[Progress News] [Progress OpenEdge ABL] Digital Asset Management with Sitefinity

[Alexander Shumarski]

This blog paints the picture that says a thousand words, offering some hints on how you can use Sitefinity as a digital asset management platform that can seamlessly merge content creation and media.

Digital asset management (DAM) systems provide organizations with the tools to create, manage, organize, embed, share or distribute various types of media. Known (unsurprisingly) as digital assets, this media includes images, video, documents and all the other usual suspects.

Creative and marketing teams, small and big alike can benefit from keeping tabs on their media. Using a central repository to store digital assets can also help improve internal workflows and processes and change the way you integrate media into the digital experience.

Choosing the right DAM for your organization could become a tedious job, because in most cases there is a catch. While the endless list of features that many DAM platforms offer may seem lucrative at first, many organizations fail to put them to good use.

As a result, many marketers still default to the tried-and-tested strategy of saving each and every file on their computer desktop. This is problematic, since all the icons crowd out the lovely picture of that beach in Hawaii that you have saved as your background picture.

OK, where were we?

Clearly, when it comes to managing digital media, there are certain needs and wants. And while some members on your team will still want to stay old fashioned, many will vote for acquiring yet another piece of software.

What your organization may really need is the ability to efficiently organize, share and manage digital assets, as well as to seamlessly merge content and media with as little friction as possible.

Unlike many DAM platforms that offer tons of different features that go underutilized, Sitefinity places its focus on ease of use and its unique ability to unite IT and marketing.

Sitefinity streamlines digital asset management with an intuitive UI, powerful backend search, revision history and built-in approval workflows.

It also enables IT to tap into its extensibility capabilities to automate manual tasks. IT can even connect to third-party platforms or cognitive services providers for some added oomph.

The takeaway here is that Sitefinity easily supports the entire content lifecycle, without requiring you to invest in new systems. Whether you’re creating brand new content or managing the digital assets you’ve already worked so hard on, Sitefinity has your back.

And, more adventurous marketers can even leverage taxonomy and digital assets to identify key personas and personalize their experience.

Who Benefits from Sitefinity?​

The DAM capabilities that come built-in with Sitefinity can benefit people across your digital team. But who stands to gain the most?

• Designers with an eye for detail. The people always ready to send you a new illustration that is even more in line with the corporate style guide.
• Developers who build beautiful, responsive pages. The ones who love the agility to upload, reuse and share images between pages and sites.
  
• PR professionals who often work with multiple digital assets. Give them the power to use images and press releases in various sizes and document formats.
• Product marketing… i.e., me. The type of person who, by always being in the thick of things, needs to be well-versed with multiple ways to publish and mange content and media.
• Demand generation, who often needs to work on dozens of campaigns. They need an efficient way to upload and embed content, put assets such as whitepapers behind forms or publish on-demand webinars on various landing pages.
• CRO folks. They tend get obsessed with testing new designs, new visual languages and new hero banners, so DAM capabilities naturally make their job easier.
• Legal and documentation team members. They need the power to keep their part of the site up to date.

At the core of any digital asset management platform is the ability to upload and organize media in libraries, add metadata and bulk edit various properties.

Sitefinity strikes a balance in features to promote productivity without adding unnecessary complexity and overdependency on other teams or technology.

Let’s See Sitefinity in Action​

Alright, time to really paint the picture of a thousand words. Here are some images, videos and bullet points to highlight some of Sitefinity’s unique DAM capabilities.

• Easily upload anything from images to videos by just dragging and dropping them
  
• Bulk upload, update or manage assets and save time (just don’t accidentally bulk-delete all your files)
  
  
  
• Define various image sizes and automatically resize or crop photos and illustrations to fit specific use cases
  
• Manually resize or crop images for pixel-perfect results
  
• Create, rearrange and merge asset libraries to keep things organized
  
• Categorize images with taxonomy or custom tags
  
  
  
• Add custom fields as placeholders for additional meta data, such as author, copyright information, URL or anything else that adds value
  
• Easily locate media globally, or in the current library with a powerful backend search
• Identify pages and content items that have images embedded in them, so you can understand the impact of updating, replacing or deleting media from the backend
• Customize the look and feel of the backend to match your mood or productivity level (you can also manually reorder media if you want to satisfy that Tetris urge)
  
• Ensure brand consistency with up to three level-deep approval workflows, so no one skips a step in the process
  
• Keep your media away from prying eyes with roles and permissions that are easy to set up (perfect for when you want to share content with select partners and customers)
  
• Set it and forget it by specifying go-live or expiry dates with a built-in scheduler
• Set vanity URLs that are easy to share, or use in campaigns
• Easily revert previous versions of the image that won the battle to the death (read: the A/B test)
  

Extending the Platform​

Customizable and connected by design with extensibility built in, Sitefinity can help you address the ever changing business requirements. It enables developers to leverage its full potential by easily integrating with third-party services.

• Save time with automation (Webhooks are your best friend when it comes to avoiding manual work)
• Integrate external providers that work hard to squeeze out every last excessive byte from your images so you can win big by improving the user experience
• Integrate with content delivery network (CDN) providers to improve the download experience for your end users regardless of their location or the device
• Tap into AI to benefit from ML-powered image understanding, text recognition and even intelligent cropping of images so even generic stock images look glamorous

So, there you have it! That’s why Sitefinity is the intersection of powerful digital asset management and intuitive multichannel content delivery.

You can use Sitefinity as the perfect vehicle to cover the last mile of the content lifecycle, delivering content and digital assets to screens across the world.

Or you can leverage its full set of capabilities to optimize your internal workflows and build experiences that your customers will continue to crave again and again.

It’s your choice—and it’s hard to choose wrong.

Give Sitefinity a try, or talk to one of our engineers. They do know their way around and can show you how you can work smarter with Sitefinity.

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