The Digital Asset Management Symposium brings lessons on "having a centralized content management repository" for creating new products.The Sept. 11 attacks compelled at least one publisher to respond rapidly by recruiting its digital asset management system to repurpose content for the homeland security niche.
Speaking to attendees at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium (PDF file) in New York on Tuesday, Christian Mairhofer, director of content architecture at The McGraw-Hill Cos., described how his company swiftly pulled content from several existing properties to create McGrawHill-HomelandSecurity.com while the niche was still in its earliest stages.
Content drawn from Business Week, Aviation Week and the company's construction magazines was recalled to service with unusual speed because of the company's DAM (digital asset management) system.
The key is "having a centralized content management repository" that all business units can draw upon to create new products that may be appropriate to their niche, Mairhofer said.
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Since a new property can be prototyped in just a few weeks now, rather than the months it used to take, a publisher can test new niche markets inexpensively, creating the opportunity to expand into new markets with a minimum of risk.
"Once you have [content] in the repository, it's flexible enough through XML to really do whatever you want with it," Mairhofer said. Another DAM-enabled initiative was the creation of a private portal for The Boeing Co., which drew upon content from Business Week and Aviation Week.
"Categorization is really critical for enabling this interoperability. I want to see stories about Boeing, I want to see stories about airport construction, and so on," he said. An unlimited array of new products can be created quickly this way once all of the content is organized properly in a central repository.
New product announcements at the show included:
Onstream Media Corp. launched its new Digital Media Platform, bundling its diverse offerings in digital asset management, hosting, encoding, Web publishing and video bridging through a single, Web-based interface.
The new offering will be sold as an ASP, with monthly charges depending on bandwidth and number of services provided. Onstream executives said they are aiming the service at organizations that aren't yet big enough for a full-fledged asset management solution but still want a way to store, share, index, play and sell online content with a minimum amount of hassle.
While the product doesn't include elaborate, custom taxonomies, it does include a simple, generic metadata system and the option to use Onstream's consulting services to organize more complex data repositories when the need arises.
Two new products were released by North Plains Systems Corp. in an effort to serve entry-level users of digital asset management technology. The TeleScope PowerPoint Studio and Creative Studio each focus on specific niches in the asset management market.
The first product enforces strict content control on a company's archive of PowerPoint presentations, preventing unauthorized changes down to the individual slide level. Not only is the product aimed at maintaining a consistent marketing message throughout an organization, it helps prevent violations of the complex and often-baffling Sarbanes-Oxley Act, violations of which can cause expensive headaches for any publicly traded company, as well as for many private corporations.
The second product, TeleScope Creative Studio Suite, aims to manage collections of QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign files through a single interface.
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