Your team has worked extra hard to release new collateral that was requested by the sales team. Following company protocol, you upload all the final assets to your DAM, and categorize and keyword them appropriately for discoverability. You then send out an email to the sales team letting them know that the new assets have been uploaded.

Mission accomplished!

You’ve done your part to get this new collateral in front of the sales team. But then, a week later, you’re surprised to see that very few people have used the new material. After a few inquiries, you discover that many of the salespeople missed your original email and didn’t realize the new assets were ready.

Even when you upload completed assets to your DAM, it can still be a challenge to educate your fellow teams on when and where to access them. By putting your most important assets front and center, you can save your team significant time and enable them to focus on what matters most.

In this post, we highlight Pinned Searches and how they’re being used by customers to distribute content to their users and increase productivity.

What is a Pinned Search?

A Pinned Search is a feature that allows users to save a search and pin it to their DAM’s category tree. These Pinned Searches can be added for yourself, a specific group or the entire organization. Pinned Searches can be simple, like a text search, or complex, including specific filters, like file type, asset rating, uploaded date and more.

A key benefit of Pinned Searches is that they’re dynamic. They will continue to update in real-time against the search criteria you set. What this means is, if any new assets are uploaded to the DAM that meet the criteria, they will automatically be added to that Pinned Search.

Use Cases for Pinned Searches

Pinned Searches have a number of benefits for both administrators and end-users. They support daily tasks and workflows by allowing users to access high-value assets in an efficient manner. Instead of having users construct their own search queries or browse through numerous categories to find what they are looking for, a Pinned Search will make the assets they need easily accessible, right within their category tree.

As Pinned Searches serve both administrators and end-users, they’re fantastic in supporting a number of use cases. Let’s dive into some of our customers’ favorite ways to use Pinned Searches.

Campaign Distribution

A higher education organization is preparing a campaign for its 2020 summer enrolment. The creative team has finalized all the campaign collateral, and the VP of Marketing needs to ensure that the appropriate departments have access to these new assets. However, the VP of Marketing wants to ensure that only the final asset versions are accessible. She searches the name of the campaign “Summer Enrolment 2020″ and restricts the file types to only include JPGs, PNGs and PDFs. To ensure that only the latest, approved assets are included in this search, she also adjusts the asset status to Approved in the last month.

This search is saved, then pinned to the digital, email and social media marketing user groups’ category tree. Each marketing department can now easily access all assets related to this specific campaign, without having to search for the assets themselves.

Product Launches

A fridge manufacturer has released a new line of fridges and wants to ensure that the sales team has access to the new product collateral, including spec sheets, images, product manuals and flyers. The Head of Marketing has created a category specifically for the new product collateral and has also created a custom attribute for the SKU number, which will be applied to all the new assets.

To help share the product collateral for the new fridge line, the Head of Marketing performs a search for the new SKU number, also making sure to include the new category. From here, he creates a Pinned Search and shares it with the sales user group. The sales team can now easily access all of the new product collateral straight from within their category tree.

Contractor Management

A tourism agency that uses contract photographers is looking for an easy way to access the latest assets uploaded by each photographer. The DAM administrator performs a search for assets that were uploaded by a specific photographer – in this case, John Smith – within the last 7 days.

Instead of performing this search on a regular basis, the admin user saves these search criteria and pins it to her category tree. Every Monday, the admin user uses the Pinned Search to quickly review the assets uploaded by John Smith in the last week.

Expired Asset Management

An administrator is struggling to manage expired assets in the DAM and is looking for a solution to help him identify newly expired assets quickly. To help stay on top of these assets, the administrator performs a search for assets that have expired in the last 7 days. He then saves this search and pins to his category tree, as well as the marketing user group’s category tree.

As assets expire over time, they will automatically be added to this Pinned Search, ensuring they’re easily visible to the admin and marketing team. By creating this Pinned Search, expired assets can be more efficiently managed, archived and renewed.

Want to see how Pinned Searches in action? Make sure to check out our webinar Get Your Team Up, Running and Thriving Remotely with DAM in 48 Hours, where we demonstrate how to set up Pinned Searches for various use cases. You can access the webinar on-demand here.

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.

