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Inside the Brackets:
[ARTESIA TEAMS]

by Jeff Wood     Jun 2003

In each issue, this section focuses on a different content management-related product, providing an overview of information of interest specifically targeted to publishers.

As publishing companies continue to digitize more and more of their content and media assets, they find that the effort to convert, store, and manage digital properties quickly becomes a daunting task. From an end-user perspective, the effort required to search and locate the electronic files is an extremely time-consuming activity. Once the required asset collections are finally identified, exposing and distributing them to authors, editors, production staff, marketers, compositors, and partners can be mind-boggling. And controlling workflow of newly-created assets is nearly impossible.

Enter digital asset management solutions.

A digital asset management (DAM) solution allows companies to store, organize, manage, and retrieve their digitized media and content in a centralized location. While many publishing companies have implemented at least some level of media management in their organization, an analysis of current features of today's DAM systems may be warranted. These applications vary greatly in their capabilities and suitability for different markets, and one such product has moved to the forefront in the publishing arena.

Artesia Technologies' TEAMS digital asset management solution has quickly become a favorite of publishers. A quick glance at their customer list reveals a proliferation of publishing companies, such as McGraw-Hill, Random House, and Simon & Schuster.

Artesia describes TEAMS as having the ability to "ingest, index, categorize, secure, search, transform, assemble, and export" content. Together, these functions make TEAMS a true end-to-end solution for digital asset management.

At the center of the TEAMS solution is the asset repository, an Oracle object-relational database which can store media assets as objects, and metadata and indexing data relationally. A series of "engines" are available for searching, encoding, and transforming data into and out of the repository, and are built entirely on standards-based best-of-breed protocols. This makes customizing the application and integrating with other enterprise solutions a much simpler process.

Another key feature of TEAMS is its workflow capabilities. By associating workflow rules and procedures with assets or TEAMS projects, members within the organization can track an asset across any project in which the asset has been created, reviewed, licensed, or repurposed. Combine these attributes with TEAMS' powerful metadata models and the ability to relate assets to each other, and what you get is a 360 degree view of the asset, its history, and most importantly, its relevance to your current needs.

TEAMS also offers the ability to import assets individually or in bulk, automatic indexing of imported files, checkin/checkout, file locking, and version control attributes. Its web client interface is certified on IE and Netscape, and its new Creative Client application allows Mac users to interact with TEAMS directly within the Macintosh environment.

Digital asset management solutions not only simplify the way in which companies deal with their media files, but also enables asset repurposing for use in other products and content models. In fact, many publishers store textual content in TEAMS and take advantage of the workflow and repository features to create a light CMS system. However, this is only a viable solution as long as the text can be treated as a single asset, and the publisher has no need to access parts of the text objects rather than whole object.

Artesia TEAMS has taken the unique needs of traditional publishers and created an easy-to-use, easy-to-manage system that allows publishers to save time and money and facilitate new revenue opportunities.

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