There's a number of reasons SharePoint doesn't cut it for enterprise Digital Asset Management: file size limits, and crude facilities for transcoding and metadata management, to name a few (we mention several more in our evaluation of MOSS as a DAM tool in The Digital & Media Asset Management Report). Much like search vendors Coveo and Mondosoft spent several years building a business on compensating for weaknesses in Redmond's old search services, pure-play DAM vendors are now attempting to compensate for the flaws in MOSS as a DAM.

Belgian vendor ADAM Software, which boasts Microsoft as a customer, recently debuted a SharePoint connector, and has put together a rather informative movie showing what the user experience of using SharePoint as a front end for ADAM is like. Along with Interwoven's Media Bin, ADAM is one of the few .NET-based DAM platforms on the market, so it's a bit of an arranged marriage between SharePoint and ADAM, perhaps.

If you're already using SharePoint as a simple image library, but need to kick up your capabilities towards real enterprise DAM, ADAM's connector could well be worth testing in your own environment. Note, however, that though the connector stretches SharePoint's DAM capabilities, it only does to a point. Depending on your requirements, you still may need to accept working outside of SharePoint for more advanced DAM functions such as management of video and other time-based assets.