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The trouble with DAM and your corporate laptops

4-Feb-2010

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management

The net-wide discussion over the Apple iPad's lack of Adobe Flash support has brought back a few memories for me: ones in which DAM tools with sexy Flash interfaces can't run in large, corporate locked-down environments, where there's restrictions against downloading just about anything (such as a special plug-in, or the latest version of Flash) to a corporate machine.

As we wrote about last year and cover extensively in our Digital & Media Asset Management Research, many DAM tools have refreshed their UIs in the last year, while other DAM vendors have continuously promised they will but still haven't released. Those interfaces are largely Flash, Flex, or AJAX-based, and definitely make DAM interfaces look like they belong in the 21st century.

That doesn't mean they're perfect. In the past several months, while assisting three Fortune 500 companies with their DAM procurements, I've watched the excitement in a potential buyer's eyes when they see a well-designed, fluid interface that's Flash or AJAX-driven, only to be followed by dismay when they realize they can't run the tool because of their locked down corporate machine.

It's something that often gets brazenly ignored by a vendor during a demo. The vendor may know that an entire corporation is still running Windows XP and the enterprise standard is still Internet Explorer 6, and a 2-year-old version of Flash, but that won't stop them from showing you something that's designed for IE 8+ with the latest version of Flash.

When you go to procure a new DAM package, be sure to include your enterprise OS and browser standards in your RFP.  Your current corporate standards may well hold you back from investing in the latest, most feature-rich, and fully-supported version of a software product. (This can also prevent existing customers from upgrading.) So now is also a good time to start pushing for a re-visit of those standards -- and an upgrade to something more modern where needed.

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