While there are a number of cloud-storage solutions out there, many aren’t equipped to support customized user access needs. What does this mean for organizations? It means they often need to restrict access to their solutions to prevent the distribution of sensitive documents and other materials. As a result, users need to constantly request the latest documents, photos, logos and more. It’s proven to be a challenge for many teams and organizations, as it takes up precious time and puts a halt on productivity and collaboration.

With MediaValet’s Category Access Management feature, organizations are able to create an unlimited number of user groups and customize their permissions and access levels, including their ability to access, share and download specific sets of assets. Here are four ways that MediaValet customers are using Category Access Management (CAM) to support their category use cases.

Region-Specific Distribution

A national food chain has franchises across the globe. The head office needs to ensure that each franchise will only access marketing material and promotions that are relevant to their market. The admin creates a custom user group for each franchise region, with access limited to categories (folders) specific to each location.

Role-Specific Access

A healthcare organization just hired a new social media coordinator. While they require access to marketing assets, the VP of Marketing wants to limit their access to sub-categories that are relevant to their job, preventing unnecessary exposure to sensitive material. The DAM admin limits the social media coordinator to only view sub-categories that were specified by the VP of Marketing.

Partner Enablement

Each Spring, a furniture retailer releases a product catalogue for their new collection. The retailer works with a partner agency to produce the catalogue. The DAM admin creates a category exclusively for the partner agency to access brand logos, product imagery, spec sheets, and brand fonts. With this new category and level of access, the DAM admin can ensure that the partner agency only has access to the relevant assets required for the product catalogue.

Collaboration Categories

A national fridge manufacturer has an upcoming campaign for their new line. Their DAM admin gives the marketing team and the creative exclusive access to a work-in-progress category, where they can work together on developing materials for this new campaign while keeping the category from all other users until the materials are finalized. Once everything is completed and approved, the DAM admin updates the sales team’s category access permissions to include the campaign folder, where they can find relevant materials to promote the new fridges.

Ready to get started?

Want to learn more about Category Access Management and how it can support your use case? Check out our CAM use case brochure.

For marketing teams today, there’s the expectation to provide visual content to customers – whether it’s an infographic, imagery, or 4K video. Teams have reported spending significant time and resources creating customized content for their audiences. But, despite content creation being a priority, organizations still struggle to find and share their assets among their departments and teams. In fact, in a survey by Nintex, 49% of professionals reported they have trouble locating documents, while others have reported issues sharing high-resolution assets due to size restrictions.

Instead of spending too much time searching for an asset or re-sending through various communication platforms, here are two ways that MediaValet enables teams to distribute their assets.

1. Web Galleries

A web gallery is an online gallery, which can be used to share and access a set of curated assets. Users have the ability to manage access to these galleries, using passwords and expiry dates. These galleries can be shared via email or an automatically generated URL, making them easily accessible to fellow team members.

Web galleries are a preferred sharing method for one-off projects or short-term campaigns, as they’re not dynamic with the DAM, meaning any asset that’s updated within the DAM will not be updated in the web gallery.

Example Use Case

A global software organization is hosting its annual sales event, in which all of its global employees travel to attend. As a follow up to the event, the office manager will share event photos with all attendees. Once the event is complete, the office manager compiles all photos into a web gallery.

To ensure that only attendees can access these files, a password and an expiry date has been set. This web gallery is then shared with all attendees using a URL link, providing them access to the collection of assets.

2. Branded Portals

Branded Portals are a great way to share collections of assets while staying on brand. Users have the ability to fully customize their portal with their preferred highlight color, header photo and logo. In addition, these portals can be shared via a customizable URL, providing another way for users to maintain their brand identity. Users can also easily organize their portal by sections with an easy-to-use page builder, giving the freedom to section content by asset type, campaign, event and more.

Similar to Web Galleries, users can determine who can access a portal by setting up an access key, ensuring their assets are always protected.

Branded Portals provide a dynamic way to share assets. With two-way synchronization between your portal and the DAM, there’s no need to manually upload or swap-out assets. This ensures that only your most-up-to-date and approved content is displayed in the portal, making it ideal for work-in-progress projects, media kits and other longer-term initiatives.

