2019-06-27: Learning to manage my own expectations: When I show people new software, I don’t expect them to like it just because we put so much work into it. They will rightfully be skeptical, ask hard questions, care for how hard it will be to adapt their way of working. UX is king.
2019-06-21: “Undocumented features” are pretty common. How do we call the opposite – features that are documented but aren’t actually implemented in the software?
2019-06-19: Excellent move by @woodwingsoft to publish all #WoodWingXperience conference videos and presentations via their #DAM: https://xperience.swivle.cloud/ Now if only the @swivledam / Elvis DAM portal UI supported deep links to assets…
2019-06-19: The joys of “agile” development: “I have a suggestion regarding the SQL schema you proposed yesterday…” “IT’S TOO LATE TO CHANGE IT. I ALREADY CREATED THE (empty, tiny) TABLE (on the development server)!”
2019-06-19: It’s sad that @Blendle stops selling individual articles. If I‘m interested in a special topic which ten different publications write about once a year, and they‘re all subscription-only, how can I read these articles? https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/micropayments-for-news-pioneer-blendle-is-pivoting-from-micropayments/
2019-06-18: I use this (free, > 50 megapixel) image to test zoom functionality in #DAM systems: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Small_bodies_of_the_Solar_System.jpg What’s your favorite (publicly available) large test image?
2019-06-18: Developers may argue to „keep it simple“. But once they implement (or even just plan) complexity, they are emotionally attached to it and will resist „making it simpler than it was“: „We might need it later“, „keeping that feature does no harm“, „never change a running system“…
2019-06-16: I’m currently learning “Git Flow” – I guess I have to spend a few semesters at Hogwarts to learn all the git spells… This cheat sheet helps a little: https://gist.github.com/JamesMGreene/cdd0ac49f90c987e45ac
2019-06-16: Sorry @Canto, but I’m going to unsubscribe from your English blog https://www.canto.com/blog/ – you keep posting very shallow “content” on a daily basis. I assume you’re writing for Googlebot, not for actual humans interested in #DAM or your products.
2019-06-12: “And so we compromise on schedule, or quality, or on the pace of our days. We compromise on our standards, on our expectations and on what matters right now. You can’t produce without compromises.” https://seths.blog/2019/06/100-compromises/
2019-06-06: At work, variety can boost creativity and problem-solving skills: Switch between screen, paper and whiteboard. Work alone, then collaborate with different people. Don‘t always meet in the same room. Go outside for a walk to think / talk things through.
2019-06-04: „As ever in DAM, I get the sense that the buy-side is way ahead of the sell-side in terms of their thinking – and getting increasingly frustrated at having to endlessly explain the basics of what this means and the implications it entails.“ – @daydreamuk https://digitalassetmanagementnews.org/features/henry-stewart-dam-ny-2019-attendee-feedback/
2019-05-30: To the nice ways to visualize UI interaction flows – see https://blog.prototypr.io/ux-flows-and-why-theyre-so-confusing-26670b9089d4 – I’d add a “street map” approach: A click that’s required = traffic light, a choice to select = junction or roundabout, text input = toll booth etc. Routing algorithms could calculate travel time.
2019-05-30: I learned that @Tamedia has a “PUX” team – “Product & User Experience”: https://www.tamedia.ch/en/group/product-user-experience/overview They seem to be doing a great job. Maybe we should hire them to help us design our apps?
2019-05-29: Hans Fermont of PubliQare talks about their PQCloud offering https://publiqare.com/pqcloud/ , helping customers get started quickly with Elvis, Enterprise and related tools running in the @awscloud cloud. #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-29: The Elvis DAM workflows at @CiplaRSA rely heavily on status metadata, says @SvanHeerden. The screenshot shows Webhook-triggered emails on status change. Full customer story: https://www.woodwing.com/inspiration/success-stories/cipla-south-africa #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-29: Anybody else doing @woodwingsoft Elvis DAM integrations in #PHP? Let’s talk about sharing (and maybe “open sourcing”) code! #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-28: NEXT runs two large Elvis clusters. @russpierpoint explains why – hi-res production and Web site delivery requirements are pretty different… #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-28: Some of these „Old DAM“ problems sound familiar… Jason Braker of @nextofficial describes their journey from Cumulus to Elvis. #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-28: Developer: “No problem if that feature doesn’t work, nobody’s using it.” Guess what happens next…
2019-05-28: Fast-paced, detailed demo by Sean Keefe of PubWorX of their @woodwingsoft Elvis “Photo Portal”. Instead of the built-in “Request upload” button, they collect metadata via Google Forms, automatically create an Elvis “share link” & send email to the photographer. #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-28: “Connect the product and the customer at the emotional level”: @cliffcrosbie talks about retail’s path to customer experience, including hiring for attitude – “people who really want to work with the customer”. Can we learn from that in our IT departments? #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-28: Collaboration is a recurring topic at #WoodWingXperience: comments, image annotations, collaborative editing… @creativecloud building a @MicrosoftTeams integration seems like the right approach; collab built into a single application doesn’t help people collaborate across tools.
