Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems

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I heard about Digitial Asset Management (DAM) Systems in a virtual conference session today and am intrigued.

I work in higher education, specifically as the marketing strategist for our Campus Recreation, and manage a team of student workers who produce our content. Obviously, working with students means our team changes – at least slightly – every year, as students graduate, get other jobs, transfer, etc. As a result, we lose A LOT. We’ll often have final approved PDFs of a flyer, for example, but not the working .psd file. Or if we DO have the .psd project, we definitely don’t have the individual elements to allow us to simply update the text/content without creating a whole new design.

Having a DAM system seems like the logical solution to this. We use Teamwork for project management and Agorapulse for social media management. Is there a good DAM System that integrates well with both of these tools?

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Hey Brittany!

Thanks for posting. Looking forward to hearing all the answers and it’s awesome to see someone in Higher Ed here :slight_smile:

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@brittany.murray did the speaker recommend a specific DAM platform?

From my agency experience, our Asana tasks would have sub-tasks reminding team members to save files in a dedicated client folder on a shared drive.

At the end of the year, our IT team would back up the servers and archive old client data so that we’d have room for new clients.

I’d be interested to learn more about other integrations and workflows. Tagging @AskYvi who might also have some insight.

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My first thought when you mentioned Higher Ed made me think of a simple Google Drive with dedicated folders that each student could access, as google seems to be the easiest thing to do. And I’ve seen a lot of schools head in the direction of giving students chromebooks with gmails already made for them anyways. Especially since its low cost or free, depending on the space of course.

An open source one I found is called Nuxeo. Says they’re used at EA (among other companies) and EA is a major player in the gaming industry.

The other one I see being recommended a lot is Bynder, although they’re not free and their cost is per customer basis… Although I read somewhere it starts at like $450. I don’t know what type of budget you have for these systems.

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The speaker worked for Canto, which looks like an awesome tool. Unfortunately, it doesn’t currently integrate with Agorapulse or Teamwork, though.

Building in the “Save” reminders as subtasks is a good idea, though! I add subtasks to projects in Teamwork, so I could always just add that.

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Thanks! We were using Google Drive when I first started but ran out of space. The University pays for the Microsoft 365 Suite, so we’ve moved our files to SharePoint since we have unlimited storage there. It’s just challenging getting students to use it since it requires an extra step. :smile:

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What about Agorapulse’s asset library? Asset Library | Agorapulse

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Digital Asset Management can actually be quite simple!
First, HE should always be the one having assets. The biggest mistake I see is going “the easy route” and having students and team members have the assets in their accounts and share from there, which leaves you with losing assets when they leave.

I prefer GDrive due to the flexibility and capabilities to automate process and DAM structure creation.

I actually mention our process in my SMP article “5 Must Know Workflows for Social Media Managers” that talks about automating DAM structure creation and even renaming and uploading of assets for backup so they are not just attached to the task in your project management system.

The biggest issue tho usually is not the actual management of digital assets but rather not having repeatable processes that simplify DAM combined with human-friendly SOPs so everyone knows how to be the best at what they do.
Combined with a project management tool that can handle being the single source of truth and easily link to assets, while automating the workflow. Teamwork will fall short on that one.

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APs Asset Library is great for SM management, but it’s not a long-term solution for digital asset management.
SM is usually just part of a bigger process. Using the AP Library as single source for your assets is impossible as there are more assets when creating content than just images.
It’s also not a way to back up and store all your assets.
This then causes team members to have to go into multiple tools, accounts, and digital locations to find everything they need - IF they’ll even be able to ever find everything…

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Thanks for the ping @stephanie. you know I love me a good DAM conversation :wink:

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I see. I figured they could store more than just images since on their page they stated “photos, audio, video, or documents”

But I could be missing other asset types that do not fit into that category :slight_smile:

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YES! So many times, I’ll have people tell me to “just update the dates on last year’s flyer,” but the student who created it has graduated and didn’t leave us with the working file. We were actually using Google Drive, but we quickly ran out of space, and our university already pays for all employees to have Microsoft 365 and is urging us all to move to OneDrive/SharePoint. Do you have strong feelings one way or another on using SharePoint as a DAM system?

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I am writing a book right now and the publishing house is using SharePoint… let me just say, it has not been efficient in any way shape, or form…
I have quite strong feelings when it comes to Microsoft products :wink:

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Sigh. That’s disappointing to hear. But I feel similarly about Microsoft overall. I’m still coping with my work computer being a PC and not a Mac. :joy:

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It’s not the most efficient one, how ever… clear Standard Operating Procedures and Workflows can make any tool work.

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Excellent question Brittany! I’m curious about this topic too as I’ve had clients who have asked me about digital asset management recently.