Example Use-Case

Hill University has a centralized marketing department on campus, which supports the marketing initiatives of various faculties and student committees. In order to support these groups, each year the university shares a media kit that includes their current logos, event photos, faculty headshots and purchased stock images for digital campaigns.

Using a Branded Portal, Hill University’s Head of Marketing can curate and share the collection of assets in a customized portal that maintains the school’s brand identity. The portal is organized into specific sections for logos, event photos and stock images, making it easy for other users to find and access the content they need. By adding an expiry date and access key, the portal holding the media kit is protected from public view and will automatically expire in time for a new media kit to be released.

Web galleries and Branded Portals are both helpful tools for working with your internal teams, as well as remote teams, like agencies and other offices. For 4 more examples of how Branded Portals address business cases, check out our post: How to Use Brand Portals: 4 Example Business Cases. Ready to get going with Branded Portals immediately? Start the conversation here.

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.

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.

The Annual DAM Trends Report

Learn about the benefits that come from implementing the right digital asset management and how to get started.

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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.

Digital asset management initiatives usually involve multiple stakeholders representing different organizational divisions, such as creative, marketing, and IT. In this series, we’re highlighting some of the common stakeholders we see involved in a DAM project and discussing their unique challenges and priorities.

The VP of IT is usually responsible for overseeing all technology projects within an organization and making relevant changes to optimize the organization’s ability to meet their business goals, as well as reducing business risks or downtime. They oversee the research, development, and management of technology portfolios for each department, as well as audit and track existing technologies. Ultimately, the VP of IT implements and enforces policies and procedures to ensure all executed technology will improve business processes and increase user satisfaction.

In this section we will cover

• Goals and Challenges of the VP of IT
• VP of IT Impact on a DAM Project
• Benefits of a DAM to the VP of IT

Goals and Challenges of the VP of IT

The VP of IT typically focuses on these three primary goals to achieve marketing success.

1. Introducing technologies aligned with organization-wide goals

The VP of IT is accountable for corporate-level technology vision and implementation across the organization. In addition to finding solutions that align with budget requirements, the VP of IT also needs to prioritize technologies that will drastically improve business processes, increase organizational efficiency and provide a high return on investment.

The VP of IT needs to analyze which technology will best meet the organization’s needs today, and also scale in the future as the company grows and priorities change.

2. Ensuring systems meet security and compliance requirements

Typically, when individual departments are looking to implement new technology, they’re concerned with the functional components, like the usability of the platform, how features align with their use case, and available integrations. The IT department, however, is focused on critical, security-related components, like regional and industry compliance (HIPAA, FERPA, etc.) and organization-required security measures (SOC2, Single-Sign-On, etc.).

This means that in addition to meeting the functionality requirements, selected platforms need to meet IT’s security, scalability, and compliance requirements. They also need to conform to the larger organizational goals and roadmaps.

3. Increasing technology adoption and solution satisfaction

The IT department is ultimately responsible for the company’s employee and stakeholder efficiency and productivity. This means ensuring that implemented solutions are adopted to their full potential and any issues are resolved within the SLAs (service level agreements) established for the end users. It’s crucial for solution support, onboarding, and training options to align with IT’s expectations.

The VP of IT analyzes platforms based on their likelihood of achieving high adoption and meeting established SLAs, often prioritizing systems that offer their own comprehensive training and adoption programs.

VP of IT Impact on a DAM Project

While digital asset management projects typically originate in the marketing department, they still need to align with the organization’s overall infrastructure.

The VP of IT needs to evaluate how a DAM initiative will affect IT support SLAs, align with the overall technology roadmap, and impact departmental efficiency and collaboration.

Here are questions for the VP of IT to consider when making decisions about a DAM initiative:

1. Are marketing-related storage costs (media, content, photography, digital archive) growing faster than the IT budget, as large volumes of video and media content are consistently added?

2. Are IT and support team SLAs being stretched as marketing demands increase for new media format support, management, and sharing?

3. Do users have an optimal experience when previewing, sharing, and collaborating on business-critical content? Are there technology-related bottlenecks preventing users from being productive?

4. Is the total cost of governance increasing as new content and digital assets are being stored across personal storage and unverified cloud systems? What’s the impact of asset loss?

5. If the company’s digital assets contain sensitive information, are they managed and governed in a compliant manner? Are existing content storage systems compliant?

