In a previous article, we wrote about the differences between cloud-sync sharing solutions such as Dropbox or Box.com and a Digital Asset Management solution such as Daminion.
In this article, we aim to take a similar approach by comparing another popular solution companies use in place of a digital asset management system, direct access to the file server.
This method is very common amongst companies that may be small in size or have a small team of individuals who produce and access their digital assets.
The reason this method is popular among smaller teams largely has to do with the cost of implementation.
This method mainly costs the price of the hardware and the time it takes the IT Dept to deploy and set up user access.
For teams of five or less, or who produce no more than a few hundred gigabytes of content each year this method can be a logical and effective solution.
But, for teams larger than five people or who produce more than 500GB a year in content, the limitations, and risks that come from this method become too high for an organization to keep in place.
A digital asset management system becomes necessary to implement over direct server access.
Like the previous article, let’s quickly compare the popular features and functions of a DAM with that of the File Server.
| Features | File Server | DAM (i.e. Daminion) |
| Folder structure organization | Y | Y |
| Galleries or collections of related assets | N | Y |
| Search by file name and folder name | Y | Y |
| Search by keywords | N | Y |
| Search by custom tags, labels, or other custom metadata | N | Y |
| Support controlled vocabulary of keywords, tags, labels, or other metadata | N | Y |
| A controlled vocabulary of search terms | N | Y |
| Show side-by-side comparison of different assets or an asset’s version history | N | Y |
| Multiple image thumbnail sizes for previewing files | Y | Y |
| View file and image labels, tags and ratings | Y | Y |
| Download original versions of the file | Y | Y |
| Download transformed or alternative versions of the file | N | Y |
| Plugs into creative applications (i.e. Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator) | Y | Y |
| Preview Work-In-Progress (WIP) layout files (indd, etc.) | N | Y |
| Show asset version history | N | Y |
| Publish directly to social media sites | N | Y |
| Push assets to other enterprise applications (i.e. CRM, PIM, ERP) | N | Y |
| Pull/Receive asset specific data from enterpriseapplications (i.e. CRM, PIM, ERP) | N | Y |
| Restrict access to assets to specific users/recipients | Y | Y |
| Restrict asset actions to specific users/recipients (i.e. view only, edit, write, etc) | Y | Y |
| Manage user access andfunctionality based on user group association(Active Directory, LDAP, etc) | N | Y |
| Manage user access and functionality based on user role/profile(Art Director vs Junior AD vs Contractor, etc) | N | Y |
| Check-Out/In of assets | N | Y |
When comparing these core features and functionality of a DAM to a file server it quickly becomes clear the disparity between the two solutions; the file server doesn’t even close in comparison to a DAM.
Yet, let’s dive a little deeper into each of the main categories below to discuss a little further as to why there is a difference between the two solutions.
Keep in mind that the key factor between implementing these two solutions is the savings in time and therefore money a company will see by implementing a DAM solution, such as Daminion, over users continuing to struggle with using a file server system.
Now, keep in mind that all DAM solutions are going to store the digital assets on a file server, whether that be on-premise or in the cloud.
Regardless, by implementing a DAM acts as a much-needed gatekeeper between your users and the assets. Usually adding a layer of technology can slow down or bottleneck a company’s process and a user’s time to accomplish a task.
However, in the case of a DAM system this extra layer not only offers additional security to the company’s assets but when implemented correctly, can speed up the processes for your users.
Organizing
While most users are going to be familiar with the idea of manually navigating a folder structure, having this be the only way to organize one’s assets, especially when there thousands or millions of assets, become terribly unwieldy for users to effectively navigate and find what they are looking for.
Organizing assets by folder structures alone easily lend themselves to one of the biggest shortcomings of this approach, and that is asset duplication.
Asset duplication is how companies struggle to maintain brand consistency in new marketing and other collateral. One of the major issues that comes from asset duplication is storage consumption.
While the cost of storage is getting cheaper year after year, the last thing the IT department wants to do is spin up another storage drive.
