little bit confusing. Since there are so many DAM solutions available, the lines have become blurry on what differentiates the variety of solutions out there. And, in addition to the number of DAM solutions available, the introduction of “light DAMs” has caused even more confusion. What is a light DAM and how does it differentiate from a traditional DAM solution? In this post, we’ll discuss the difference between the two, and how to choose which one is best for your organization.

• What is a Light DAM?
• What is a Full DAM?
• Why Organizations Upgrade from Light DAM to Full DAM
• How Do I Know Which is Right for Me?

What is a Light DAM?

A light DAM is essentially a digital asset library within another SaaS solution such as CMS, Work OS, etc. Typically, they have light functionality and are employed with the understanding that the assets will mostly be used within the parent or hosting solution.

Key Features of a Light DAM

1. Asset Previews: Basic previews of your assets are available, typically only for photos and videos.

2. Share Links: Share links can be created for individual assets for easy sharing from within the solution.

3. Basic Search: Users can search for assets with a file name, description, and (sometimes) other basic metadata.

The Bottom Line

For companies who have light digital asset needs and a small library, the capabilities of a light DAM may just fit the bill. Small organizations who need to access assets from a central library, and easily find and share them would see a benefit from employing a light DAM and probably wouldn’t need the sophisticated and robust functionality offered by a full DAM solution.

What is a Full DAM?

Full DAM solutions are built specifically to store, manage, and distribute your digital assets. They offer excellent functionality that allows users to manage most types of digital files and perform a variety of beneficial tasks, including re-sizing and re-formatting media, tracking usage history, and sharing large files easily. With features like branded portals and permission-based user settings, a DAM ensures that only the right individuals have access to the assets they need, protecting your library and ensuring maximum security.

Key Features of a Full DAM

1. Easy Sharing: A DAM has multiple features, such as web galleries, portals, and distribution links, that allow for the easy sharing of large media files, such as high-resolution images, large-format videos, etc.

2. Asset Security: A DAM offers version control, history tracking, and watermarking, as well as enhanced security and compliance to ensure full control over digital assets for both internal and external users.

3. File Discoverability: A DAM makes storing, managing, and finding brand and marketing material easy with artificial intelligence, keywords, and advanced search capabilities.

The Bottom Line

A full DAM solution is best for companies that need a streamlined way to produce, store and distribute a large amount of rich media content (photos, videos, audio, and more). Companies with a growing library of media assets or distributed teams likely require more complete solutions and long-term strategies for their ever-growing digital asset management needs.

Why Organizations Upgrade from Light DAM to Full DAM

Organizations that are having a hard time managing their content and are in need of a more robust solution to manage their content—especially rich media, have probably outgrown their current solution and would benefit from upgrading to a full DAM solution.

While organizations gain vast benefits from upgrading to a full DAM from a light DAM, here are a few noteworthy features:

• Sharing: Not only can users share all popular formats and sizes of files, but a DAM allows them to instantly send files of up to 200 GBs to anyone, anywhere in the world, no matter what browser or operating system they’re using. Firewalls aren’t an issue as only links are used, eliminating the need for attachments.
• Searching: A DAM offers additional advanced search features, including AI auto-tagging, that allow users to find what they’re looking for without the hassle of sifting through a large number of assets.
• Asset Rendering and Resizing: A DAM enables users to crop or customize the format and size of each asset when they use them.
• User Permissions: Custom views and access for teams and individuals ensure that all users can only access what’s relevant to them.
• Integrations: Teams can use their assets in several other platforms, creating a more advanced and well-rounded solution.
• Scalability: As your team and/or assets grow, the number of people who need access to them may also expand. A DAM scales easily to thousands of users while keeping assets safe and secure.

How Do I Know Which is Right for Me?

Small organizations that don’t work with very much content and only need to store a small number of brand assets and stock photos, may only need a light DAM solution. On the other hand, organizations that are creating, purchasing, and storing a large amount of content, are looking to manage and share their content easily and prioritize security and compliance would highly benefit from implementing a full DAM solution.

Is it Time to Upgrade?

After reviewing the key features that both a full DAM and light DAM have to offer, it’s obvious why many organizations are choosing to upgrade to a full DAM solution. Companies that have outgrown their light DAM and need a better solution for storing, sharing, and managing their digital assets in a secure way—and require a solution that can grow with their needs—have moved on to full DAM systems and aren’t looking back.

