Ralph Windsor on Digital Asset Management News – Telerik Add Digital Asset Management To Sitefinity:

“This does mark a clear point of convergence between WCM and DAM – an outcome which has been talked about for some time and now looks to be definitely happening. It’s interesting to note similar trends with DAM systems starting to offer WCM functionality as discussed earlier this week.”

Ralph refers to WebDAM adding an embedded CMS. Adobe CQ (sorry, Experience Manager) tries to go the other way, tacking a DAM system onto their CMS (missing the opportunity to integrate with existing DAMs, and having issues). The free Koken is an interesting hybrid; it looks like a DAM but focuses on publishing and has an editor for essays/pages.

Like most DAM vendors, we did integrations with various Web content management systems at customer request (WordPress, Drupal, red.web, redFACT). Some are more elegant than others, but it’s the usual integration pains – different APIs, data models, UI extensibility points… And the fundamental problem of duplicated data that has to be kept in sync.

This is similar to the editorial systems (for print publications) we’re integrating, but the WCM / CMS market is unique in that it has a lot more active players. And it’s moving faster; new vendors and versions emerge and requirements are changing quickly.

In an ideal world, there would be both a DAM value chain and a WCM value chain: Well-architected software would allow us to use a DAM as the backend for a CMS. From the CMS, we could take the editing and administration frontend, and the Web rendering and delivery functionality, and bolt these onto a DAM content store that contains all of our assets. (Without having to duplicate the data.) DAMs are usually better at search, scaling to millions of assets, file format and metadata handling. (CMIS might be meant for that, but I haven’t heard of it being used that way. Did I miss something?)