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Understanding Digital Assets
Digital assets are, by definition, any form of media that has been turned into binary source code, or made digital. This includes nearly all intellectual property in this day and age, as much of it is created digitally, and nearly all of it is stored digitally. Digital assets can include photos, graphics, text files, PowerPoint™ presentations, business records, and even emails. |
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Digital assets, by definition, cost a company or individual employee time or money to make. While business people of all types must be able to access and use their digital assets, creative professionals may have additional needs with regard to digital asset management. In order to effectively understand, make use of, and manage digital assets, a company must be aware of their existence and able to access them. Digital asset management is an often overlooked but important business practice.
Digital Asset Management
How do you effectively manage your digital assets, protect the security of your intellectual property, and do it all in a way that efficiently uses your time and resources? Creative professionals today may spend as much as 10% of their time on digital asset management, including searches for materials that they require. Well organized, practical, and functional digital asset management can make a difference in employee productivity, contentment, and efficiency. Fortunately, there are a number of options for digital asset management.
Good digital asset management will reduce the time your employees spend looking for files and organizing their files, and it will improve overall efficiency on a day to day basis. Creative professionals will find that digital asset management improves their speed and work quality on nearly every project, since they will easily be able to access all the necessary files and materials. Graphic artists and other similar professionals often need to access logo files, source materials and more, and with an easy to use digital asset management system, their work time will be more productive.
There are many options for digital asset management software. They share a few similar qualities. All organize digital assets in some easily accessible form. Most work with the metadata connected to the files to provide a user friendly and logical organizational structure for the corporation’s digital assets. Metadata are specifically data about data. They specify the information in the file, who has rights to access or change it, and more. Creating the organizational system and the metadata for your digital assets is one of the more time consuming parts of using and setting up digital asset management systems and software.
Types of Digital Asset Management Software
Digital asset management systems can range from simple desktop solutions for single users to complex shared workspace solutions for entire corporate environments. Content can be stored on network drives or on movable media. Process oriented digital asset management software solutions are another option. In this instance, a coordinator or project manager assigns file access, and careful records are kept about each file’s history. This particular type of intellectual property management is often specific to the data required. Other options for digital asset management are merchant-centric or industry-centric, allowing information to be shared among appropriate parties.
Online Digital Asset Management Systems
All these intellectual property management systems share one thing in common. They are software solutions, implemented on a machine, server, or within a company. One growing alternative to this sort of digital asset management is online digital asset management. A number of companies offer this service, in which digital assets are uploaded to an offsite server, and then the files and intellectual property assets are available via password access on an as needed basis. This solution allows employees to access digital assets from any location or computer, and also provides backups and protection for digital assets. Hosted solutions also allow maintenance, updating, and more to be the responsibility of the host. This is a great digital asset management system for many companies or individuals, as it allows for both easy access and sharing of information between sites and workers.
The Best Digital Asset Management for You
Which digital asset management system or software is best for you and your corporation? Well, that can vary. First, do you want your digital asset management in house, or does the security of multiple backups and low maintenance effort of online digital asset management appeal to you? If you have good technical support staff in your corporation, perhaps an in-house option will be ideal, as software can be set up, managed, and maintained in house. If you do not have staff to handle those tasks, or would simply prefer to avoid assigning employee hours to digital asset management, an online system may be ideal for your company and employees. Both digital asset management software and online digital asset management systems can be configured to manage intellectual assets in the digital age.
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