Widen Enterprises

As the Brand Development Manager here at Widen I’m constantly looking forward. Where are the markets going? What are the latest trends? What is the next Big Thing in rich media management that we need to be a part of?


So it was kind of a fun “looking back at looking forward” exercise I went through when Newsweek re-published an article that they had originally published in 1995 titled The Internet? Bah!.

In it, Clifford Stoll, the journalist who is unfortunately linked to his couldn’t-be-more-wrong predictions for life, laments against the value of the internet and how it will never be a big life-changer everyone wants it to be.

While I could pick nearly any sentence out of the article and show how Clifford was wrong (e.g. “The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper” – tell that to the newspapers of today!) the more interesting aspect was what Clifford got right by getting it all wrong. You see he came to those conclusions by considering the tools that were available at the time and to illustrate that he started it off with “Consider today’s online world.” That was his first mistake. If the online world stayed how it was in 1995 (think text based usenet groups and 2400 baud modems – a 30k image would easily take 30 minutes to download!).

If you consider the future based on the tools we have available today then the future will always look impossible. What he wasn’t considering was that cell phones of today would have 100x the power as the computers of 1995. Or that downloading a full movie today would take 5 minutes, when downloading a simple JPEG image in 1995 takes 30 minutes!

But in uncovering all these problems Clifford was uncovering opportunities – unfortunately he just didn’t know it or didn’t care to act on it. In the article he talks about the lack of social communities in 1995 – hello Facebook, MySpace, etc. He calls the internet a “wasteland of unedited data” – hello Google! And his rant against the future of ecommerce because of a lack of secure online purchasing (PayPal, Google Checkout, SSL, etc.) and lack of social feedback (Amazon rating system, review sites).

The point is that every single one of the problems he mentioned later became billion-dollar industries and, in many cases, companies in their own right. So Clifford was so right by being so wrong!

How does this all relate to DAM Asset Management? Well, just like Clifford I’m not sure yet.

We as a company and an industry have become comfortable with the markets we serve and the use cases from those markets. For example here at Widen we started off serving primarily the manufacturing and retail industries (via their Marketing departments), though more recently DAM software is catching on with Healthcare, Government, Education and other sectors.

We make some assumptions that our product is not the right fit for, say, an individual. Or a sole-proprietor. For all the reasons you might think and agree with—it’s too complicated. Individuals don’t need all those features. People prefer storing their images locally for speed reasons.

But after seeing Clifford’s 1995 example I have to challenge you and myself on these – how many of these are legitimate roadblocks, and how many are glowing opportunities waiting to be solved by the next Bill Gates?

I’d be willing to be bet that the 2025 version of us will kick ourselves for not acting on these ideas sooner.

As a followup to my previous blog post about Photoshop turning 20 years old, I wanted to pass along a cool link on the subject...


Adobe has a website dedicated to the indispensable image editing tool hitting 20,000 miles on the software odometer. This site contains an interactive time line of major Photoshop milestones going back to 1990. There is also a very cool video featuring a discussion with the creators of Photoshop - Thomas Knoll, John Knoll, Steve Guttman, and Russell Brown - as they discuss the evolution of Photoshop. The video begins with some vintage footage where we see Russell Brown placing a photo of himself behind President Regan and the first lady on an old Macintosh. 

If you've used Photoshop as I have in the last 20 years, you may find this discussion of the brains behind the software interesting.

“IT wants our Digital Asset Management solution installed at our location.” … I’m sorry to remind you Marketing but are you sure IT knows what is best for you? Does IT do everything else you want? Do they provide the timeliness in response you need? Have they ever dropped the ball on a project before? Do you ever get the feeling like you’re left on an island? I don’t mean to bring IT down or even make reference that you’re IT department is lacking in support for marketing, but we’ve seen it time and time again… IT has way too many other business critical responsibilities and projects going on to give little ole marketing the attention it needs. Marketing requires immediacy in action and a certain degree of understanding of your processes.

Marketing, remember to consider your DAM needs first. You have the right to work with a team that understands creative and marketing workflows. You have the right to a timely and guided DAM software implementation. You have the right to have your administrators and DAM users receive the proper training they deserve. You have the right to have a help desk with DAM specialists that can help when you and your users have questions. You have the right to receive regular upgrades with new features and innovations in DAM and marketing technology. You have the right to contribute ideas and feature requests. You have the right to have a system that is scalable to grow with your needs. You have the right to have a DAM system that can work with other systems. You have the right to a responsive team that can restore digital assets that are accidentally deleted. You have the right to have the peace of mind to know your digital assets will always be accessible. You have the right to know what you’re paying for and only pay for what you use. You have the right to know that your digital asset management programs will be a success.