MediaValet is a digital asset management solution that’s trusted by hundreds of leading brands around the globe to help them make the most of their high-value digital assets. Ready to learn more about what MediaValet has to offer? Check out our DAM demo today!

If you’re considering implementing a foundational layer like a digital asset management (DAM) solution, there might be a possibility you haven’t thought of leveraging your organization’s Microsoft strategy.

MediaValet is now available for purchase on the Azure Marketplace. The Azure Marketplace seamlessly allows organizations to cover 100% of their MediaValet subscription fees with their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) benefit, giving teams an easy and convenient way to purchase a DAM.

How to Get Started

Remember your friends in IT? Now’s the time to organize a quick meeting. If your organization is a heavy Microsoft user, there’s a good chance that IT has committed to a certain level of Azure consumption that needs to be used. Azure consumption benefits have an expiration date, so it truly is a “use it or lose it” scenario.

Plus, if your organization doesn’t use a MACC benefit, you can still leverage the Azure Marketplace using a pay-as-you-go account or simply, a credit card.

Benefits of Purchasing on the Azure Marketplace

Purchasing through one of Microsoft’s Marketplaces offers several benefits that ultimately help smooth out your buying process. It allows you to:

1. Take full advantage of your existing benefits

A Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment is a contractual agreement to spend a certain amount with Microsoft over a period of time. It’s a “use it or lose it” plan, where organizations are incentivized to spend the entire amount or lose out on the initial investment. With that said, purchasing MediaValet on the Azure Marketplace can help your organization make full use of its MACC benefits before they lapse.

2. Purchase a DAM without increasing budget requirements

When you choose to purchase MediaValet through the Azure Marketplace, you’re able to use the budget that’s already been “spent”, as it’s already been committed to Microsoft. This can help get the DAM initiative approved, as the organization doesn’t need to reallocate the budget from other initiatives or solutions to fund it.

3. Boost buying power and help make the procurement of a new DAM solution easier

Solutions that are available on the Azure Marketplace are “pre-vetted” by Microsoft, meaning they have Microsoft’s stamp of approval. This can help smooth the procurement process and make IT more comfortable with accepting an unfamiliar solution.

Simplify Procurement with the Azure Marketplace

With budgets experiencing greater scrutiny and competing pressures, finding alternative funding solutions can help you move foundational projects ahead without having to go into battle. A DAM can very easily enable the entire organization by managing all digital assets in one central library.

At the end of the day, the main thing to remember is that procuring a new solution doesn’t need to be a cumbersome experience. By staying within the Azure platform, you can fast-track your DAM procurement process and move your operations forward, so you can focus on delivering results.

There’s no doubt about it – video has become a critical component of any marketer’s content toolbox. Not only are 55% of people watching video every day, 52% of marketers in a recent HubSpot guide actually identified it as the content type with the highest ROI. Short video formats, in particular, like those found on Instagram and TikTok, have seen a particular increase in interest. Wordstream even cites that videos, on average, get 12x more shares on social media than text and images – combined!

While the value of video can’t be disputed, it can be incredibly challenging to manage. Even for those that have a digital asset management solution and some form of artificial intelligence in place, the inability to pinpoint a specific moment in time in a video can leave people spending hours sifting through terabytes of footage to find that “magic moment” they need. This is why advanced, time-based video indexing capabilities, like those offered by Microsoft, when combined with a digital asset management solution, are critical to driving significant productivity and ROI gains for marketing and creative teams.

Using DAM-based, advanced video AI capabilities, like those offered with MediaValet Audio/Video Intelligence, users can not only identify which videos contain a specific keyword, it can also identify where in the video it’s present. It identifies objects, people, text, spoken words, sentiments and so much more. It can save marketers countless hours, allowing them to instantly find the exact moment they need from any given set of videos.

Here are three ways that artificial intelligence is enabling organizations to maximize the value of their video content.

Increased Video Re-Use

The nature of video content makes it incredibly challenging to reuse. At any given time, an organization is hosting thousands of hours of video across hard drives, shared servers, and cloud platforms – all with nothing to go on but the file name (which, let’s be honest – is usually named something like “VID-145246″). There’s a ton of legacy knowledge that’s involved in knowing:

1. If any given video exists and
2. Where that video is stored.

Artificial intelligence makes it easier to find and reuse entire videos, as well as identify opportunities to reuse shorter clips within longer videos. Artificial intelligence for video also enables marketers to more easily find quotes and information within video content to be used in other content formats, such as blog posts, infographics, and whitepapers. With this functionality, you can maximize the ROI of your videos and significantly improve their lifespan.

