Asset Management With Magnolia: You Have the Choice

Digital assets are the driving force behind building compelling digital experiences. While publishing relevant content is crucial for capturing the interest of customers, truly engaging digital experiences include images, video, audio, and other digital assets.

Enterprises often waste time and money with digital assets. The problem is that many employees have trouble finding and using the digital assets they’ve spent considerable money creating. That’s why at Magnolia we created native support for DAM (Digital Asset Managment) capabilities and we enable you to integrate with external DAM systems as well.

Let’s take a closer look at the importance of digital asset management for enterprise organizations and how Magnolia supports digital asset management through its Assets App and the DAM Connector Pack.

Enterprise organizations have vast amounts of digital assets but they often can’t fully or efficiently use them for digital marketing efforts. Due to fragmented systems, lost and hidden data is a significant expense for many organizations. If marketers can’t find the digital assets they need, the ROI of creating these digital assets plummets. Marketers will be forced to duplicate their work or spend a substantial amount of time searching for the assets they need.

The key benefit of a DAM system, much like content management, is the centralized management of content and digital assets. Whether the DAM system is external to the CMS or you use Magnolia’s native DAM capabilities, the ability to organize, find, and retrieve digital assets is critical. DAM systems ensure that digital assets are secure and instantly accessible by employees, and that the files can be used to build a consistent and compelling brand image.

The Assets app is Magnolia’s native DAM solution. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key DAM features available to marketers using this central interface.

In the workbench of the Assets app you can see assets displayed as a list, nested folders, or a thumbnail grid. Assets can be images, video, audio, Flash, documents and many more file types. Magnolia can manage a massive volume of assets but it’s a best practice to organize large repositories into folders to ensure high performance.

You can add new folders and assets easily using the action on the right side. Assets can be added individually or multiple at once by uploading a zip file. You can also select assets and use them on web pages or custom content types.

By opening a particular digital asset, marketers can edit a wide range of attributes from name to description and other essential metadata. Magnolia uses the Simple Dublin Core Metadata Element Set by default, but companies are free to customize the metadata to meet their needs. Users can also control access to specific digital assets and editing functionality. Magnolia supports versioning of assets so users can easily restore a previous version of any digital asset.

Tags are short keywords that make finding and reusing content and assets much easier. Magnolia provides much of the asset metadata automatically using AI-driven algorithms. Image recognition, for example, detects the subject of an image and tags the asset when it's uploaded. If you want to leverage a cloud service for more advanced image recognition, you can configure Magnolia to use Amazon Rekognition instead. Consistent tagging ensures that digital assets are easy for the marketer to find and leverage for digital marketing efforts.

Images can be edited directly in Magnolia, which speeds up the editing process and eliminates the need for marketers to switch between many systems or upload multiple versions of an image with different size requirements. The image editor is not meant to replace best of breed image editing tools, but to provide the basic features necessary for the marketer’s everyday needs.

The Find Bar makes it very easy to search for any kind of asset using text or voice. You can use the Find Bar to search any content within the CMS across all apps or focus on digital assets specifically. It’s also possible to filter search results by tags, by date of last edit, or by the user who modified the file.

The search feature leverages AI-driven contextual search to provide the most relevant results based on past user behavior or their particular user role within Magnolia. Using deep learning and a neural network Magnolia organizes results by relevance. The more users search and use the Find Bar, the better the results.

Easy and flexible assets management is a core capability to win in the digital age. We created the Assets app as a versatile DAM access point built directly into the Magnolia interface. Marketers can organize and retrieve the digital assets they need from one centralized system and reuse these assets for multiple campaigns, websites, or other channels. That means building rich digital experiences and maintaining consistent branding is straightforward.

While the Assets app is a capable DAM solution, as a vendor with a best-of-breed philosophy, we provide full flexibility to use whatever DAM you choose. If you already have an existing DAM system and don’t want to migrate assets into Magnolia, you can easily connect to the external system using APIs. There’s a prebuilt DAM Connector Pack available for integrating with systems like Amazon S3 and Bynder. You can even use multiple DAM systems in parallel while enjoying a single point of access.

You are free to choose the DAM setup that meets your unique business requirements, whether it’s the Assets App or an integrated system. The important thing is that you choose a solution that best enables you to manage and leverage digital assets to build compelling digital experiences at a lower cost.