Sitecore Content Hub - Digital Asset Management - DAM - Walkthrough

Akshay Sura - Partner

8 Aug 2020

In this video I am going to walk you through the Sitecore Digital Asset Management (DAM). Hoping that future videos will capture the setting up of DAM and the technical aspects.

Transcript

Note: The following is the transcription of the video produced by an automated transcription system.

Hey, guys, this is Akshay Sura today we will be going through Sitecore Content Hub Digital Asset Management, DAM for short. This is the first of a few videos on DAM. So, this will be a walk through. Just taking a look to see how the Digital Asset Management looks like. Of course, DAM is all about assets, so anything and everything which revolves around an asset. So we’ll take a look at that. And then hopefully in the upcoming videos, when we look at administration as well as development or any kind of integrations, we will look in a plain instance which does not have any content. So that way we can kind of see what it takes for us to add that additional metadata, the taxonomies, the values, the look ups, and then, you know, you can even get into theming at that point. All right. So here we have our demo instance I just open it up, brand new. So, content in general brings you to this screen. And again, you can customize any of this, any of the pages. If we need theme specific to your brand or your company, you could do that as well. And we’ll definitely get into all of this in the administration, part of the video. But today is just a walk through. So, as I mentioned, DAM is all about assets and everything revolves around assets. And when you get to this asset screen, essentially, you’re able to see all the assets which you have permission for.

And as you notice, we this is a fresh instance, and usually you would be able to see the thumbnails or the, you know, previews for these assets. I’m assuming it’s still spinning in the background. And then on the left, you have facets for search. And one of the videos I mentioned, I’m actually super critical of search. And this is actually it’s very, very good from for my even my standard. So, you have different types of facets. And again, you could add custom facets for different attributes you have. You could add more attributes for an asset, for a specific asset. So, by default, when you pick assets as sorry facets it it’s say and could bring me everything, which is a branding asset as well as a powerful brand. So, you can manipulate your search results based on the existing facets. You know, you can add new facets. Sometimes the facets have multi value. So, you go to checkboxes, you can absolutely specify, and you know, whichever checkboxes you would like. The other thing to mention, too, is that if you have a search query, which you keep using consistently, you could save that search query. So, you know, why don’t you save it will get listed and you can expose this even on the first screen so you can save yourself some clicks as well as some headache if you’re running the same queries again and again.

The other thing to mention, too, is if you, you know, advance search, you could do searches on a few of the attributes of the asset. So here, say, for instance, I search for lime. You can see that it’s doing a title search for that. You could do date searches if you choose to do it. Since this is, uh, let me just say this year, since this is, um, a demo instance, I’m not quite sure, but yeah, you could run advanced searches as well as specific to a specific field if you want to look into that value. So, you know, just makes it easy search. You imagine you have hundreds and thousands of assets. It’s not feasible for you to pick a specific asset which you have been working with or you need to work with. So, this is the screen you would be using the most different assets you the previous would be different, obviously.

So, the preview for a video as it would be different than a PDF and a PowerPoint and an image, but you can pretty much store any types of assets. You can do a preview right from the search screen. You can keep toggling to going to the next asset. And on the right you can see some information. So, all of the all of the actions you can perform on this preview, you can customize as well. So, this should be good enough for you to look through and see if you find an image you need and then, you know, you could do. Multiple operations on it, so when you select the multiple, you get this specific type, you know, you have three selected so you could you could download, you could do a few things. And even these can be customized in terms of actions as to what you need them to do, bulk edit it. For instance, you can edit all the metadata of multiple assets at one time, if that’s what you choose to. In this case, you’re adding descriptions or brand at one time. But these actions can be configured right in the next section. We’ll take a look at the asset, you know, details. What I did is I went ahead and picked a product asset, because I want to show you something. So, for each asset, again, pretty much anything on here can be customized. So, for instance, here we have some metadata tags. For instance, we can enable cognitive services for, you know, anything which is of a specific asset type, for instance, product. We go ahead and get it from the cognitive services and it auto tags it as part of the image processing, for instance. You could definitely do that asset types. For instance, you could add multiple if you choose to see an arrow next to something that means it has some value. You can search for things if you like. So, it’s pretty extensible in here.

