In the technology world, we of ten let mumbo-jumbo terms fly past us and assume we know them, or figure that, when we really need to know them, we’ll be able to quickly figure them out. Which is fine, until your boss or a client or even one of your peers is seeking your advice and whips out an industry acronym and that blank “uhhhhhhh” look comes over your face. You know the face: The one that looks like a stunned mullet.

One of the reasons technology professional don’t have a deep understanding of every buzzword and acronym is that they simply haven’t got the time to learn them all. Another is that—technology being a highly specialized world—they’re not exposed to them all. Another, certainly, is that there is a constant stream of new-comers.

But another leading reason is that, since tech workers often learn new applications on-the-job and not in a classroom, and despite mountains of industry magazines, they far too seldom encounter clean, rich, straight-forward explanations—and that is what we attempt to provide below regarding DAM vs. WCM.

To begin, digital asset management (DAM) is too often mistaken as just a more elaborate form of document management or Web content management (WCM). Part of the confusion comes from WCM and enterprise content management (ECM) vendors who promote their systems as DAM tools, when really all they offer are generic repositories for binary files. For some customers, this “DAM-lite” approach might work, but enterprises that need to carefully manage rich media assets will require something much more specialized— which is what DAM provides.

So what makes DAM technology special, you may ask, and how can you determine if you need a DAM system or a WCM system? Let’s explore some of the unique characteristics of DAM, as well as the business scenarios in which it’s most frequently applied.

How DAM is different from WCM
In the WCM world, “content” tends (broadly speaking) to be something that has the potential to convey information. In the DAM world, content is something with value, hence an asset. The distinction is subtle but important. In DAM, a piece of content does not become an asset until it’s been classified, indexed, versioned, secured, stored, possibly reformatted or canonicalized in some way, and (typically) assigned a lifecycle state, a unique ID, and an owner.

What's the key to making it all work? Metadata. In the DAM world, it’s what you know about an object that makes the object findable and reusable, thus valuable. These days, it’s not unusual for unstructured content, such as images, to come with their own embedded metadata (in the form of “XMP”— extensible metadata platform), but the general assumption in DAM is that any object, of any kind, regardless of whether it has its own embedded metadata, regardless of whether it’s structured or not, should be enlistable as an asset in the system.

If an asset comes into the system totally bereft of metadata, information about the object will be extracted, either from the object directly (via rules created beforehand) or manually by the person who uploaded the object. DAM offerings vary greatly in sophistication with regard to metadata handling, but the point is, nothing gets into a DAM system without some kind of metadata association. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many WCM systems.

Established DAM vendors tend to be older than the most established WCM system vendors (predating the Web itself, in some cases). This fact, coupled with the demanding scalability, storage, networkbandwidth, and other requirements of the DAM domain, have given DAM vendors a unique perspective on what it means to manage content.

DAM systems tend to store files in a file system, whereas the associated metadata is stored in a relational database. In rarer cases, the metadata continues to be managed as XMP, embedded in the asset.

Most WCM system tools (and some lighter weight ECM tools, like SharePoint), store all content in a database, which generally won’t work for the kind of large files you see in a rich media environment. WCM system vendors (and their customers) frequently do not need to think as abstractly about the “C” in content management system. Content can have structure or not have it. It can be textual or binary. It can be anything. It’s what you know about it (and how you manage what you know about it) that matters. What got us most excited about DAM technology during our six months of research for The Digital & Media Asset Management Report was just how fundamentally metadata matters (and is applied and used!) in DAM—far more, perhaps, than in any other sort of content technology.

When do you need a DAM system?
There’s more to the distinction between DAM and other tools than metadata. Two rather unique services in a DAM system include transforming and transcoding. This allows you, for example, to upload a Windows Media File into the system and convert it to Flash or QuickTime automatically. If you need a Web-ready photo but it’s stored in the DAM system as a high-resolution Photoshop graphic, a DAM system allows you to transform it on the fly, as you download it, into a low-resolution jpeg. DAM systems also allow for graphic designers and “creatives” (as they’re often called in the DAM world) to access and upload files without ever leaving their favorite creative application— whether Quark Xpress, Adobe In Design, Photoshop, etc. Designers and creatives like to stay inside their tools. They want minimal interruption or hindrances to their creative process and efforts. This is especially important in any scenario involving compound assets—such as a brochure or a catalog, that could include images, text, and other content. DAM systems allow creatives to manage compound assets as a whole, or in pieces. A DAM system will track every instance that, say, a photo is used across all assets, be they individual or compound.