Why is it that IT departments want Digital Asset Management solutions that are installed on-site? Is it because they own it? Is it because they can customize it? Is it because they want their assets behind their firewall? These are all valid questions. DAM SaaS providers and SaaS adopters deal with these questions all of the time. There are answers to these questions, but the DAM project owners should ask these questions back to their IT managers as well.

The truth is you don’t own the installed software. You only own it if it’s a home grown solution and many large companies are finding that their home grown solutions, after years of development, do not compare to modern-day DAM solutions. Many home grown solutions don’t embrace the feature set, ease of use, and scalability of today’s enterprise-class DAM solutions. If you’re thinking an installed solution belongs to you, you’re not entirely correct. You don’t own the code. If you want to customize it, you must ensure the parts to customize fit with what your needs are and that you have the competency to customize it.

You’re still subject to the release cycles, support and professional services offered by the installed provider. There’s a certain level of expertise it takes to implement and maintain DAM software and many IT departments are not staffed with “DAM experts.” Consider the competencies of IT and the competencies required for a DAM implementation, ongoing maintenance and expansion. In most organizations, the IT team’s time is filled in maintaining the other business critical systems. Does DAM carry that high of a priority with IT?

Installed or SaaS, You Still Own Your Digital Assets

Whether you deploy an installed solution or work with a hosted provider, you still own the assets. It’s just a matter of where they live. Of course with an installed solution, they live behind your firewall. With a SaaS solution, your assets live in the hosted provider’s secure data center or the cloud. This is much like banking… you keep your money in a bank because you trust they can do a better job managing it than you can. Certainly, there are good reasons to have asset libraries on the client site. That’s why Widen introduced the Appliance. With the Widen Appliance, companies have replicated assets on-site to support internal creative operations and business continuity planning in the event of catastrophe causing the internet to go down.

One of the many reasons companies – big, medium and small – choose to work with a SaaS provider is because the hosted DAM provider has a better infrastructure to support a widespread network of internal and external users. A hosted provider can often offer greater scalability of the infrastructure. This includes scalability to scale resources up as the demand increases and scale the resources down when so much storage and bandwidth is not required. Scalable SaaS DAM deployments can be more cost-effective as they support a true pay for what you use model.

We had a prospective client share their DAM story with us last week and their needs matched up very closely with what Widen could provide in a hosted Digital Asset Management solution. They needed a central repository for images and videos, easy to use, easy to find assets, multiple levels of control and access, and asset tracking and usage reporting.

However, after learning the Widen online digital asset management solution matched up very well to the needs of this particular client, they came back to us saying that their IT department would only consider solutions installed on-site. Regrettably, Widen is a 100% DAM SaaS provider and delivers web-based DAM solutions where the asset libraries are hosted in Widen’s data center.

Do they want the internet installed too?

I thought it was interesting that this particular client’s IT team would only consider an installed solution since they’ve been unable to maintain the current system. This is something we hear all of the time. Ironically, most of their digital assets – images and videos – end up online. Do they want the internet installed too? If the destination for your digital assets is to be online, then wouldn’t it make sense for the digital asset management solution to be online as well?

A recent Forrester ECM (Enterprise Content Management) report by analyst Stephen Powers shows that more interest was seen in SaaS products (than on-premise or open source), with 43% of the respondents expressing interest in SaaS WCM and 39% in SaaS DAM. “Because content stored in these systems are often public-facing, organizations were less concerned with sharing the content outside the firewall,” reports Powers.

Consider the use and destination of your digital assets in defining your goals and needs with a DAM system. In a large organization with multiple divisions in multiple locations, an installed solution isn’t always the best option. Consider all internal and external users? Will the installed solution be the single point of reference for everyone in the organization? Will everyone adopt the solution or will people still work in the same siloed environments their used to? One of the main goals for deploying a DAM solution should be making it easy for users to access the system, enjoy using it and make it easy to get want they need so they will come back again.

Common challenges with digital asset management programs include segmenting internal and external groups of users to have varying levels of access to specific groups of digital assets. Widen makes this easy by empowering clients to govern their user base and the level of interaction they have with different digital asset libraries. Roles and Permissions controlled by client administrators make governance a critical yet manageable part of DAM software deployments in organizations of all sizes. Watch the video to learn more.

Widen provides Digital Asset Management implementations with a phased approach. As a service provider, it’s important to Widen that we work with your team at the pace that you see fit. What does “done” look like? We want to know your expectations so we can help you manage the success in phases. Technologically, we provide the scalability to meet your demands as the system grows. Watch the video to learn more.