Example: Anniversary Campaigns

You’re the marketing coordinator for a fast-food restaurant that’s about to celebrate its 50th year in business. As part of an anniversary campaign, the marketing director wants to showcase the commercials that were used to promote the grand opening 50 years ago. Using Video Intelligence, you search for the term “Grand Opening” in your DAM. The DAM then pulls all videos that included the term “Grand Opening”, either within on-screen text or spoken word. You’re quickly able to identify the best videos and send them to your director for use.

Improved Time-to-Market

Creating high-quality videos at scale can be a big challenge – especially for organizations without a dedicated video team. In addition to maximizing ROI, another benefit of making your video content more discoverable with artificial intelligence is improved time-to-market for video projects. Sifting through hours of video footage for content to use in a new piece can take hours if not days. Artificial intelligence can significantly reduce this time, allowing you to identify specific moments within hours of videos where any person, object, or topic is present.

Example: Social Media Highlights

You’re on the social media team for a large basketball franchise. You’ve been tasked with creating a new post that highlights the top moments from star player, Josh MacKenzie, in the game the night before. Using Advanced Search, you search for People: Josh MacKenzie and Uploaded: Last 24 hours. With Video Intelligence, you can quickly navigate to specific timestamps including Josh MacKenzie, and identify the best clips to use. You edit them into a quick highlight reel and submit the video for approval within an hour. It’s live on social before noon that day.

Enhanced Accessibility

Another major improvement that artificial intelligence brings to video is enhanced accessibility. Not only does artificial intelligence boost video footage with auto-generated subtitles, but it also allows the viewer to translate those subtitles into their native language. Microsoft Video Indexer, for example, can auto-translate transcriptions into 57 different languages – on the spot. This opens up huge potential to train, communicate and share more effectively with individuals, learning about their personal preferences and needs.

Example: New Employee Training

You’re an HR manager for a federal government organization preparing a video training series for all new hires. Once the training videos are finalized, you upload them to your DAM and run Video Intelligence for these new videos. A transcript is then automatically created for the videos, which will allow each new hire to apply subtitles in their preferred language if needed.

Learn More About Audio/Video Intelligence

Are you ready to maximize the value of your audio and video content? MediaValet’s Audio/Video Intelligence enables you to quickly generate asset transcripts and easily identify people, topics, scenes, and more within your audio clips and video footage. Learn more

MediaValet is one of the world’s leading cloud-based digital asset management (DAM) solutions, helping top global brands manage and distribute their assets. A centralized DAM approach enables marketing and creative teams to move fast, with confidence and control.

As the digital asset management sector expands to address more use cases, the ability to connect to various platforms and devices is becoming an increasingly important component for company-wide adoption. This change is causing APIs to be a common topic in DAM conversations and purchase decisions.

But what we’ve found is that, while an API is a necessity for many DAM projects, not many DAM champions actually know what an API is or, more importantly, the functionality that it can bring to their DAM.

This post will arm you with the knowledge you need to understand the basics of APIs and how they can help your organization achieve its goals for DAM.

What is an API?

Let’s start with the basics: what is an API?

API stands for “Application Programming Interface“. It allows a product to talk to another product using open data. Basically, it’s the “messenger” used to communicate to a system what you want it to do and return the correct response.

An API allows developers to take advantage of code already built into a given platform and perform an action without having to re-write existing code. Internal developers expose “endpoints” in their product to allow external developers to connect it to other platforms. They then provide a list of operations that developers can use to perform any given actions and explains the language (script) requirements for the platform.

Put simply, with an API in place, developers don’t need to know the “how” of an action, they just need to know how to connect to it. This significantly reduces the amount of code a developer needs to create, prevents the duplication of data processes and improves consistency across platforms.

For a simplified explanation, watch this awesome video by MuleSoft that explains APIs using a restaurant waiter:

APIs in Day-to-Day Life

As a consumer, you actually use APIs frequently in everyday life. You might use it to:

Book a hotel
When you book a hotel through an online booking site, like Hotels.com, you often start by entering where you want to stay, the dates you want to go and the number of guests you have. The moment you hit “Search”, APIs work to aggregate relevant information from hotels that meets your criteria and return the results to a single, consolidated webpage. It allows you to compare hotels instantly without having to visit each individual site.

