Not so long ago, our creative services department stored all of its creative content on various media, including CDs, DVDs, external hard disks and various network storage devices. An ad that ran six months ago could sometimes be found in 10 minutes, while it would sometimes take two hours to track it down. In the worst cases, the ad could not be found at all (maybe the network volume was out of space and someone accidentally deleted files that were not backed up).

If this story sounds familiar, it’s not surprising. I’m sure there are many prepress departments whose creative content is still archived or stored off-line, or worse, only on the artist’s computer.
 

Good news

The good news is that the digital asset management solutions available today can solve all of these problems while also making you more efficient and organized. Whether you’re cataloging an Adobe InDesign document, a Final Cut video or a Flash animation, a DAM can handle it. Want to add or extract metadata from files? Not a problem. The DAMs of today are fast, user-friendly and well engineered.

 Although there are various solutions available (see www.damusers.com for more information), I won’t have enough space to cover all of them in this column. Instead, I’ll focus on the one we purchased — Cumulus. Cumulus comes from German vendor Canto, a company that has been in business since 1990 and has thousands of users.

Cumulus can be purchased for a small workgroup or scaled for your entire organization. At Newsday, we decided to go with the Enterprise version. We started cataloging assets last July and we just passed 100,000 assets. We have no intention of deleting these assets as we purchased 4 terabytes of storage to start the project. We’ve cataloged every file format imaginable for print and the Web, including PDFs, Adobe InDesign documents, EPS, TIFFs, JPEGs, Flash files and video.

Every file we catalog has metadata attached. Some of the metadata is extracted automatically when cataloged and some is entered by the user. When users catalog an asset, they are required to enter information in a window that appears. Some of the information is selected from drop-down menus and some is entered manually. We can add or subtract metadata fields at will and we can make them mandatory.
 

Search capability

One of the most impressive things about the Cumulus database is its search capability. When performing a simple query the database returns the matching results within a second, much like Google. If I’m searching for all ads that contain the word “Macy’s,” the database returns the results instantaneously. Cumulus also offers complete version control so any user can “check out” or “check in” an asset with complete control. The database will show you which user made which revision and it will tell you which user currently has the ad (asset) checked out. Any asset that has been checked out cannot be modified by another user. This feature is extremely helpful when tracking client revisions.

Another unexpected benefit of using Cumulus was the application’s much-improved reporting tools. All of our users log in to Cumulus using their domain accounts so the database knows who’s working on what. Cumulus gives you the ability to run queries on just about every metadata field and the results are very useful. For example, I can ask Cumulus to show me all the InDesign documents that John Smith worked on from March 1 to March 31, 2008. Having this information at your fingertips really helps when it comes time to report on metrics.

Sending info to others

Assets can be e-mailed or printed from the Cumulus rich client or the Web client. Users who need only read access to the assets (sales reps, etc.) can use the Web client to quickly access assets and check what ads their clients have run in the past. The days of interrupting an artist to ask for a hard-copy proof are over. Sales collateral is now very easy to move around the organization and sales professionals can do what they do best — sell.

I hope I’ve shed some light on the benefits of DAM systems and how far they’ve come. Hopefully, you’ll never have another ad go missing. Happy archiving!

James Kober is the prepress area manager for Newsday in Long Island, N.Y.  You can e-mail him your questions and comments at jkober@newsday.com.