What I did want to show you is that this asset seems to have an additional section called product data, which is specific to an asset of type product, for instance. But if we were to if I were to go back, it’s fine if I were to go back to my search and clear the filter for product asset. So, I’m not looking for anything product. Let me let me just do artwork. For instance, if I go into this specific asset, as you can, as you can see, there isn’t any product data. It shouldn’t be what we can even using permissions, hide some of these sections if it’s not applicable to this type of asset we are looking into based on the type they choose. So, there’s quite a bit of things you can do. As I mentioned, you can preview assets in here like PDF, anything you can think of.

If you have a composite asset, like a zip file, you could even look through the, you know, the assets inside up inside of a zip file in order for you to, you know, see what’s in there next if you want to upload an asset. So here you can see what’s pending at this moment, which is not much so either I could select files I can import from public links or you can basically just drag and drop if you choose to do that. As it comes in here, it takes a little bit for the job to run. It creates the preview. But you’re able to look at the asset. You can add metadata to it. You could specify, you know, this is a social media asset, for instance, localization and select that. And then I can go ahead and hit save. I could add more metadata if I choose to for sure. I could download the file to see if you know, the right one is selected.

I could specify an alternate preview. So, if I’m not happy with the preview of the image, I can definitely select the alternate preview. So, you know, you pretty much do all the things in here before you go ahead and go submit for approval for it to get into the actual DAM. OK, as mentioned, let’s go ahead and submit this for approval. Once you do that, it goes out of your queue you’re going to review here. If you have multiples, you could select all of them and then you can go ahead and, you know, approve all of them and reject them by default. You can do that in an individual fashion.

If you want to review a specific asset, you can specify the things you would want to change inside of that asset if that’s what you need to do. If you need to review it, if you need to preview, obviously, it’s the same exact thing, if you want to, you know, annotate on the specific asset to give feedback, you could mention that and then you would get an annotation. So we can mention that to that gets added to you’re able to if this was a document, you can, you know, cross it out, you could do quite, quite a few things to annotate sort of gold, provide your feedback so that we you know, they know exactly what’s happening with, you know, what needs to get changed in order for this to get approved. Come back here and then we’re going to go ahead and reject this.

So that the changes can be made and then we can get it back again with the appropriate changes so that we can go ahead and approve it when necessary. So as you can see, we got some, you know, feedback for the rejection we can go through and then figure out exactly what the feedback is in the annotation so we can see, OK, you know, gold is not gold enough.

And then we knew that the “why” color needs to change. So, it’s a good way for us to go back and forth. The workflows can be set appropriately as well. If you have enough permissions in the system, you can archive an asset. Essentially, this will take the asset out of the public view so that we won’t be able to. You can’t use it so you can archive an asset they can unarchive it if you choose not to keep it in archive and you need to use it as well.

You can also archive multiple assets at one time so you can select a few of the assets it archive. And then if you really, really need to bring them back, you absolutely can. So archived assets, once you’re going to manage, you’re able to see which ones, you know, where archived and you can unarchive them so they’ll be available again in the system for you to use. I mean, that should pretty much coverage as the walkthrough of the previous are coming in now, now that it’s processing, which is great. So as for a walk through, this should pretty much cover it. In our upcoming videos, we’ll talk about administration and adding metadata taxonomy lookups in order to hydrate our information properly, which will come from your data model once you work with the Sitecore team to set it up at the beginning. Thanks again for watching. You can reach us on several social channels and on our website. I hope you come back to watch more of these Content Hub videos.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me. @akshaysura13 on Twitter or on Slack.

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Akshay Sura

Akshay Sura

Akshay is a nine-time Sitecore MVP and a two-time Kontent.ai. In addition to his work as a solution architect, Akshay is also one of the founders of SUGCON North America 2015, SUGCON India 2018 & 2019, Unofficial Sitecore Training, and Sitecore Slack.

Akshay founded and continues to run the Sitecore Hackathon. As one of the founding partners of Konabos Consulting, Akshay will continue to work with clients to lead projects and mentor their existing teams.


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