In addition to storage, indexing & previewing files becomes more burdensome the more assets you add to the server combined with the number of concurrent users looking through and downloading out of the file server.
Keep in mind that when a user goes directly on to the file server and navigates through the structure, the burden of re-indexing the content and serving up their previews is managed by that same server.
Load times of previews can be extremely long, especially when dealing with larger files. The preview is regenerated every single the asset is called up.
In contrast, a DAM typically generates a low res preview file and caches key data. Therefore, when a user looks through assets, the previews load almost instantly.
This is one of those simple ways to speed up the process for users. No one loves to sit and wait for a file preview to load just to realize that file isn’t the one they are looking for.
A lot of time DAMs are deployed on their own dedicated application server that can have more processing power on it than the actual file server. This separate and more powerful server can also increase the speed it takes users to upload content and for previews to be generated.
These same app servers are used to process transformations of the source file into an alternative file output. Once again, we are saving time. Like we talked about a lot in our last article, saving money is one of the reasons for implementing a Digital Asset Management solution like Daminion.
Searching
The limitations of searching are merely an extension of the section above. Without powerful and accurate search capabilities users can’t find what they are looking for.
Searching is limited to manually clicking through folders. The success rate of finding what you need dramatically drops if there is no formal folder structure in place and limits to the number of sub-folders a path can have.
Going briefly back to the topic of indexing assets, if folder paths become too deep or long in characters the path and associated assets can become corrupt.
The best rule of thumb here is to keep your folder paths at a maximum of seven levels deep. Going more than seven can be very tedious when clicking through, plus you start to risk folder paths hitting server limitations.
For those of us who have tried this many times before know how slow and inaccurate those search engines on the file server can be.
How many times have you tried to search by a keyword in a file name, get no results in the search, but can later find the file after spending several minutes or hours manually navigating folders?
Searching on a file server is too basic and light weight that most of the time it is ineffective. This is where the use of a DAM is far superior for users. In a DAM a user can search collections, they can search by keywords, tags, etc. Even searching by file names or folder names are far superior in the quality of their results.
Plus, keep in mind that not everyone thinks or searches the same way. On a file server you essentially are forcing the user to search using only one method, manual navigation.
A DAM in contrast not only supports the manual approach, but it also allows users to search by typing in terms or choosing existing terms or values from a controlled vocabulary. In some instances a user can use multiple methods together.
Another advantage of using Search within a DAM is the ability for users to create search recipes and save them. The user can then quickly select the search recipe the next time they go on the asset hunt and quickly recall those search results.
Searching directly on the file server offers no saving of search criteria. A user is then left to remember the exact folder navigation steps in the future when looking for those same assets.
Metadata
When only working directly on the file server the user is limited in the metadata they can see and even search by. A lot of embedded metadata a user can see on a file server is administrative and structural data.
This is data like creation date, file size, file type, file creator, etc. Administrative data is limited and can’t be edited from the file server.
The biggest loss is that of contextual data. This is the data that describes the contents of the asset such as keywords, search tags, content description, etc.
This type of data for most users is the data they actually know, care about, and use to search and find their assets.
So, if you take away the most important metadata, then users are left only ‘tagging’ assets based off of a folder path and folder name. Users can no longer easily or quickly find assets based on the real meaningful data they know and use.
Viewing
We have touched on this a little bit earlier in this article, but there is more to highlight here. As we mentioned earlier, previews of assets on the file server are generated on the fly every time an asset is selected.
When dealing with large files (anything over 1GB) the time it takes to recreate that preview can take several seconds to even minutes. Users don’t have that kind of time to sit and wait for a preview to be generated.
One of the other large drawbacks to preview generation on the file server is that a lot of creative file types are not supported. This leaves the user with the only way to see what is in the file is to download and open it in the files native application.
Again, depending on file size this can add a significant amount of time for users to look through assets.
