Artesia has been tackling the asset management problem for the past four years and found that many customers wanted to add a workflow on top of the ability to manage an asset, be it an image, document or multimedia file, in a given project.
"Digital assets have longer lives than projects," says Sebastian Holst, vice president of marketing at Artesia. "Objects created are stored separately in a workflow tool and apart from the actual asset. So simple questions like 'where has an object been used?' are hard and can be expensive to answer."
With the new workflow piece in Teams, a designer can see which projects a particular image has been used in. For instance, an advertising agency can use this to ensure an image is not used in material of competing customers, Holst says. To track an object, information is entered into an XML model that is stored in a relational database. Teams ships with an Oracle database to handle this task.
When ingesting a new piece of content into the application, Teams can attempt to extract summary and metadata automatically from the file. Some user input is required to make the information about the object more robust.
The objects themselves - 200 different file types are supported - are not stored directly with in the Teams application. Rather, they can reside anywhere and are pointed to by the tool.
Getty Images Media Management Services, a hosted digital asset management provider, has been using Teams for a few month in its hosted service as well as the company's sports and news photo business. The company uses the product to track some 1.1 million images and is adding nearly 2,000 new assets per week, says Jim Epps, director of product management at Getty Images.
Epps says he is looking forward to the release of Teams 4.4, slated for early October. "Combining collaboration and workflow closes final link in product to make it a start-to-finish type of tool for doing rich media asset management," Epps says.
For Artesia, part of the battle they face is to get customers to actually use the workflow and asset management as part of their everyday business. "Enterprise software seems like corporate medicine - good for the corporation, but leaves a bad taste in the individual users mouths," Holst says. "With asset management, need to have support from all the users and not a top down approach."
To make the transition to a workflow/asset management system easier, Artesia implemented only basic workflow information and kept it simple. "In the creative/collaborative process, complexity can be the enemy of efficiency," Epps says. "Teams has all the basic stuff, but it is not overdone and is generalized enough to work for anyone."
With a price tag starting at $100,000, Teams is targeted at large companies that manage assets across multiple fronts, including print and Web production. The Teams 4.4 server will ship in October and will be available for Solaris and NT.
RELATED LINKS
