Back in the late 1990’s - a lifetime ago in “technology years” - enterprise resource planning (ERP) was widely regarded as the “center of the universe” for business IT. However, after several years of many grueling, disastrous ERP implementations later, technologists began to realize this was not the case.
The core of the ERP design model was the general ledger. The idea was that whenever actual business took place, it was also an “accounting event” - a sale, a purchase, an inventory shipment. But workers and managers take action based on business events, not journal entries. The general ledger-centric design of ERP did not allow organizations to describe the key business processes that acquire and serve customers, drive revenue and build lasting value for the organization.
Today, there is a similar change in perspective underway in the digital asset management (DAM) world.
For decades, the core of Digital Asset Management applications has been the file
- as in one video, one pdf, one image
- stored in a folder, which, in turn, is kept in electronic filing cabinets.
This design model is quite old, inherited from the management of physical media preceding computers: file cabinets holding folders with printed images, camera slides and other media, as well as plenty of paper documents.
The file-centric design of DAM cannot properly describe or optimize how digital assets are created, shared and acted upon. This is an increasingly serious limitation as more organizations recognize that boosting competitiveness requires empowering workers and teams with a true digital workplace: a seamlessly integrated technology environment that can unify diverse content sources, streamline access to content and expedite critical business workflows.
The new design model for modern, strategic digital asset management - notably the Nuxeo Platform - is centered around metadata instead of files.
Because the Nuxeo Content Services Platform does not rigidly define a document as a file, such as legacy DAM applications do, a Nuxeo document can be a rich content object. Each content object can contain multiple documents and binary types, along with all related attributes (metadata and hierarchy), which you are free to define and modify to match your specific business processes in ways file-centric DAM tools simply cannot provide.
A metadata-centric design model is one of the many major advantages the Nuxeo Platform offers over traditional DAM applications.