January 15, 2020
Digital Asset Management systems enable organizations to store, share, and organize digital assets (images, videos, documents, etc.) in a central location.
The usage of a DAM allows organizations to have a single source of truth, without confusing users with complex folder structures and multiple resolutions. Most DAMs allow administrators to track the usage of individual assets and set usage rights for users and user groups.
More than half of organizations are known to store assets in more than four separate places (like Dropbox, Google Drive, SharePoint, etc.), and over 70% have over 1000 assets. This results in less effective and efficient marketing campaigns due to the complexity of file structures in these cloud storage platforms.
Sitecore Content Hub is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool that was acquired thanks to Sitecore’s acquisition of Stylelabs last year. As a tool, it’s been around for over five years now, but it’s starting to gain more traction thanks to Sitecore’s promotional push in recent months, promoting its seamless integration with Sitecore XP. Content Hub supports features in addition to Digital Assets Management (DAM) by installing modules. Some of the popular modules include Product Content Management (PCM), Project Management (MRM), and Campaign/Content Management (CMP).
We are lucky to have already embedded Content Hub and its modules into our projects and teams. However, we recognize that for many people, it’s still a tool on the periphery of their Sitecore implementations. So, here’s a list of the most noticeable things we’ve picked during our implementations.
1. Intuitive Design
Let’s kick off with the fact that Content Hub is an extremely user-friendly application. The responsive design enables usage on most devices with a web browser.
2. Taxonomy
The updated Taxonomy helps you organize your digital assets by assigning a specific category or multiple categories. Setting up the taxonomies is the most crucial part of Sitecore Content Hub because the users will use taxonomies and metadata to search for an asset, instead of hunting for it in a folder-file structure.
‘Taxonomies’ in Content Hub allows users to quickly filter through hundreds of thousands of assets and narrow them down to just a handful. For example, if your organization sells frozen food products globally and you want to find a video of potato products sold in Asia, you can set the asset type taxonomy to “video”, product type taxonomy to “potato”, and product region taxonomy to “Asia”. You should have narrowed your results down to a few useful assets.
If you want to narrow it down even more to mp4 videos of french fries sold in Japan, you can select the “mp4” under “video” (mp4 is of the children of the “video” item in asset type taxonomy), “French fries” under “potato”, and “Japan” under “Asia”. Users can then add these assets to their favourites collection to use them later or share with others.
3. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Utilizes Microsoft Azure’s Computer Vision service. You can choose to enable auto-tagging to enhance the overall searching experience.
4. Feature Friendly
It’s easy to add more features whenever you need them, making implementation options flexible and scalable. Adding a new taxonomy / metadata type is easy.
5. A More Secure Service
You have the option to restrict access or give partial access to the asset portal. Restrictions can be based on any taxonomy / metadata values associated with each asset.
6. It’s a SaaS
Which is a strong offering when thinking about global scalability; it must be fast when you are sharing documents around the world. Content Hub is hosted on Microsoft Azure with the option of having multiple servers around the globe for better regional performance.
7. Great Integration
Now that Sitecore owns Content Hub, it has an exciting roadmap ahead. Sitecore have already developed a connector for Sitecore XP, and more integration features are in the plans. You get the sense that Sitecore is trying to make the two products integrate as seamlessly as possible.
Our Content Hub implementation experience means that we can sit right alongside customers and guide them through this process from start to finish.
We know what Content Hub is capable of and are set up to help with everything from working out whether it’s the right option for customers, right through to successful implementations and the knock-on positive business results. So, why not get in touch to find out more?