2019-05-28: Interesting @Tamedia workaround for InDesign documents taking longer to load when the editorial system runs in the cloud: Move the InDesign client application into the cloud, too, using @awscloud AppStream. #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-28: Marco di Bernardo of @Tamedia: The biggest challenge is usability – getting all the different tools to work together well, so people don‘t avoid using them. #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-28: While @woodwingsoft „has grown from traditional publishers, 65% of the customer base already is from brand management / marketing“, says @paterson_ross. Coping with diverging requirements will be a major product management challenge. #WoodWingXperience
2019-05-25: I‘ll tweet my conference highlights (time and battery life permitting). The official hashtag is #WoodWingXperience (according to the booklet). https://twitter.com/woodwingsoft/status/1131103995508994048
2019-05-24: The new masonry view in @woodwingsoft Elvis #DAM 6.32 looks great:
2019-05-24: Content marketers won against librarians? Sad that @Widen “consolidated” the @digitalassetmgt site, taking hundreds of #DAM articles off the Web. 243 @PlanetDAM links are now dead. They say they’ll restore selected articles. How about preserving them all?
2019-05-23: I’m new to @Docker, but my first “containerized” Symfony 4 application was up and running in a few hours thanks to blog posts like http://geekyplatypus.com/making-your-dockerised-php-application-even-better/ and @phpstorm’s excellent Docker support…
2019-05-23: Excellent “Webhooks with PHP” talk by @lornajane – that’s where I learned about @ngrokapp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBlmEfljrn0
2019-05-16: On rights: “What is or isn’t usable is always based on the particular user and the context in which they want to use a piece of media. Also, it’s not enough to show a journalist what they can and can’t use; they need to know why a piece of content is ‚red‘ ‚green‘ or ‚amber‘.” https://iptc.org/news/iptc-2019-spring-meeting-day-3/
2019-05-13: Give me both the pros and cons if you want to convince me of something. There always are disadvantages. If you don’t tell me about them, either you haven’t thought things through, believe the hype, or you want to manipulate me.
2019-05-09: „… die Pläne für neue Workflows im Redaktionsalltag sowie Neuerungen in den zugehörigen Tools – von der Themenplanung über den Texteditor bis zur Archivierung – zeigt ein Board ‚Editorial Solutions‘.“ https://devspiegel.medium.com/okr-teams-kollaboration-wie-wir-unsere-produkte-weiterentwickeln-1190ac3fc055
2019-05-07: From the @Medium Terms of Service: „We can remove any content you post for any reason.“ https://policy.medium.com/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e0f One more reason to go back to the good old personal, self-hosted website. https://twitter.com/bennetttomlin/status/1125393833552949249
2019-05-07: Bad software quality is ultimately management‘s fault, not the developers‘: Intentional mediocrity (more quality != more revenue), firefighting mode (often due to over-promising salespeople), little interest in UX and users, neglect (not a strategic product, near end of life).
2019-05-03: Trying to establish a “#DAM Governance Council”, as outlined by @jhorodyski in this excellent article from 2014: https://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/the-greatness-of-information-governance-025736.php (Finding a good German name is hard. “Arbeitskreis Bilddatenbank”?)