6. Do you have redundant digital files (videos, media, images, content, PPTs, PDFs) across multiple hard drives and storage? How does this affect storage costs?

7. Is there anything preventing the organization from using cloud-based solutions? Is there a preference for the type of cloud platform?

8. Which cloud platforms, AI vendors, and integrations best align with the overall IT strategy?

Benefits of a DAM to the VP of IT

When approaching a VP of IT with the benefits of digital asset management, it’s important to think high level. Here are some benefits to consider highlighting:

Enterprise-Level Security: A DAM offers various security measures, such as triple redundancy, geo-replication, single sign-on, and more to ensure that the company’s assets are safe from loss due to human error or natural disaster.

Comprehensive Compliance: DAM cloud providers, like Microsoft Azure, deliver a large set of compliance certifications and attestations, such as FIPS, HIPPA, FERPA, and ISO 27018, and offers data residency in over 40 regions across the world.

Scalability: A DAM is able to scale endlessly and adapt to internal changes easily, as the organization grows and changes.

Support and Training: A DAM vendor typically offers support and training as part of their solution, allowing the IT department to focus on other initiatives.

Reduced TCO for Storage: A DAM reduces costs for storage hardware and removes the costs for upgrades, maintenance, and disaster recovery.

This is the second of a three-part series highlighting common stakeholders you need to get on board with digital asset management. Don’t forget to also look at the priorities of the CMO and Creative Operations.

Here’s some other helpful content, to help you build the business case for DAM project across your organization:

• ROI Calculator and Business Case
• Key Stakeholder Benefits Deck
• 3 Categories of Users to Consider

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!

As a CTO, I evaluate emerging technologies that have the potential to massively transform or disrupt the industry that we are in. So, I try to gain a comprehensive understanding of the technology, look at how various industries are adopting it, and determine if it can provide a significant competitive advantage for our company. If the likelihood of transforming or disrupting the industry is high, then a strategy needs to be formulated to leverage the technology in a manner that quickly brings value to our customers and the market overall.

Let’s take the advent of cloud computing as an example. Eight years ago, we determined that cloud computing would change the Digital Asset Management (DAM) space by radically reducing the cost structure while materially increasing security, redundancy, and accessibility. We explored our options in cloud infrastructure and figured we could develop a cloud-based SaaS offering that had unmatched scalability, reliability, and resiliency. We asked ourselves – “What is our cloud strategy?” After looking at the DAM market and our options for delivering a cloud-based DAM system, we decided to adopt the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud offering, Microsoft Azure, as it was being developed to cater to the enterprise market. This decision was a landmark point in our history as it not only allowed us to focus on building and operating the best software we could – and not waste resources on maintaining and supporting IT infrastructure, but it also gave us a major competitive advantage that continues to this day. We have executed our cloud strategy as planned and we are continuing to build on it each quarter.

Blockchain and the Future of DAM

Blockchain is perhaps the next technological marvel after cloud computing that has reached significant levels of adoption and has raised substantial interest not only in consumer-based applications but for the enterprise as well. Enterprise-class blockchain technologies such as Ethereum, Corda, and Hyperledger have grown rapidly in support and adoption over the past 12 months. The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance was formed earlier this year with members such as Microsoft, Banco Santander, National Bank of Canada, ING, and Cornell University’s research group; Corda was developed by R3 and 80 of the world’s largest financial institutions; And, Hyperledger was spearheaded by IBM and is supported by well-known technology companies such as Intel and Oracle and financial services firms such as JP Morgan, ABN AMRO and Wells Fargo.

A new wave of blockchain technologies has introduced the concept of Smart Contracts and is now being referred to as Blockchain 2.0. Just like we saw the future of the DAM space changing with the emergence of PaaS cloud computing, I believe that Blockchain 2.0 will herald a new era for DAM.

The Internet of Value

At its core, blockchain is a secure, decentralized, and distributed ledger system that records transactions across many computers. The validity of a transaction is determined by the consensus of the various computers or nodes in the network instead of having a central trusted or official record. These transactions represent value being transferred from one entity to another. Because of this, several thought leaders have coined the term “Internet of Value”.

