{"id":1831,"date":"2016-04-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-21T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wwwneu.strehle.de\/tim\/weblog\/archives\/2016\/04\/22\/1591-2\/"},"modified":"2016-04-22T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T22:00:00","slug":"1591-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/weblog\/archives\/2016\/04\/22\/1591-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Distributed DAM: From silo to search engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I dived into product management<\/strong>: gathering requirements for our DAM product, sketching and specifying new features, taking screenshots and writing discussion documents. It\u2019s an important process (here\u2019s an outline<\/a>) \u2013 we don\u2019t want to build stuff our customers don\u2019t need.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m getting lost tracking the documents<\/strong> and files produced during this process: To-dos and discussions in Basecamp, documents in Google Docs, PDFs and photos of paper sketches in Dropbox, and wireframes in myBalsamiq<\/a>. A bit ironic given that I work for a DAM vendor, isn\u2019t it? After all, my favorite DAM system claim is to be \u201cthe content hub for all your digital creations\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n

I could (manually) create copies of all these documents within our DAM. But they\u2019ll get modified in the originating systems, and new documents will appear which I\u2019d have to copy as well. In this case, most of my digital assets need to live outside the DAM<\/strong> (for editing and sharing) so the DAM system isn\u2019t of much use to me.<\/p>\n

Can\u2019t our DAM software be a bit more like a Web search engine<\/strong>, or \u201centerprise search\u201d software, and not care where a document is located as long as it is accessible? Why does our software require the records and metadata to reside in its local database? (I already discussed this in \u201cDreaming of a shared content store\u201d<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I wonder whether a modern DAM system should let us \u201cmanage\u201d decentralized or distributed assets<\/strong>: We should to be able to not just find them within the DAM, but also add\/edit metadata and rights information. (That structured data associated with the \u201cremote asset\u201d could well live within the local DAM database.) Wouldn\u2019t it be great to sign up to a fresh cloud DAM system and have it automatically index and link my Dropbox files, Google documents and Facebook photos \u2013 then letting me search and organize them?<\/p>\n

This sounds way easier than it is; it has its drawbacks and will be a pain to implement. (Yes, I\u2019d be the poor developer struggling with all the fragile connectors to other systems.) But that\u2019s the DAM system I wish I\u2019d had this week.<\/p>\n

See also:<\/em> Cloud software, local files: A hybrid DAM approach<\/a> and System architecture: Splitting a DAM into Self-Contained Systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Update (2017-02-27):<\/em> It\u2019s here \u2013 see DAM innovation: Distributed content in Nuxeo and Picturepark<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week I dived into product management: gathering requirements for our DAM product, sketching and specifying new features, taking screenshots and writing discussion documents. It\u2019s an important process (here\u2019s an outline) \u2013 we don\u2019t want to build stuff our customers don\u2019t need. But I\u2019m getting lost tracking the documents and files produced during this process: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weblog"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.strehle.de\/tim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}