The Digital Asset Management system is the hub of the digital asset life cycle. DAM covers the management portion of the life cycle. Widen has developed tools upstream from DAM to support the creative workflow and approval cycles in addition to marketing and sales tools downstream. Watch the video to learn more.

Widen recognizes that digital assets need to be externally distributed, but also need to be internally consumed. Creative workflows demand hi-resolution files be accessible at local speeds. Marketing networks require remote access to the most current assets. Watch the video to learn more about the hybrid approach to digital asset management with the Widen Appliance as the creative workflow extension to the hosted model… entirely under the Software as a Service approach to DAM.

Every user experience is important to Widen. An important part of the user digital asset management software experience is having a clean, friendly, intuitive user interface. Widen continues to advance the User Interface to make the user experience as enjoyable as possible. Watch the video to learn more about how Widen shares in the success of adoption with digital asset management system deployments.

Widen helps companies get more value from their digital assets. We don’t do that only by providing cool, usable technology. We help companies get more value because we have the service commitments and service teams in place to ensure success. Watch the video to learn more about how Widen ensures success beyond implementation.

Everyone wants to know about best practices in digital asset management. Best practices with digital assets metadata and taxonomy development, categorization, etc. As a DAM SaaS provider, Widen takes digital asset management best practices to another level by leveraging the collections of digital asset usage data to help clients compare against past usage and performance within their DAM system and with other Widen clients. Watch the video to learn more about Widen’s ratios referred to as “Digital Asset Management Success Metrics.”

Digital Asset Management is not all about technology. If you’re considering Widen in your digital asset management project, then service must be important to you. Widen is a service company. We’ve been that way for 62 years. Watch the video to learn more about how Widen provides Digital Asset Management Software as a Service, emphasizing the last “S” in SaaS.

What Digital Asset Management technology is going to fit the needs of your company? How often are upgrades provided? How are upgrades determined? Watch the video interview to find out more about how Widen goes about involving clients and delivering DAM software upgrades.

Awhile back, we participated in a RFP for a digital asset management system at a large enterprise. In working through the RFP, we put together several video responses to the different sections. In the videos that follow, I'll talk about Widen’s qualifications, experience, practices and approach to providing digital asset management solutions as a service provider.

Watch the video to learn about why Widen understands digital asset management software and, more importantly, what goes in a DAM system.

Inspiration is Key!

Whether you work as a creative mind, marketing, sales, inspiration is key!

Not getting enough inspiration?

What about... The great outdoors? A good book? Maybe your favorite music inspires greatness in you.... How about a road trip??

Here is a quick list of people, places, and things that inspire me to be me. Follow me on twitter @PremediaArts and let me know what inspires you.

Anthropolgie has a great blog and is a perfect place to start on our inspirational journey. They ask a simple question. What is Inspiration? and then try to define it... good stuff... go ahead click and see for yourselves.

The entry from David Eustace "IN SEARCH OF EUSTACE" is amazing and brought tears to my eyes. Maybe its because I just returned from traveling with my daughter and husband and long for life on the road maybe its just the idea of reconnecting with ones we love... either way it is truly inspirational.

http://theanthropologist.net

Now that I've gotten that out of my system. Lets take a look at something a bit more corporate in nature.

AIGA
www.aiga.org

American Institute of Graphic Arts has an inspiring and informative web presence that can help you take your skills and career to new heights. I like to visit my local chapter site (http://wisconsin.aiga.org) at least once a week to find out about upcoming events and see member portfolios. Need a job? Find you local aiga and check out the recent job postings! Sweet. You can also follow you chapter on twitter or friend them on facebook.

I'd follow you anywhere!

Some of my favorite tweeters to follow...

@Lowepro 
Name: Derrick Story
Location: Sebastopol, CA
Bio: I'm the Photography Evangelist for Lowepro and have lots to share.

@SusanAkaSARK
Name: SARK
Location: San Francisco, CA
Bio: SARK is a best-selling author & artist, with over 15 titles in print and well over 2 million books sold.

@NAPP_news
Name: Photoshop User
Location: Worldwide
Bio: We are the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (led by Scott Kelby), the leading world-wide resource for Photoshop training.

One of the lists I follow is @GOOD/photographers - a list of photographers they have worked with and a blog... cool!

Well that's my list... I am inspired to make music, make art, and live life on the road... ok so maybe life on the road is not realistic but it is inspirational and inspiration is not about reality its about what defies reality.

Now i leave you with a photo.... inspired yet?

