What is the difference between document management and digital asset management?
All organisations have documents and files that need to be managed. Originally, these were just static files, and documents published on the Internet needed management solutions. In fact, document management solutions (DMS) emerged as the obvious mechanism or process for creating, managing, storing and sending these documents to the right departments and the right people.
Digital Assets: definition
Today's electronic media are much more than just online text files. Companies use images, videos, audio files and other digital formats that also need to be managed. Digital Assets are often time-consuming to create, but they are important to organisations because they attract the attention of customers, both internal and external to the organisation.
Digital assets require a format and management process that enables them to be reused. When looking for a solution, one question organisations need to answer is whether an EDM system is capable of meeting their needs or whether a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution is more appropriate.
To complete this answer, an organisation needs to understand the difference between EDM and DAM tools, a difficult task because the market confuses these solutions. In this article we will look at how DAM software is specific and why organisations need a DAM solution to manage more than just text documents.
What is document management (DAM)?
Organisations use DAM to facilitate the administration, creation, workflow and storage of documents across different departments. An EDM solution uses databases for storage and workflow engines to design and support workflows, including business rules and metadata.
Document management systems are often used in industries where there are large volumes of documents, such as insurance, healthcare and government. EDM solutions are increasingly moving towards Web Content Management Systems (CMS).
Digital asset and resource management (DAM)
Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions are also known as Multimedia Asset Management (MAM), Entertainment Media Asset Management (EMAM), Brand Resource Management (BRM), Marketing Content Management (MCM) and Asset Management (AM). The DAM solution focuses on organisations specifically linked to digital assets, such as the entertainment or advertising industry, and is used in situations where asset replication is important. Organisations often combine a DAM solution with a content management solution to maintain their website. As a result, DAM and CMS vendors acquire one or the other solution to complement their offering.
Different ways of looking at EDM and DAM solutions
Although DAM solutions come in a variety of forms, there are slight differences in terms of the functionality of each category. This article will focus primarily on the regular functionality of the DAM solution, including files and rich media types.
Magan Arthur of Arthur Consulting Group, explains that organisations can take three different approaches when comparing the EDM solution to the DAM solution:
- Tools and processes
- File and content types
- Uses
In this article, we will look at these approaches to explore the difference between EDM and DAM tools.
Difference No. 1: tools and processes
EDM and DAM solutions are based on a common content management function. These features include the repository, metadata indexing, search capabilities, user-defined accessibility and workflow functions.
The repository stores content and can be either a relational database or a simple file system. It includes standard features such as registration and control, document versioning and taxonomy. It will also allow metadata to be defined, so that it contains all the relevant descriptions of the various documents and files. This metadata can then be used by the search engine for indexing. Workflow supports the different tasks and roles involved in the process, whether serial or parallel.
In addition to these similarities, there are essential differences in the respective tools and processes of EDM and DAM solutions.
The EDM solution, on the one hand, focuses on capturing text content using optical character recognition (OCR), is integrated with word processing tools and enables different elements in a document to be defined as content. The EDM solution is able to reuse this content either in parts or in the whole document. In the repository, the DMS solution can store elements of the document in different formats, such as extensible mark-up language (XML).
The DAM solution, on the other hand, integrates with applications focused on the creative design of resources, such as Quark, AutoCAD, Flash and three-dimensional animations. DAM solutions are capable of linking, disassembling and reassembling complex and combined assets. The DAM solution is also capable of modifying images directly by resizing or modifying colours, and can manage large files, particularly video files. Its search capabilities extend beyond standard searches to include visual searches using image recognition. In addition to text indexing, which DMS solutions also manage, the DAM solution is capable of indexing voice-to-text conversion videos, videos with subtitles and much more.
Difference No. 2: file and content types
The tools, as described above, can store different types of file, which is another way of differentiating the EDM solution from the DAM solution. EDM files are mainly text-based, such as word-processed documents, files from office tools, PDF files, HTML files, etc. DAM systems capture rich media files which can be images, logos, audio media, videos, CAD (computer-aided design), animations (including GIFs and Flash), and design files.
DMS systems are often capable of storing these types of files, but provide little more than storage, which is not enough for organisations that use large quantities of digital files.
Difference No. 3: Business uses
Each solution can also be used for different types of business process. Business processes are automated by these solutions, which help to create, encourage collaboration, review and approve content across different divisions of the organisation. Here are some examples of business processes in which EDM and DAM solutions can be used. The EDM solution is often used in contract negotiations, documentation creation, policy and procedures, articles, reports or reporting processes. DAM solutions focus on the collaboration and management of advertising or marketing materials, multimedia kits, corporate presentations or videos on demand. The libraries created by the system include image galleries, videos, various fonts and logos.
Conclusion
DAM solutions can be differentiated from EDM solutions according to the tools, file types and business processes in which the solutions are used. Organisations often consider implementing DAM and EDM solutions together, because integrating text- and media-based content is a better long-term strategy.
By managing both text files and digital assets, organisations are looking at how to integrate CMS solutions. As a result, publishers are starting to integrate DAM solutions with CMS solutions. To do this, publishers will need to work on seamless integration between the products, and must compensate for the different technological approaches between a DAM solution and an EDM or CMS solution.
On the positive side, publishers are changing their objectives and beginning to recognise that the market is demanding a more modular approach to these solutions, and that the sector is currently refocusing on open or service-oriented architectures (SOA).
Overall, we will see that EDM and DAM vendors will continue to improve their solutions and integrate them to provide an increasingly demanding market with a robust, integrated solution.
Article translated from French