TABLE OF CONTENTS In this chapter, we will take a look at the DAM systems on the market. It should give you an overview that will enable you to narrow down the vast number of different programs to a few that fit your needs. You can evaluate these as a next step to get a good basis for your final decision.
Many vendors claim that their software offers Digital Asset Management, but what each vendor defines as DAM varies widely. As a comparison, a simple text-editing program such as Notepad or Wordpad might be considered a word processing application, although it is nowhere close in functionality to applications such as Microsoft Word. With Digital Asset Management this is a bit different, and almost opposite Windows or Macintosh file systems can be considered DAM solutions, but usually aren t labeled as such. There are, in fact, quite a lot of applications that are not categorized as DAM but offer DAM functionality nevertheless. Image libraries, for example, usually aren t filed under that category, but they clearly are DAM solutions.
For an overview of the different types of DAM solutions, see Chapter 2, Section 2.5. Now we will look at the scale of different DAM solutions.
In the first part of this chapter, the systems are differentiated by the number of users they support. In the second part, they are differentiated by their complexity and their capabilities. The most commonly used category names will be explained here. Finally, in the third part of...