What is the best digital asset management product? That’s a good question… and a common question among those beginning to research digital asset management technologies and vendors. The purpose of this post to help those understand how to decide what is the best digital asset management product for you.

Organizations of all shapes and sizes are adopting digital asset management systems and practices to improve efficiency, brand consistency, accountability, intelligence and effectiveness. When asked, “what kinds of companies need digital asset management?” my response is typically any company that has sophisticated enough creative or marketing operations that they’re creating significant amounts of digital content – images, videos, brochures, etc. – that need to be used and repurposed. That digital content is to be centrally managed and readily available for multiple users to access the content they are supposed to. DAM is particularly valuable to organization’s that have distributed user networks and workers who require remote, self-serve access to a central library of digital assets. There is no exact right or wrong answer to know if a company needs DAM. The size and scale of a DAM implementation varies. When the “traditional” methods of using the shared drive, email attachments, and FTP site start to bring reoccurring pain, then DAM might be something worth considering.

Organizations that are finding success in adopting DAM software solutions include the following vertical markets:  manufacturing, retail, marketing & advertising agencies, media, entertainment, publishing, sports, colleges & universities, healthcare, insurance, financial services, non-profit organizations, hospitality, food service, government, engineering, construction, hi-tech.

When asked “What is the best digital asset management product?” … There really is no right answer. It varies. The digital asset management analyst community will tell you the same thing. The best DAM solution really depends on you and your company. It depends on what kind of company you are and what your functional goals are. The size of your company or industry you’re in may matter (or may not). The size of your digital asset library may matter (or may not). The types of assets you predominantly need to manage may play a part. The quantity of users and their location (internal or external) may make a difference.

The digital asset management analyst community will tell you to consider the types of solutions vendors offer to fit different use cases. It is important to understand the business scenarios that fit each vendor’s product strategy to find the best digital asset management product for your particular circumstances. The DAM analyst community has helped those looking for DAM solutions by rating vendors according to common scenarios useful for understanding which types of products tend to work better according to the type of projects. These use case scenarios can be divided into three buckets to include: (1) Image Management, Brand Management and Marketing Operations – segmented further by Digital Asset Library, Photo Archive, Brand Management, Marketing Collateral Production and Distribution, and Ad Production services; (2) Publishing – segmented further by Periodicals Production & Distribution, Multi-Channel Publishing, Catalog Publishing, Rights-Managed Content Syndication and Distribution services; (3) Video Production – segmented further by E-Learning, Video Review and Approval, Short Form Video Production, and Broadcast Video Production services.

Other things to consider when looking for a digital asset management vendor (in no particular order) include:

How long has the vendor been around? … How long have they been offering DAM? … How much of their focus is on DAM? … Is DAM a core part of their business or just a side activity? … How many DAM clients do they have? … How many DAM clients have they lost? … Do they have experience in your industry? … Do they offer complementary services? … Where does their experience come from? … How stable is the company? … Have they been bought or sold? … Is their DAM offering home grown or purchased from someone else? …  How sophisticated is it? … Is it evolving as the marketplace changes? … What does their product roadmap look like? … Do they have one? … How often do they come out with new upgrades and innovations? … Who installs them? … Do they have a technical services team? … Do they have a help desk? … What are their hours? … How do you reach them? … Who handles the implementation? … Do they offer training? … Do they perform integrations? How? … What information technology resources will be required internally? … What is the cost to deploy? … What is the cost to maintain? How do you achieve an ROI? … What are the extra costs? … What are their security practices? … How can they ensure my assets are safe? … Is it customizable? … How much customization is required to make it work? … Is it scalable to grow with my business?

These are just a small set of the many questions to ask when looking for the best digital asset management product for your organization.

Leave a comment if you have other advice for those looking at DAM for the first time or share your experiences.

One of the many purposes of a Digital Asset Management system is to provide controlled access to an organization’s library of approved digital assets. Note the key word here is controlled! There are many types of marketing software systems that provide some sort of repository services for centralized storage of documents, images, and other files. However, only a true DAM system should suffice in a sophisticated marketing environment where you want to deliver tiered levels of control for the collaboration, management, and distribution of digital assets. In Widen’s world of DAM, tiered levels of control are managed via Roles and Permissions.

Without Roles and Permissions, you may as well post everything you own to a public-facing website for the whole world to access. In a web-based DAM system, every a user has a secure login which authenticates them into a Role with a predefined set of permissions.

Roles and Permissions determine 'who' has 'what' level of access to 'which' assets and 'how' the user can interact with the assets.

