Distributed Rich Content-Centric Visual Collaboration & Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Due largely to the Covid-19 pandemic, work conditions over the last few years have pushed people, teams, and companies to become highly distributed. Remote and hybrid team collaboration rapidly became the norm in many places. Distributed collaboration is generally centered around content. In the majority of cases, distributed rich content-centric collaboration is still tied to screen sharing. Since 2019, the rise of distributed collaboration tools is a testament to the fact that there is a market need for more engaging solutions.?

There are too many rich content formats (images, videos, etc.), and there lies the hard engineering and UX problem. For example, UX modalities for multi-party distributed co-editing of text (a.k.a. multiple people working on one text file simultaneously) is quite a bit different than that of other content types like images. Multiple people co-editing one single image is probably not something desired by the user; however, if there are multiple images in a single inspiration-board, and multiple users want to edit a unique image in the inspiration-board at the same time, then several common use cases exist. Depending on the type of content, distributed multi-party content collaboration poses various engineering challenges in a variety of areas; architecture, design, performance and scalability of infrastructure, application, and client-server protocol, just to name a few.???

The size, sophistication, complexity of organization workflow, and budget for content storage, determines if an organization chooses a specialized Digital Asset Management systems (DAM) or an online file storage (OFS) systems like Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc. The DAM space is highly fragmented with over 200 DAM solutions available with a variety of specialization options. DAM solutions also tend to be very expensive, complex, and require expertise to manage effectively. On the other hand, OFS is far more cost effective, but it comes with far less DAM equivalent functionality. OFS systems are not a DAM replacement, but they provide a cost-effective solution for small business, and less complex operations.?

To effectively collaborate on rich content, users first need to discover the assets from their data repositories. The discoverability of rich content is one of the core problems that needs to be solved across the industry. A big contributor to this is the limited or poor metadata tagging of rich assets/content stored in a DAM or OFS. Traditionally, organizations relied on people to tag assets, which is rather cumbersome, expensive, and easy to ignore. As a result, content/asset tagging is often an afterthought which can have large implications later in the collaboration process. To address this problem, one recent trend is to use AI driven content/asset tagging. AI can do generic asset tagging, however unless additional steps are taken to overlay content domain specific nomenclature, AI generated generic tags often have limited effectiveness in improving content discoverability.

Another common problem with seamless and effective collaboration of rich content stored in DAMs is that users must jump through hoops to get content in and out of the system. It often requires the use of an overwhelmingly complex UX paradigm that is common in DAM software. That’s why many enterprise users try to stay away from interacting with their DAM, unless they must.?

Due to the issues outlined above, even though organizations spend enormous sums of money to acquire and install DAM solutions, the full potential and effectiveness of these systems has yet to be fully harnessed by employees and customers to push the boundaries of our digital economy ecosystem.?

Here at Bluescape ( https://www.bluescape.com/ ), we have been taking steps to alleviate many of the pains of distributed rich content-centric collaboration. We will be unveiling some exciting updates at Adobe Summit 2023 ( https://summit.adobe.com/na/ )?and at DAM Los Angeles ( https://www.henrystewartconferences.com/events/dam-la-2023 ). If you are struggling to get the most out of your DAM solution and would like your assets to be easier to search, discover, and share we encourage you to visit the Bluescape team and learn more.

#digitalassetmanagement #whiteboard #visualcollaboration #aem #dam #designcollaboration #imagesearch #digitalmarketing #distributedcomputing