Cable network puts unified interface with Web-based search protocol on a system that combines three separate asset management tools.Getting end users to accept and participate in a digital asset management solution is sometimes a more daunting task than creating the system itself.
Carl Hixson from HBO described his company's "federated portal" approach at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in New York on Monday.
Hixson, director of digital technologies for the cable network, took a best-of-breed approach, deploying three different management platforms for different data types.
"There is no one solution that would have handled all of our needs. Artesia's great for rich media; I don't know that I'd use it for Web content. Stellent is wonderful for document management; I don't know if I would store my video in Stellent. So we think we got the right application for the right business need."
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HBO also installed Interwoven Teamsite for Web content management. But if getting users to accept one asset management system is difficult, a three-platform solution seems nearly impossible to sell. "Interoperability between modules is really key for us," he said, but "how do we make it all transparent to the end user?"
HBO settled on a single browser-based interface that accessed all three systems. "We have what we call a federated search from a consolidated view," Hixson said.
By using Web-search conventions that everyone knows, the result felt familiar to most employees from the start. "Users log into a Yahoo-like Web interface, type a natural language search, and see all photos, video and Web content in a unified view, ranked by relevance," he said. The search data yields links to assets from video archives, print campaigns, marketing materials and Web content archives.
While the results are easy, the path to getting those results was anything but simple. "It sounds easy, [but] it took six years for us to build this system," Hixson said.
Hixson's team of seven included database developers and Java experts as well as other experts. "We had a librarian working with us from the inception ... to develop metadata schema, which is at the core of the federated layer because of the power of XML."
Asset management pros discuss the basics of digital asset management. Click here to read more.
HBO's pioneering efforts included more than a few challenges. "I don't know if it's early adoption or being the guinea pig," Hixson said, but he did keep the project on track with what he called "a philosophy of phased implementation according to asset type and user type." This involved differentiating between users who were content creators and those who were content consumers and deploying to each group separately.
He started by taking on photo assets, "low-hanging fruit," as he called it, then moved on to marketing collaterals, then rich media.
Hixson emphasized the importance of teaming up with vendors to speed development. "If we can't develop the technology ourselves and we've identified a technology that already can do what we need, no need inventing the wheel."
Asked for advice on staffing a project like his, he emphasized the importance of having a team with the right collection of skills. "At minimum you should have a DBA," he said, plus experts in Java and .Net. "You might not need a team 24/7, "but there are times when you'll need a team."
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