Roles and Permissions allow…

• The marketing team to prepare a campaign that will launch in six months.
• The product team to produce training materials for a product that doesn’t hit the market until next year.
• The regional field reps to only access current collateral and promotions created for them.
• The marketing team to ensure assets for products that have been taken off the market are not accessible by the sales teams and partners.

Although it can be a very complicated aspect of DAM to administrate, Roles & Permissions can be as simple as can be for a four-person workgroup or as complex as a multi-national enterprise with several departments, divisions, brands and channels for access and control. Maintaining the Role & Permissions structure is critical when rolling out updates and a key point in selecting the right partner. More than that, working with Roles & Permissions that allow for adaptability, flexibility and scalability with ease is vital to the ongoing success of your DAM system.

Read the article in E-Commerce Times: Whose Fingers Are in Your DAM?

Contact Us to learn more or to see the Roles & Permissions structure in Widen’s online DAM system.

They grow up so fast, don't they?

Adobe Photoshop turns 20 years old this month. It seems like only yesterday that little 6 year-old Photoshop 4.0 discovered nondestructive image editing with Layers. Or when he was 8 years old and impressed you with his multiple undo History Palette. But at the same time you wanted to send him to bed without dinner for the horrible way he mismanaged color in 1998. We all watched as Photoshop went from the pimply pre-teen years of 6.0 to when he began developing facial hair with CS2's Bridge and Smart Objects. And now he's off in college... sniff...

                          

Ah, memories. I recall the first time I played with Photoshop. I was a young kid with a dream. Well, okay, I was a 20-something working on a Scitex Prisma workstation. Scitex was what all the cool imaging people were working on in 1990. Then along came this program called Photoshop 1.0 from Adobe. Some of my coworkers at Quad Graphics knew it as a funny program with the creepy bitmapped eyeball icon running on that little beige box called the Macintosh over in the corner. Back then it was not so much of a photo editor as it was a paint program with a few image correction and optimization capabilities.

By 1993 I was weened off the Scitex system, and had my own speedy Quadra 950 running Photoshop 2.0. Back then, Photoshop was no replacement for a high-end CEPS system. The Mac, running at a speedy 33MHz, was dreadfully slow (by today's standards), RAM was very limited and expensive, and the tools in Photoshop did not compare to a $200,000 workstation like the Scitex Prismax. What a difference 17 years makes.

Today, with Photoshop 11 (CS4), Adobe has created a something that has transcended proper grammar, as the noun "Photoshop" has morphed into a verb in many circles. The phrase "We can photoshop that out." is as popular as "Please hand me a kleenex." or, "Can you make me a xerox?".

Did the Knoll brothers ever imagine what would become of Barneyscan XP (Photoshop 0.87) back in 1988? I don't think it's making too much of a leap to say that Orville and Wilbur Wright are to air travel, what Thomas and John Knoll are to digital imaging. Okay, I'll give Russell Brown some props as well.

Photoshop evolved into the tool it is today because the digital imaging and desktop publishing markets around it flourished at the same time. First it was low-cost desktop scanners, then digital photography. This digital revolution helped define what Photoshop has become today.

It is impossible to imagine any image you see in a magazine, newspaper, catalog, billboard or a website that hasn't been touched by Photoshop. Sure, you can do a lot of color correction and image enhancement in RAW processors like Apple Aperture or Adobe Lightroom, but for full feature image editing, Photoshop what you need.

Over the years, there were many programs that came and went that were supposed to kill Photoshop, or at least compete with it. There was software like Live Picture (anyone remember FITS files?), and in 1995 Quark announced plans for Xposure, the Photoshop killer that never made it to market.

When I was in art school in 1984 (yikes!) I can recall my instructors trying to put aside our fears by saying the computer would only be another tool for an artist to use. They used to say things like, "You could take a computer programmer and ask them to create art on a computer and they couldn't do it. But train an artist how to use a computer, and it becomes another tool in their arsenal.".

            

Who could forget this little bit of photo retouching from 1994? Time Inc. turned OJ's mug shot into an illustration with a little help from Photoshop. See more of these famous manipulated photos here.


Over the last 20 years, Photoshop has become that indispensable, omnipresent tool for every artist. In the right hands, amazing, original works of art can be created. In journalist or marketing hands, it can even be used to slant the news or make the unreal seem real to support an accompanying story. See the OJ photos above. It can do something simple like subdue a red cast from your child's face. Or clone the barf stains off the carpet from the 20 year old Photoshop's all night kegger at the fraternity last night.

Here's to another 20 years. There is still so much for that Photoshop kid to learn...