When do you need a DAM system?
Explicitly or not, different DAM products target different “use cases,” or scenarios, and these scenarios are quite different from the ones wherein WCM systems are commonly applied. In our research for The Digital & Media Asset Management Report, we identified 13 common scenarios for DAM. We present several below. Though these scenarios are abstractions, and overlap somewhat, they can help you understand typical situations when DAM is required.

1) DAM Library or Photo Archive
One of the most common starting points and basic uses of a DAM system is as a digital asset library or photo archive. In this scenario, your DAM system functions as a common, centralized place to catalog and store all of your digital photos or assorted assets. These assets may be at the end of a creative process; older; or less frequently used. The archive becomes a reference for historical use of the assets; for generation of new ideas, such as using an old picture in the new brochure; for recreating a scene, such as seeing what the set for a photo shoot looked like; or as a single definitive catalog, to determine what the organization owns.

2) Brand Management
Every company has a brand or product to manage. Corporate communications and marketing departments use the brand library to store and find common brand elements, logos, style guides, documentation, and finished pieces. You may share those assets with both internal teams and external agencies and partners. In some instances, you may focus on a single asset type, such as cataloging all logos or online banner ads. Simple brand management requires basic metadata support, basic packaged transformations to provide approved renditions for various media, security to control asset access and visibility, and a simple folder structure to facilitate navigation and search across brands. Multilingual brand management adds on the need to support simultaneous access to the same assets in multiple languages. As such, every piece of metadata for every asset must exist in all the languages required by the installation. Not only must the DAM system support a multilingual metadata model at the asset level, it has to support workflows for creating and maintaining that metadata in all the necessary languages.

3) Marketing Asset Production and Distribution
Marketing groups commonly create and assemble marketing collateral in conjunction with internal or external design or creative groups. This effort may require creating multiple pieces of marketing collateral simultaneously or in parallel and there may be significant shared copy and assets between the pieces. Typical adopters of DAM in this scenario are manufacturing companies; retail, hospitality, and consumer product companies; companies with national or global brands; and ad agencies.

4) Ad Production
Print ads are often compound assets. Creatives must be able to work with that asset, upload it and download it, without having to explicitly “package for output” from the creative tool and manually store it in the DAM system. They need to version the asset, version assets within it, and manage a configuration of a compound asset and its content over time. This is a typical ad production scenario that requires a DAM.

5) Catalog Production
In this scenario, catalogs of images and product information are produced. Deep compound asset support is required, along with multi-page document storage, retrieval, and versioning. One of the trickiest elements of this scenario, but where a DAM can really deliver, is leveraging “where used” relationships—the ability to determine which compound documents use which assets. Typical adopters include retailers, manufacturing companies, content or product aggregators, and traditional print catalog companies.

6) Short Form Video Production
Short form video production refers to the creation or production of video that’s less than 30 minutes long. It usually refers to commercials, advertisements, or other promotional video. This type of video has become common in organizations that use video for corporate, marketing, or product communication. DAM systems might serve as a repository for video and help manage the review between production and reviewers. Unlike a WCM system, a DAM system might store a combination of raw video footage, clips, and works in progress at various stages and digital forms. Rather than passing around videotapes, sending clips by email, or logging onto an FTP site to retrieve and view the video, the DAM system is the vehicle for sharing and communicating. It provides a secure, controlled, and integrated environment in which to review, and in some cases edit, the video.

7) Broadcast Video Production
One of the original areas for DAM was broadcast news production. By integrating the broadcast infrastructure, including non-linear editing suites, scheduling systems, playout devices, and video feeds, the DAM system gave the broadcaster access to historical and archived video content to integrate with the live feeds during a video editing session.

With the increasing demand for alldigital broadcasts, from the shoot through transmission and archival, DAM systems will play an increasing role in the production workflows and have a permanent home in the newsroom. Broadcast news production is among the most demanding and complex of DAM applications. Though we only list a few here, there are over a dozen unique business situations where DAM is appropriate. Tellingly, our vendor evaluation process revealed that few vendors performed well in more than two or three scenarios. As you consider DAM tools, be sure to remember that—by no means—does one tool fit all.

--Therea Regli and Kas Thomas are coauthors of "The Digital & Media Asset Management Report," published by CMS Watch.