2019-05-03: “Metadata sources are connected through a unified graph.” Let’s do that! https://twitter.com/lisagrimm/status/1124303059566329857
2019-05-01: “When a journalist requested a picture for an article, the picture desk would find it, send it into the content management system, send the journalists the ID, and they would then put the image into the article.” https://twitter.com/fotoware/status/1123528787466039296 / https://www.fotoware.com/blog/the-financial-times-image-workflow
2019-04-30: “If you don’t think mediocrity is rampant in the DAM industry, take another look at the software solutions that are available… We have an industry full of ‚good enough‘ software solutions, yet no absolutely amazing tools that seduce people into wanting to get content organized.” https://digitalassetmanagementnews.org/opinion/david-diamond-interview-series-third-instalment/
2019-04-29: Dear vendor, even bugs that haven’t hit users yet are costing us – a lot of time (reproducing, documenting, testing fixes) keeping us from important project tasks, – and real money because we must pay your partner to report the bugs to you (your ticket system is partner-only) https://twitter.com/tistre/status/1121684211063115778
2019-04-29: „Here’s an idea. A thought experiment. Start with the premise that the best approach is to ship nothing.“ https://twitter.com/johncutlefish/status/1122734567268343809
2019-04-26: Our DAM system isn’t even live yet, and we found 21 bugs in the product already. (These are the ones acknowledged by the vendor; they fixed 4 so far. We reported more – some were classified as feature requests, others still pending.) #QualityAssurance
2019-04-25: Outlook Safelinks https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/advanced-outlook-com-security-for-microsoft-365-subscribers-882d2243-eab9-4545-a58a-b36fee4a46e2 are terrible for developers exchanging API or example URLs. To help me deal with them, I created a macOS Service (via Automator) that runs a PHP script which replaces the selected Safelink URL with the real one…
2019-04-18: “The present fear is that you are just going to design it wrong. All good DAMs are built on paper first, a combination of whiteboarding and excel documents… The second fear is just that people won’t get on board with it.” https://www.widen.com/blog/building-dam-systems-on-paper-robert-noble-widen-podcast
2019-04-18: If you’re an unsatisfied customer, don’t expect your vendor to change for the better. You may invest time and energy to escalate, force or cajole them into performing better – slightly, and not for long. Deal with, or quit, organizations lacking the drive to continuously improve.
2019-04-18: Nothing is perfect – I’m always aware of the imperfections of the stuff I build and do, and would rather improve it than defend the status quo. Here’s a nice explanation of why not all people feel this way: https://seths.blog/2019/04/make-things-better/
2019-04-17: „Autonomy for some people means implementing whatever solution they have in mind — that looks fun to work on. It also means not being ‚dragged down by other people‘ or ‚having to do lots of meetings‘.“ https://twitter.com/johncutlefish/status/1118594764650110976
2019-04-16: Does anyone use @pixolution together with @woodwingsoft Elvis #DAM? Duplicate detection and visual search would be a nice addition to our Elvis.
2019-04-14: SimCity for macOS is on offer today – I bought it, hoping I can use it for software architecture visualization: /tim/weblog/archives/2016/07/31/1595/
2019-04-12: I love how the @IPTC embraces #LinkedData. (I‘m afraid they are light years ahead of the news / publishing industry and their software vendors.) https://de.slideshare.net/slideshow/iptc-new-taxonomies-ideas/140310264
2019-04-12: „Most news agencies‘ stories are processed in a […] format hostile to hyperlinks, processed by poorly standardized, slow-release-cycle legacy systems, with a human copy-and-pasting plain text more often than not part of this workflow.“ https://tfm.slides.com/mvtango/iptc-spring-2019#/metadata-as-a-service-dpa-trust-project-iptc-spring-meeting-2019
2019-04-11: When you’re coding, time flies by: I make use of that phenomenon to „shorten“ long, boring train rides. This time, I built a graph for my „content registry“ project in Neo4j, and learned some Cypher along the way. (I ❤️ that you can download the documentation for offline usage…)
2019-04-11: Nested, hierarchical collections – a great new feature in @woodwingsoft Elvis #DAM 6.30: https://helpcenter.woodwing.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002645166-Elvis-6-Server-Release-Notes You can thank our photo editor staff for insisting on that functionality getting added to Elvis.
2019-04-09: „Unfortunately even today’s DAM implementations commonly make the mistake of undervaluing user experience. Making the constantly evolving use cases intuitive to the users requires manual backend tweaks…“ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dam-versus-content-services-magan-arthur/
2019-04-09: Ich verstehe die Intention – wer Veränderungen schlecht plant oder kommuniziert, schiebt die Schuld gern auf „Angst vor Veränderungen“. Aber „cognitive bias“ wie https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-quo-Verzerrung oder https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlustaversion sind nachgewiesen, es gibt diese Angst tatsächlich. https://twitter.com/kpukall/status/1115128547197300737
2019-04-08: “If I’m going to be promoting a product, that product has to be amazing.” If you come across truly amazing DAM software, please let me know… https://digitalassetmanagementnews.org/features/interview-with-david-diamond-part-1/
2019-04-08: Wow. Das sieht interessant aus – da würde ich sehr gern das Kleingedruckte lesen können… https://twitter.com/eklde/status/1115272766540980225
2019-04-02: Interesting to see how a (once excellent) DAM system that has no clear ownership, little governance, and no development resources becomes more and more of a burden as requirements and expectations evolve.