Put Graphics, Multimedia, and other Digital Assets to Work in Content-Centric Applications

Anyone who has browsed a Web site recently, whether a flashy consumer site or a purely functional corporate intranet, knows that content today is far more than just text.  Video presentations, graphics, scanned documents, audio files, and company logos are powerful tools used to communicate business messages via the Web.  For this reason, digital asset management (DAM), the process of managing graphics and multi-media content, is increasingly important to most organizations.   However, the real value of DAM lies in the ability to easily and cost effectively put those assets to work in support of business initiatives.

Unfortunately, even though the Web is a prime delivery channel for digital assets, integration between DAM and Web delivery solutions is often loose, even when they are modules in the same product suite.  This can mean each system requires its own workflow and repository services, which is inefficient and makes coordinated publishing efforts difficult.  It can also make it hard to track publishing dependencies across systems, which can affect content quality and end-user experience.

FatWire Software provides a flexible and secure system for managing digital assets.  With FatWire, designers, graphics creators, content owners, and business managers can easily create, find, edit, and reuse rich media assets, saving valuable time and money.  And since FatWire manages and delivers digital assets through the same Enterprise Content Management (ECM) infrastructure used to manage other content types, enterprises can develop Content-Centric Applications that deliver all the sights and sounds of the business.

Manages All Types of Content in a Common Repository
The FatWire Content Server product suite is an enterprise content management solution.  This means it can manage all types of content including images, audio and video files, documents, and Web content with a single system, making it easy to associate and aggregate different types of content into consumable form.  While many digital asset management systems merely point to disparate file systems, FatWire's common repository provides a single-point of backup enabling quick disaster recovery.

Tracks Publishing Dependencies to Ensure Quality
One of the benefits of managing digital assets alongside other types of content in Content Server is that publishing dependencies across different file types can be tracked and enforced.  This helps ensure quality as it reduces broken links and missing files.  Content Server allows business users to see where managed assets are presented to users, so they know in advance what will be affected when changing or deleting a file.  When changes are made and approved for publishing, those changes are held until all Web pages on which the content is used are reviewed and published.  Content Server's transactional publishing model publishes all new or changed content at the same time to ensure that content is always consistent and there are never any broken links.

Applies Management Services across Assets to Support Business Processes
FatWire provides workflow services needed to support the business processes associated with producing, managing, and delivering digital assets to multiple channels.  All assets in the system can be included in workflows, allowing all content contributors to leverage diverse assets in their Web content management processes.   This creates efficiencies as content destined for the same delivery channel can be put through a common workflow, rather than requiring content producers to work with multiple systems.  Library services such as create, read, update, delete, check in/check out, and revision history are all available features for digital assets.

Promotes Asset Reuse
FatWire helps companies reduce the high costs incurred when users recreate rather than reuse media assets. FatWire makes it easy to reuse existing media assets by allowing the search and navigation of assets and asset categories to find files. While searching and navigating, Content Server displays image thumbnails and asset metadata rather than actual high-resolution images, making it easy to browse search results to locate the right file.

Provides Tools to Automate the Management of Diverse Digital Assets
Automatic transformation of digital assets saves time and money. The Content Server product suite includes various tools and automated processes specific to each type of digital asset that it manages. It can convert over 200 file types to HTML or XML enabling rapid Web deployment of valuable digital assets. The filtering technology can perform automatic processing of digital assets, such as extraction of thumbnails from uploaded images and system-wide image resizing. There are filters for different types of media, such as a filter to extract size, snapshots, duration, and dimensions from a video file and another to extract album, artist, and song from MP3 files. Developers can also create their own filters. Rules can be established to handle different types of files differently. For example, resizing can be applied to all JPEG files but not to GIFs. The system also supports the bulk import of existing digital assets and their metadata.

Makes Image Production Easy for Designers and Graphic Artists
FatWire enables users to create images directly through its easy-to-use interface. It includes standard tools for image cropping, rotation, color manipulation, and more. To meet more advanced editing requirements, FatWire supports integration with design tools such as Adobe InDesign, Adobe Graphics Server, Quark and other preferred editing tools.

Content owners can use Windows Explorer to drag and drop files into the repository, edit metadata, and classify files into the taxonomy. This enables designers to easily put assets currently on their desktops into a managed environment.

Gives Administrators Flexible Customization Options
In addition to providing easy-to-use tools for content owners, FatWire also ensures that site administrators can set content standards. Administrators can automatically control image dimensions, file size, format, resolution, color count, and aspect ratio, ensuring consistency across the enterprise. Administrators can also control the type and size of files that can be added to the repository.

Organizes Assets in Easy-to-Use Hierarchical Framework
Business users are accustomed to working in hierarchical folder directories. Using the FatWire Content Server product suite, content owners can manage digital assets in this same user-friendly interface. Assets can be kept in the same directory structure as other content types and metadata can be applied to these images based on the metadata associated with the directory. Content Server also allows for attribute inheritance. This means that any attributes assigned to a folder are automatically assigned to the documents in that folder and can also be assigned to any subfolders. This reduces redundant data entry and ensures important metadata is not omitted. This structure also allows tremendous flexibility and efficiency in managing large numbers of digital assets, especially during the initial stages of importing large existing repositories.

This hierarchical structure is customizable. Multiple hierarchies can be created to suit different audiences, such as a hierarchy by source for the copyright department and another by category for marketing. FatWire also offers an image library interface that provides a quick view of important digital asset information including a thumbnail.

Ensures Assets are Secure
To ensure that digital assets are stored, managed, and delivered securely, FatWire offers granular and flexible access control features that can be applied according to directory, file type, or content repository. Administrators can create access policies that define functional privileges such as Edit, Copy, Delete, Checkout, Approve, Inspect, Preview, and Rollback by role. So for example, brand marketers can ensure they have control over valuable brand assets. Policies that are set at parent folders in a hierarchy can be inherited by files in those folders and subfolders. This provides the security needed to ensure that content creators, approvers, and viewers are only accessing those assets they're allowed to edit and/or view.

FatWire's e-commerce capabilities allow businesses to sell digital assets and include these assets in promotions, cross-selling, and up-selling. To protect against unauthorized access, digital assets are delivered in a secure manner, requiring a session key to match the key embedded in the asset's link.

Provides Robust Staging Environment
Most content owners want to see what an image will look like in all its delivery destinations such as Internet, intranet, and extranet sites, as well as email campaigns and cell phone devices. FatWire allows a user to preview a single image in all of its delivery templates. The Content Server staging environment allows preview of assets across multiple sites before publishing to production environments.

Delivers Content to Multiple Channels
Managing digital assets within Content Server's multi-site support solution makes them readily accessible for delivery to multiple Web sites and channels. The same digital assets can be used across multiple sites which is a cost-effective way to re-purpose content. The system can also leverage managed digital assets for delivery to hand-held and phone devices, as appropriate.

Personalizes Content Delivery
As with other content types managed by Content Server, digital assets can be associated with personalization rules to help deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. Using Content Server, business people, who are most familiar with the content, define the rules that dictate who sees what content under what conditions. They define segments of users and create relationships between content and user segments.

Integrates with Existing Systems
Customers require flexibility to meet their DAM needs. FatWire's support of open standards like XML allows customers to leverage existing DAM systems, if required. These systems can remain the source of record for digital assets while FatWire manages the metadata, Web content integration, and delivery of those digital assets.