A DAM by contrast supports preview generation for a much broader type of assets. Plus, if your organization works with a lot of assets that initially aren’t supported, you can always reach out to your DAM provider and request support of that file type.
Usually DAM vendors such as Daminion understand the time savings that come from proper file previews alone that they value providing support for new file formats to their customers. You don’t have this level of influence with operating system providers.
Another big viewing capability that comes with a DAM is side-by-side comparison. This allows a user to view two different assets at the same time simultaneously for comparison. Sometimes the DAM can not only provide the standard preview comparison, they can also provide pixel comparison between different versions of the same asset and highlight what has changed.
Distributing
When it comes to distributing your assets from the file server this is only doable if the destination can map to the server. Also, this leaves users to manually upload to each location.
If the same assets has to go to multiple locations, the process is manual and therefore time consuming and prone to human error. Plus, if each location needs a slightly different variation of the file, such as different file type, dimension, resolution, or a combination of any of these, a user has to manually create each one.
This can also require that user to have access and understanding of the specific software used to create the asset initially.
Part of where this becomes problematic is it eliminates the ability for a larger audience to self serve and get the assets they need, when they need them, in the output they need them.
By contrast, a DAM solution such as Daminion can create export recipes for common and regular outputs. These can then be created on a self serve basis by a large audience without the need of a single person or small group of people being responsible for creating the outputs for common sizes or dimensions.
Another DAM benefit for distribution can be the ability to automate the process. Automation eliminates the risk of human error and increases productivity.
Automation of delivering assets can even be set up to happen during business off hours when your team is at home.
Protecting
Protection of assets is very important, and when you give users direct server access your are limited in how assets are protected. In a DAM such as Daminion, you can limit access to specific assets with security policies. You can also set different user roles for the same assets that can change how a user can interact with the assets.
For example, roles can give one role the ability to view and edit a group of assets, but a different role may only be able to view the same assets, but not perform any sort of edit actions.
The protection capabilities of a DAM become more and more important with the growth of more asset producers and consumers. Especially in a world with a large portion of the workforce working remotely it is becoming even more important to control how and what assets are seen and what they can do with them.
Working (in progress) files
For any team or organization that is creating new files on a regular basis, this is going to be one of the biggest benefits of a DAM over the direct access to the file server. There are a few reasons for this advantage.
The first being previewing these creative build files such as InDesign. Preview capabilities are limited for these file types compared to a DAM.
Another advantage is the ability to check-in and check-out of these creative files. This capability limits and restricts other users from saving over the top of or editing the same file at the same time. This eliminates the risk of losing valuable production time.
Usually, this feature also allows users to cleanly duplicate and create versions of the file without risk of users accidentally pulling an older version of the file. Plus, users can also add notes to the new version of the file from the person doing the upload.
One other feature of some DAMs when it comes to WIP files is the ability to link to the different design elements such as photos, graphics, logos, etc. This is valuable in a few ways.
One, if a new version is created, the updated version is now pushed to all build files where these assets are used. Updating the element once can update multiple build files at the same time.
No more out-of-date versions sneaking into your projects. This means time and money are saved, once again.
Secondly, is that a user can see all the build files linked to the same element, giving users an idea of how much a particular asset has been used. This can reduce asset usage fatigue.
Thirdly, users can find assets by either searching for the element and then going to the linked build file. Or, a user can search the other way by looking for the build file and then finding all the linked elements.
Ultimately, a DAM is critical to the success of any creative group that is re-using the same assets multiple times or creates multiple rounds of edits to the same build file. Trying to manage linked versions and build files with elements is messy and highly lends itself to producing duplicate files.
The DAM Layer to your tech stack
Hopefully, your DAM eyes have been opened to the many ways a digital asset management solution such as Daminion offers many positive tradeoffs over working directly from the file server as your asset management solution. The benefits listed above, plus many more far offset the cost of implementing and owning a DAM.
For further DAM related questions or inquiries specific to Daminion please feel free to contact us at www.daminion.net
