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Sharpening the dull Digital Asset Management functionality in SharePoint

2-Feb-2012

Tags: Digital and Media Asset Management, SharePoint Ecosystem, Selecting Technology, ADAM

It is an understatement to say that SharePoint has become a nearly ubiquitous platform for workplace collaboration. Yet, as our technology evaluation subscribers know, SharePoint may be omnipresent but it's definitely not omnipotent. An enterprise cannot just survive on SharePoint for all its unstructured content needs, since there are significant functionality gaps in the SharePoint armor. (For instance, we recently noted that SharePoint has been slow on the social uptake.)

Digital Asset Management is another big gap. Customers may praise SharePoint in various ways, but no one can allege that SharePoint has strong DAM functionality. (For more details, consult our DAM Report).

To make up for SharePoint's lack of muscular DAM features -- such as large file storage, transcoding, and transformation -- customers usually look at a separate DAM product. Increasingly common in Microsoft-centric enterprises is using SharePoint as a front-end to a full-fledged functional DAM back-end -- so that when you need transcoding or other non-SharePoint functions, it's there behind the scenes. DAM vendor ADAM has the longest-running SharePoint connector, and it's been widely used, albeit with largely mixed results.  

Another widely used offering is MediaRich for SharePoint, by software vendor Equilibrium. It's different from ADAM's connector approach in that MediaRich is not a freestanding product. It requires and rides on the services/functionality provided by SharePoint, such as user management, search, and workflow. It works with both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010, providing the functionality around metadata, transformation of images, and transcoding of audio and video that SharePoint alone lacks. 

The question you need to ask yourself is, do you really need or want your digital assets to be managed via SharePoint, or is it better to take a DAM-specific path and leave SharePoint to manage documents?

If you're already using SharePoint and are looking for DAM functionality, evaluate whether your requirements are best met by an add-on like Equilibrium or whether you'll need a separate DAM product. Much of this will be dictated by the user experience you want to deliver: if users are accustomed to using SharePoint for internal document management, it may make sense to manage those documents together with digital assets, if business workflow requires it. But SharePoint isn't used elsewhere in the enterprise, it should not be the first tool that should come to mind for standalone DAM. 

Let us know if we can advise your decision-making.

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