Post on social media
One of the most commonly-used APIs can be found in your phone, specifically, when you’re using your camera within an app, like Instagram. When you take a photo or video on Instagram, the app connects to your phone’s camera using API calls provided by the phone. The API allows you to instantly post to your stories or feeds, without needing to switch between your camera app and Instagram.

Buy something online
When you make an online purchase, there are often multiple APIs in place to give you the most optimal experience possible. From payment-handling APIs, which create a more secure and streamlined payment experience; to shipping-coordination APIs, which instantly sort processing and delivery with the shipping companies, nearly every online shopping experience is made better thanks to APIs.

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How Does It Impact DAM?

Although most digital asset management solutions have an extensive library of out-of-the-box integrations, its near-impossible to instantly integrate with every platform out there. This is where an API becomes an important component of a DAM.

An API allows your developers to connect to the DAM’s endpoints to create custom integrations that connect your assets with existing productivity tools and desktop solutions. It gives you the flexibility to choose your ideal digital asset management vendor, even if they don’t have a required integration.

An API allows you to access a variety of DAM functions from within other platforms, to create a seamless experience for your users. Some common uses for an API include:

User Management: Create new user groups and add, delete or edit your users within other platforms, like your identity and access management solution.

Asset Distribution: Provide easy access to your assets from within other platforms and allow for various actions, like downloading, sharing, versioning and transforming.

Quick Uploading: Transfer new assets to your DAM directly from your desktop or another application, mapping relevant metadata.

Direct Publishing: Create embed links or upload your assets directly into your publishing platforms.

Lightbox Management: Create, list and share your lightboxes from within another platform.

Advanced Search: Find your assets using enterprise-level search capabilities, such as advanced filters and AI-generated tags, within other productivity tools.

Report Creation: Create customized reports based on information tracked within your DAM.

Getting Started with APIs

While this post covers the basics of what an API can do, its capabilities are endless. To learn more about the different functionality an API can provide for DAM, visit our Open API page.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.

For most digital asset management projects, success is determined by this simple question: Can your users find what they need? If the search experience is poor and users are not finding results in the first few attempts, no matter how great and complex the solution is, there will be issues with user adoption and implementation success will be jeopardized. Keep in mind that search goals are not always as simple as finding the latest logo or a specific brochure by name. Search results are meant to solve unique inquiries related to the user’s roles and make their workflow and processes more efficient.

When evaluating the search capabilities of different DAM platforms, it’s important to prepare several potential queries that correlate with the needs of your team. Your users need to be able to do more than just search for a single word and be able to intelligently narrow down their results in order to find what they are looking for within a reasonable timeframe. Some things they may want to consider in their search:

• How old is the asset – less than 7 days? The last month? Last Year?
• Who uploaded it?
• Is it flagged as final, approved or has another data point?
• Does the image have people in it?
• What’s the dominant color?
• Do you want to look at a specific area of the library?

By having the ability to include these types of search criteria, your users are able to improve their search and find what they need fast.

Let’s look at a few sample scenarios:

1. Client Deliverables- Specific Clients

A creative agency account manager needs to monitor and track the final projects delivered to one of their clients, Spa Express, to ensure accurate billing and reporting. Here are examples of what they would want to track: How many assets were uploaded for a specific client in a given month? How many videos and high-resolution photos were created this month against a set quota?

Search Criteria:
Client: Spa Express
File Type: TIFF, MP4
Delivered to Client: True
Status, Event, and Dates: Uploaded in Last 30 Days

2. Finding B-Roll – Specific Asset Types

A Hotel’s marketing coordinator is putting together some social videos for their location in Honolulu. They are looking for “B-roll” content from that specific location to build their videos. “B-roll” is set up as a custom tag that can be used to filter results.

Search Criteria:
File Type: Videos
B-Roll: True
Location: Honolulu

3. Photography Management – Specific Uploaders

A brand that works with multiple agencies is looking for an asset. Their creative designer doesn’t remember the specifics of that asset but knows that it was uploaded by a specific agency or its photographer and would have approved status.

