　　Along with continuing demand from print buyers for faster turnaround, printers also are finding that their clientele wants quick access to their assets. As more printing businesses handle larger amounts of digital information for customers, the need for a good digital asset management system (DAM) becomes abundantly clear.
　　"Just as you have temperature control and a filing system for plates, you need to have those same considerations for digital files," notes Todd Eckler, vice president of North Plains Systems, which manufactures the TeleScope DAM product. The days of do-it-yourself directory structures based on folders are over, he says, because of larger, more complex file types, the need for faster turnaround, and customers that expect on-demand access to their assets.
　　Internal, external benefits
　　A DAM system can benefit printers in two ways, Eckler observes. Internally, printers can lower their costs and make processes more efficient by streamlining the way that their files are organized and accessed. Externally, printers are finding that asset management can be a revenue model, he notes.
　　"Asset management can be a cornerstone of securing business in a highly competitive market," states Eckler. A user-friendly system that allows customers to access their own assets through a customized portal, for instance, can help ensure that a printer's clients keep coming back.
　　"Very often, printers use asset control as a captivating force for their customer base," agrees Geeter Kyrazis, director of business development with Wave Corporation. When customers feel they can trust a printer to maintain and manage their assets, he suggests, it's less likely that they will look to a printer's competitor just to save a dollar or two on a print job.
　　For RR Donnelley's pre media division, which six years ago implemented an internal DAM system based on Wave's MediaBank technology, the decision to deal with DAM was a purely practical one.
　　"We realized with our customers increasingly giving us digital content, we needed a more efficient way to manage that content for production purposes," notes Mary Lee Schneider, president of PreMedia Technologies for Donnelley. Soon, she relates, the printing giant's customers--including retailers and catalogers--were asking for the ability to store, pull up, and re purpose assets for their own needs.
　　Today, the company has more than 1,600 users of its DAM solution, with more than a million assets under management, Schneider relates.
　　Not just for the big guns
　　But products like MediaBank aren't only for the industry's heavy hitters.
　　"The majority of our user base can be characterized more as 'mom-and-pop' graphic arts companies," Kyrazis says. "Initially, asset management often is deployed as an archiving solution, which is really appropriate to any size shop. Then, as the archiving problem gets solved, the system's other features become more apparent, and are deployed more and more."
　　In the case of MediaBank, some of these additional features include permission rights, job and volume management, the ability to create custom views depending on users, search capability, optional check-in/check-out controls, revision control, and more. Kyrazis notes that Wave's purchase of Banta Corporation's B•Media content management solution a few months ago means that MediaBank will offer even more content management features in the near future.
　　While DAM is becoming a buzzword for a variety of industries, with hundreds of "enterprise" DAM solutions available for a range of businesses, Kyrazis says that solutions like MediaBank are uniquely positioned to address the needs of the graphic arts user. "For example," he notes, "you won't find a generic asset management product that has a Quark extension allowing you to track image usage within QuarkXPress. That's only going to be found in a product that arose out of print and publishing production."
　　Other functions important to printers include the ability to work with InDesign files, JDF integration, and support for Adobe XMP tags, features that "aren't on the radar screen of larger, more generic applications," Kyrazis says.
　　Evolution to DAM
　　Many DAM solutions have evolved as solutions designed specifically with graphic arts users in mind.
　　Unlimi-Tech Software's DocTera offering, for instance, evolved from a solution to help printers transfer files efficiently, to an archiving tool ideal for printers that specialize in reprints, as well as others who need to have efficient, secure access to files.
　　DocTera's asset management options are available in its Enterprise version, which is suitable for quick printers, commercial printers, and wide-format printers, among others in the graphic arts industry, notes Unlimi-Tech director of business development Zaki Usman.
　　"A lot of systems require the client side to be installed--in other words, before you send me files, I have to send you something to install on your computer," he explains. "With our software, there is no client-side installation," Usmann notes, explaining that after printers download the system from DocTera, their clients can upload files directly onto the printer's Web site. "Data is fed into an SQL database, the de facto database technology for print," he states.
　　DocTera users such as Foster Reprints, Michigan City, Ind., use DocTera technology to run a customized Web site from which users can easily access files and place orders for production and distribution, notes Usman.
　　Keep it simple
　　Ease of use is a key feature of the Portfolio solution from Extensis, Inc., notes Joseph Schorr, senior product manager for the software manufacturer.
　　"We have a very practical view of DAM," he says. "We don't want to make people feel like they're applying for a home loan every time they need to get access to a file."
　　Schorr says that DAM should offer three essential features. First, users are looking for organization. Using a folder system--the default organizing tool for many printers these days--can easily lead to a sprawling, messy hierarchy that "reaches the point of diminishing returns," he notes.
　　Second, a DAM solution must offer fast, easy search capability so that users can quickly locate files from among the thousands they may have stored in the system. Finally, a good DAM system should allow for distribution and access, Schorr explains, since users are likely to want to repurpose assets for a variety of uses.
　　Portfolio has its roots in Aldus Fetch, a widely used file transfer solution that Extensis acquired from Adobe a few years ago. Since then, Schorr explains, Extensis has added file server capabilities to the product. With the server version of Portfolio, customers can connect the DAM solution to an SQL database, and multiple users, with multiple levels of access, can log in to the system to retrieve assets.
　　Canto's Cumulus, recently released in Version 6, is available for single users and workgroups alike. With the software, which now is available for Mac OS X, assets can be managed and made available centrally in one window, so users can create virtual asset repositories.
　　XML opens possibilities
　　With North Plains' TeleScope solution, users can systematically catalog, retrieve, and reuse files in real time with the system's unique distributed client/server architecture, Eckler explains. TeleScope addresses printers' needs for a system that they can adapt to their clients' requirements.
　　"You can set up TeleScope in a way that, internally, its functions will be the same, but to the outside world, it will look like a portal that was specifically designed for that client," Eckler explains. This flexibility--which is enabled as a result of the way content is stored in relation to the rules surrounding the search and access of assets--allows printers to offer a range of portals for their clients, from complex to generic, he adds.
　　TeleScope also can track which users are accessing assets, as well as the time the assets were used, and can provide other monitoring information that allows printers to see exactly how their clients are making use of the system. TeleScope, which uses a data storage model based on XML, supports more than a hundred types of file formats, and "will never refuse an asset," says Eckler.
　　To Eckler, the most important consideration when deciding on investing in DAM is how a printer plans to use it to expand its business. "Just getting a DAM system is not the answer," Eckler notes. "It's what you do with it in the future that's important. DAM is a technology that enables successful business processes."
　　Small risk, big reward
　　For printers that are interested in the benefits of asset management, but are hesitant to commit money and time to a system, Savvis Communications Corporation's Wam!Net arm recommends its Wam!Base Archive Service, a central storage infrastructure that users access through Wam!Net's global secure private network.
　　Use of Wam!Base doesn't preclude the use of other asset management solutions, notes Wam!Net director of print and publishing Janice Reese. "A lot of DAM solutions aren't designed, scaled, and hosted to be a global server of content," she says. With Wam!Base, assets sit in Wam!Net's data centers, which eases concerns about data security and also prevents users from tying up bandwidth while accessing large files.
　　The pay-as-you go system requires no upfront capital expense, says Reese, and the system can be customized based on printers' needs.