A GUIDE TO USING SHAREPOINT AS YOUR DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Can you use SharePoint Managing the digital assets-be it your company documents, product design, sales presentations, and the like, is critical for the everyday operations of your business. It is recommended that you use an efficient Digital Asset Management System (DAM) to manage your digital asset that ensures data consistency and easy accessibility.
Now, you might use SharePoint for storing your data, but can it be used as a Data Asset Management System? If yes, then how can you go about it? In the sections below, we will cover all the basics so that you can get started using SharePoint Digital Asset Management solution.
Is the setup of your document management currently limiting productivity? Find out how SharePoint could be changed into a high-powered Digital Asset Management system that is customized to fit your company’s needs.
What is a Digital Asset Management System?
What is a Digital Asset Management System?
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is an all-in-one platform that is meant to: Store, Organize, Manage, Distribute, digital assets like:
Text documents:
- Images,
- Videos,
- Audio files,
- HTML code
- Other digital media formats
The system makes it possible to tag the assets with metadata. Therefore, it streamlines the processes of searching, obtaining, and reusing the content. Moreover, it provides data protection, adherence to regulations, and smooth flow of assets among the departments.
What Does a DAM System Do?
An efficient Digital Asset Management system comes along with efficiency level increased for companies in terms of organizing their asset workflows, accessibility of content, no more duplicate creations, better coexistence. It also ensures that assets being correctly controlled, secured, and available all the time during their lifecycle.
- Organizing digital assets
- Converting, merging, and collating digital assets
- Creating a data library for searching documents when you need it.
- Verifying the integrity of digital assets
- Distribution of digital assets
- Security and data compliance
- Data backup
Can Microsoft SharePoint Work as a Digital Asset Management System?
Yes, Microsoft SharePoint has the potential to serve as a Digital Asset Management system in an effective way. It is not only known for its document storage and administrative cooperation but also for the advanced features that it possesses which make it appropriate for DAM applications.
Key Features of SharePoint That Make It Suitable for Digital Asset Management
- File Management: Like any other DAM, SharePoint Digital Asset Management allows you to upload single as well as multiple files at a time. You can also extract EXIF metadata during upload.
- Meta Data Handling: SharePoint Digital Asset Management allows you to manually and automatically associate metadata with your files.
- Data Browsing: Not only would you be able to browse through folders or by file name, but you would also be able to search by metadata.
- Access Control: Managing who has access to the data is one of the vital features of any DAM. You will be able to set roles and assign users to roles as well as to teams.
- Workflow Management: Microsoft SharePoint Digital Asset Management allows you to manage your workflows and schedule tasks easily. You can also integrate SharePoint with Microsoft Power Automate and add greater automation capabilities to your process.
As you can see, SharePoint Digital Asset Management can effectively solve the challenges of managing your digital assets. Now, let us learn the basics of setting up an environment to manage your digital assets with the help of Microsoft SharePoint.
The Basics of Setting up a Digital Asset Management System with SharePoint
Knowing the basics of setting up a SharePoint Digital Asset Management system is important. Here are the primary objectives that need to be achieved:
- You should provide metadata for each different kind of asset.
- Determine the ideal volume of storage space that is required for the assets.
- The place to store assets at various stages of the life cycle is important.
- Controlling access to an asset at each stage of its life cycle.
- Controlling how users can create, review, approve, publish, and dispose of assets.
Creating Asset Libraries in SharePoint 2013
Microsoft SharePoint 2013 allows organizations to create asset libraries that work like the Digital Asset Management System.
When planning to create an Asset Library in SharePoint, it is important to assign user roles. Here are the user roles for SharePoint asset libraries.
What are the Key Roles for SharePoint Asset Libraries?
Asset libraries in SharePoint with clearly defined roles to enhance accountability, speed up workflows, and support content governance. They also allow the organization to collaborate efficiently by assigning specific tasks of creation, management, and consumption of digital assets.
- Asset creators: These are the individuals who create assets. This includes users like copywriters, graphic artists, or any people who create individual assets. Asset creators can create and upload multiple versions of the same file. For example, one can create multiple logo versions in different resolutions or colors and upload them to the system.
- Asset managers: These individuals will be in charge of managing the assets in the library. They look after the end-to-end workflow. These will look after when an asset is first submitted, sent for publication, to the asset’s expiry. They are also in charge of organizing assets in the library and adding important metadata such as keywords. Managers can even set a date after which the asset cannot be used.
- Asset consumers: This includes people whose primary intention is to use assets from the library.
You can assign a single role to multiple individuals or multiple roles to the same individual per your needs.
Planning for Asset Libraries in SharePoint
Now that we have understood the distinct roles, let us take a quick look at the stages involved in creating an asset library for SharePoint. Asset library offers you exactly what you expect from a SharePoint Digital Asset Management system.
The Steps Involved in Planning for Asset Libraries
- Identify roles for managing digital assets: You need to start by deciding who will create digital assets, the kind of assets that will be created, and the people who will manage the assets and maintain the on-premises servers on which the assets are stored.
- Analyze asset usage: In most cases, your digital asset will be larger in size than your standard documents. So, it is important to plan your storage. This can be achieved only after proper analysis of asset usage. When you do that, you will be able to decide how to structure the asset libraries, the number of libraries you need, the types to use for the assets, as well as the policies which will apply to the asset libraries.
- Plan an organization of asset libraries: Next, you will need to think about how you are going to organize your libraries. While doing that, you would need to do the following tasks:
- Determine the number of asset libraries required.
- Decide on the location where you will be creating each asset library.
- Choose between a fixed or collaborative library.
- Plan Content Types: Next, you must decide on the content type. You can choose from the ones that are already included in SharePoint, which includes images, audio, video, and document. You also have the option of creating custom content types that are derived from them.
- Plan for Content Governance: Now, you will need to decide on the control for each content type and decide on the storage location of the digital assets. You can choose versioning to keep all the iterations of the asset in the library. You can also implement an approval process that the asset should go through before being available to others in the organization.
How Evolvous Help You Maximize SharePoint’s Potential?
At Evolvous, we have a team of expert consultants who help businesses like yours tap the potential of SharePoint. We help you with the planning and execution of your SharePoint Digital Asset Management System. If you are currently using any other cloud storage or DAM application, then you should think about shifting to Microsoft SharePoint as it helps you to achieve better integration with other Microsoft Enterprise Solutions like Power BI, Power Apps and other applications from Power Platform.
To make it easier for you to explore the benefits of SharePoint, we are currently offering 50% off on first POC. Visit us SharePoint page to know more.
Get Started with Evolvous Today.
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