Search Criteria:
Status, Event, and Dates: Approved
Action and User: Uploaded by [email protected]

4. Product Discovery – Specific Products

A furniture manufacturer frequently has to search for images that do not contain people. Searching manually through almost a million assets is not an option. Yet it’s an attribute that’s hard to capture manually. Leveraging cognitive services-powered search can help scan through those assets in a fraction of a second.

Search Criteria:
SKU: 12345, 6474511
Brand: American Signature
Material: Leather, Faux

5. Color Themes – Specific Colors

A home décor retailer runs frequent campaigns that are based on color themes. They need to easily find images with dominant colors in a specific tone. With Advanced Search, cognitive services would only show images that match the specific color tone.

Search Criteria:
Color: Yellow
Category: Couches/ Sofas
Category: Table, Storage

Just like Google’s original mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, at its simplest form, the purpose of a DAM initiative is to organize a company’s digital assets and related information to make them accessible and useful, whenever they’re needed.

When done properly, a DAM initiative can provide unrestricted access to resources and empower employees to achieve more.

Learn more about MediaValet’s Advanced Search and Cognitive Services capabilities!

From architecture to civil engineering, there are many industries that depend on the ability to build 2D and 3D Autodesk AutoCAD drawings and share those files with partners and clients. The issue that AutoCAD users face is that most of their partners don’t own a license to use Autodesk software, rendering it nearly impossible to view the files they’re sending.

What makes viewing AutoCAD files so difficult?

Typically, clients, partners and suppliers that need to view 2D & 3D AutoCAD files rely on various online CAD viewers. These tools allow viewers to look at DWG and many other drawing files from a web browser without owning a license to the original CAD application.

Everyone likes an easy, quick and efficient solution to technology compatibility issues, but working teams who share their AutoCAD files often encounter problems and find that these online viewers aren’t, in practice, as seamless as they promise to be. For instance, most firms create multiple kinds of CAD files for each project, and when an engineer needs to share various files types, multiple times a day, the process gets complicated.

The most common trouble arises from the fact that each online CAD file viewer handles different file types, but not all. Clients on the receiving end are left scrambling between different online viewers, trying to access the information they need to make decisions in a reasonable amount of time. The biggest cost ends up being time wasted from the ongoing process of finding, downloading and using the appropriate CAD viewer for each file type. This becomes even more problematic when new file versions are released that the clients’ online viewers don’t yet support. Clients are left seeking yet another online viewer.

This is why companies are turning towards a digital asset management system to help manage their AutoCAD files.

How to view AutoCAD files with a DAM

Let’s back up for a second – What is a digital asset management system?

A DAM is a technology solution that helps organizations manage their collection of digital assets (photos, videos, 3D files, etc.), and empower their employees with the media they need, when they need it. DAM allows employees to search, review, and deploy digital assets in a safe and secure way, improving production and collaboration processes.

The real benefit of using a DAM for viewing CAD files is that teams no longer need to export files from AutoCAD into a specific format. They can just keep the original files in the DAM, and from there, the DAM allows collaboration with any user that has been granted permission to view a particular file.

Organizations who create rich media drawings and images with AutoCAD tend to run into a series of issues, as described above, when trying to share files. But with a DAM system and an Autodesk AutoCAD viewer, these same organizations will be able to grant all partners, affiliates, and clients access to the 3D files they need, without the need for a separate viewer.

With an Autodesk AutoCAD viewer powered by Autodesk Forge, companies will benefit from:

1. No plugin or client download: The viewing audience, client or partner, simply log into an online portal for access to approved 2D & 3D files stored in the cloud.

2. Private sharing: Files can be shared privately with individual partners or clients, so viewing 2D & 3D files is a more private and highly-secure.

3. A central location for ALL rich media files: 2D & 3D files can be stored within the DAM to create a central media library of CAD files and related photos, videos, audio or other file types.

Key benefits of using A DAM to view AutoCAD files

Easy Viewing: Quickly and easily open and view high-resolution drawings, maps, and models without AutoCAD software.

High-Quality Printing: Enjoy the same print fidelity as the original design software.

Enhanced Communication: Changes can be shared with your extended team and stakeholders, even if they don’t have the original design software.

Increased Efficiency: Clients can quickly review 2D and 3D designs on their own desktop, and firms can communicate changes to their clients more easily.

Reduced Costs: Avoid misunderstandings with clients, and reduce time and money spent communicating ideas to clients.

Want to learn more about our Autodesk AutoCAD viewer? Book a demo now!