Digital assets possess value and they are used as a medium of exchange. Cryptography is used to facilitate and secure these transactions. Hence, cryptocurrency, one form of digital assets, has become a buzzword in the financial services industry. When people talk about blockchain, it often gets associated with FinTech because of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. However, FinTech is not the only industry that blockchain will affect in the future.

For example, the creative services industry also deals with digital assets that carry value, media assets (i.e. photos, graphics, videos, audio, etc.). Intellectual property ownership and attribution establish value for media assets and Blockchain technologies can be used to verify the transfer of ownership of media assets or even just the right to access and use such assets. With the introduction of SmartContracts in BlockChain 2.0, I believe various types of supply chains in almost every conceivable vertical, not only in FinTech or MarTech, will be massively disrupted in the very near future. Imagine the possibility of having computer protocols facilitate, verify and enforce the execution of contracts in all buyer-supplier relationships.

Blockchain in the Media Asset Lifecycle

As I have come to realize over the last few years in serving our customers, digital asset management systems (DAMs) go well beyond ingesting, cataloging, securing, storing, transforming, sharing, and retrieving media assets. DAMs have evolved significantly and now, in many cases, facilitate the management of the entire lifecycle of digital media assets – from womb to tomb, from media asset creation to archival. In every stage of the lifecycle, the ownership and attribution of the media assets may change. This is where Blockchain technologies come in.

To illustrate this point, here’s a simple example: When a company commissions a photo shoot, the photographer may submit 100 photos of which the company has paid to only select and purchase the rights to 10 images. Until the images are selected and purchased, the ownership of all 100 images belongs to the photographer. Stored in the photographer’s cloud-based media library, the buyer will log in and selects the photos from the shoot that they want to purchase. Upon completion and approval of the selection by the photographer, the selected photos will be transferred to the company’s media library and SmartContracts record and facilitate the transfer of ownership and the agreed-to rights.

During the content creation process, it’s not unusual for multiple parties to be contracted by a company to deliver a single piece of content and SmartContracts will allocate the shared ownership rights amongst the various creators of the content. For example, in a video production for an ad, the company can hire a director, videographer, crew, modeling agency, etc. SmartContracts can be used to allocate and enforce the stake of each content creator in the production of the content.

In the case of companies that own content, they can easily transfer ownership of their content to other parties using SmartContracts in the same way. For example, a digital agency or a video production outfit can decide to sell content that they own to another company. They can also decide to license content to another company that publishes or distributes the content. These transactions, the transfer or sharing of rights between parties, are all recorded and executed using SmartContracts on a Blockchain network.

What’s Next?

There are three types of Blockchain networks – Public, Private, and Consortium. Public networks are completely open and anyone can join and participate. Private networks are typically used by companies for internal purposes within business units with known participants. A Consortium is a partially decentralized network where participants are known to the members of the consortium and the consensus process is controlled by a pre-selected set of nodes in the network.

The massively transformative vision for Blockchain in the DAM industry is for content distribution to be decentralized and democratized in a public blockchain network where creators of media assets can publish, broadcast, and distribute their work and get compensated for the value they generate. This, however, at this point in time, is more of a moonshot than a bankable strategy. I think, what we need right now, is a federation of digital asset media libraries that can serve as a distributed and decentralized ‘system of record’ for digital media in an enterprise Blockchain ecosystem. This will establish concrete media asset ownership rights and attribution for media assets as a first step before we tackle the much larger and more complicated content licensing and distribution space.

Our first step towards this future is anchoring MediaValet’s Blockchain strategy on Ethereum. Using SmartContracts and cryptlets on an Azure-based, enterprise-class, blockchain consortium network, we will allow tenants within the MediaValet digital asset management platform to participate. Once achieved, we’ll open up membership to other platforms that are considered “systems of record”.

With the pending release of Microsoft’s new Coco Framework for enterprise blockchain networks in early 2018, my team and I will be among the first to evaluate its promise of more performant throughput, more flexible confidentiality models, and more distributed governance. If these prove true, our timeline of how quickly blockchain will affect the DAM space will shorten dramatically.

We believe blockchain will have a major impact on the future of the DAM space, and we plan, as we are doing with many other new technologies, to be amongst the vanguard to commercialize the technology.

To learn more, check out our brochure “How to Leverage Blockchain in DAM“

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!