TABLE OF CONTENTS Digital asset management products fall into many categories by application and by function. Some have been developed to manage documents, some images, and some for video content. The content management products have been designed to explicitly handle the assets that are served from web sites. Many products have been enhanced, so that they can handle any form of digital content. In general, the more all-compassing the product, the higher the cost.
The driver for the general-purpose product is the rapid adoption of multiple channel distribution of information and content. As an example, a brand manager will need to control document templates, marketing collateral, images (product shots and logos), television and radio commercials, web pages, and now information for wireless devices: the third-generation phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Another example is a training department. Again, they use the full gamut of asset types: manuals and guides, images and illustrations, CD-ROMs with training movies, and now DVDs and streaming media.
Digital asset management helps to merge these different asset formats, so that they can be managed as a whole, with no regard for their format. Just as a distance-learning product combines video, audio, PowerPoint slides, and text into a web page, the control of a multimedia content repository can be implemented with digital asset management.
Document management is a mature product area. There have been systems in use since the 1980s. The users have tended to be large corporations especially those obliged to maintain proper archives (like pharmaceutical...
