Can’t find that file? Digital Asset Management (or DAM for short) allows your organization to smartly store and access digital audio, video, images, and other graphics. Generally speaking, digital asset management systems are specialized central databases that allow quick access to non-text data. While the practice of digital asset management first took off with advertising agencies, print publishers, catalog houses, and broadcast news organizations in the 90s, it quickly spread to a broad spectrum of users.

In a deadline-driven environment, you can’t just expect to slap stuff up on the server and hope to find it when you need it. With a DAM system, thumbnails represent content for quick visual browsing, whether a photo in Tagged Image File (TIFF) format, a piece of line art in Adobe Illustrator (AI), or a logo in Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) format … and it doesn’t end there. (Don’t forget the PowerPoint, Flash, and Acrobat PDFs!) If you’re serious about this stuff, you need more than just what’s built-into Windows…

Today’s digital asset management systems run the gamut from applications targeted at the single-seat home user through massive enterprise-level solutions. Big corporate DAM users include pharmaceutical, financial, automotive, and retail organizations.

While the majority of digital asset management systems are designed to run on in-house servers, there are hosted solutions, as well.

San Francisco-based Canto is the granddaddy of the digital asset management field, with more than 1 million licenses and 12,000 client/server systems installed. The current version of their software is Cumulus 6.0.3. Other digital asset management developers include Alienbrain, Artesia (OpenText), ASAP!Jack, Documentum (EMC), eMotion, IBM, Leapfrog, MarketingPilot, MetaCommunications, Quark, and others.