In 2018, Nuxeo was among the select companies Forrester invited to participate in its 2018 Forrester WaveTM: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience.
In this evaluation, Nuxeo was cited as a Strong Performer for its Digital Asset Management System.
In this post, we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the particular areas of strength Forrester identified in Nuxeo’s product offering.
Content Localization
The Forrester WaveTM 2018: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience gave Nuxeo the highest score possible (5.0) in the content localization criterion. In order to receive this score, companies must demonstrate that their existing DAM product has capabilities such as cascading changes, multi-level inheritance, integration with translation products, and translated search capabilities. Our ability to deliver these best-in-breed capabilities are part of why our base of large media and entertainment industry customers continues to grow.
Managing digital assets can be difficult - even within a single team, in a single office. Add in the needs of a borderless global organization — from multilingual collaboration to international usage rights compliance — and the complexity balloons by orders of magnitude. If your marketing department uses digital assets in more than one country, excellent content localization capabilities are mission critical for delivering maximum return on DAM investments.
Scaling content operations in a global organization can be a daunting task — but with the Nuxeo Platform, the world can seem like a much smaller place. Keep communication lines open while improving brand consistency and automating manual and inefficient processes, using Nuxeo’s industry-leading content localization features.
Flexible Data Model
Today’s global organizations regularly create digital assets with complex, intersecting metadata. A video advertisement might contain an actor, a piece of music, and a product. Each part of the ad has its own particular usage rights: an actor whose image can’t be used in one country due to a conflict with an exclusive contract, music that is only licensed for a specific time period and geographic region, and a product with a country-specific label.
Trying to make sure these pieces of data travel with all instances of the asset being used can be difficult with traditional DAM. One of the most unique features of the Nuxeo Platform is its non-hierarchical data model, which allows metadata to intersect and nest in complicated ways — to minimize compliance risk, and make life easier for your teams.
Take our example above. Using Nuxeo, the ad could be set to “inherit” metadata fields pertaining to usage rights from all three objects: the actor’s likeness, the music, and the product image. Other ads using any one of these components will also be linked to their respective objects. Then, when that piece of music becomes the theme for a controversial horror movie and you don’t want to associate it with your brand in any new campaigns, you can easily access every ad using the piece of music — making it easy to use other metadata to find out where they’ve been deployed, or to recut new versions that use a different song instead.
Universal Access to Digital Assets
Searching for and accessing rich media can be a time-consuming task when digital assets are distributed across a number of offices and systems. Nuxeo uses a distributed content services architecture to ensure fast search and download, even for the largest assets, no matter where in the world the data is physically located.
Nuxeo knows that global organizations depend on being able to search out assets wherever they are. Using Nuxeo’s platform, searches are done in a snap — no more annoying waits for search results that slow down research. Even small branch offices far from an organization’s HQ can search for and find content near-instantaneously.
After content has been discovered with search, Nuxeo makes downloading and accessing that content fast and convenient. Using cloud service content delivery networks and cross-region accelerators, Nuxeo makes it possible to keep assets from all over the globe at your fingertips, without slow downloads cramping your style.
Watch our video “Searching is easy. Finding is hard.”
DAM Approval Workflows Go Global
Acquiring approvals for a single completed marketing asset can be challenging when multiple countries, languages, and teams are involved. Ad hoc processes — emails, Slack conversations, and text messages — often dominate cross-country approvals, both when there’s no DAM system in place and when their DAM’s content localization capabilities are incapable of meeting their needs.
With Nuxeo, digital asset tagging can trigger specific localization workflows. For example, a company could create a process so that when asset tagging designates an image for use in France, the asset is automatically sent for machine translation (for example, by Lionbridge or SDL), while also simultaneously sent to a librarian for metadata translation and localization.
Manual human approvals and QA processes can also be automated for each location and language, ensuring that approvals from each location can be secured in time for content to be deployed effectively. As the demand for content continues to increase, automating these approval processes is one of the most effective ways to ensure that your “content factory” can create assets at scale.
Digital Assets Versions Organized
To drive production of content at scale in the global enterprise, Nuxeo DAM also makes it easy to indicate and display asset relationships. With Nuxeo, “child” assets (that repurpose and localize content used in “parent” assets) can be easily visualized and stored in a way that makes sense for the tools and content management workflows used by each local team.
Tracking asset relationships makes it easier for your teams to stay on the same page. For instance, let’s say you’ve recently had a logo change. Using Nuxeo DAM system, all content with the old logo can be found quickly, updated, and approved - improving brand consistency throughout your organization.
Repurposing and remixing content effectively is one of the best ways to stay ahead of competitors, but recombining content for global audiences can mean an explosion in the number of versions each new asset requires. With Nuxeo’s highly-scalable platform — capable of supporting tens of millions of rich media assets — re-versioning and atomizing content will never slow your searches down or make it more difficult to access content when you need it.
Improved Adoption With Localization
Of course, DAM installations are only useful when they’re actually used. User adoption of a DAM system and satisfaction are higher when content localization enables everyone to keep working with the language they know best.
Nuxeo’s multilingual user interface ensures that assets can quickly be localized by teams all over the world, without language barriers to prevent collaboration or reuse of content. Nuxeo even supports localized, multilingual configuration - ensuring that users in every location can adapt the platform to their unique needs.
Discover how to accelerate your product creative lifecycle.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Automation can make your approval and compliance workflows easier to manage with less risk.
Learn more | A Beginners Guide to Digital Asset Management Workflows
In the 2018 Forrester WaveTM: Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience, Nuxeo was given a “5.0” rating for “superior capabilities relative to others included in this evaluation” for workflows and approvals.
We’re proud of our rating, but not surprised: versatile, configurable workflows are central to our product because we know how tangled workflows can negatively impact your team, your brand, and your enterprise.
With a multitude of configuration options that can drive automation of even the most complicated, multi-layered and nested workflows, Nuxeo is ready to take on your biggest content management workflows challenges.
We’ve all had frustrating experiences with workflows and processes. Whether it’s getting two independently reviewed versions of an asset back—with two contradictory sets of suggestions that need to be reconciled—or spending ten minutes searching for the email with an original timeline for asset production, small inefficiencies can quickly add up.
Content Approval Workflows
One of the most common points for inefficiencies to spiral out of control happens during approval workflow processes. Inconsistent ad hoc workflows develop, leading to time-consuming delays while people use multiple systems to manage an asset from creation to deployment.
One reviewer marks up a paper copy and snaps a quick shot with their mobile phone, while another wants to use email and yet another sends their notes by Slack. Sometimes, previous attempts at DAM leave companies with systems of record that go unused because they are difficult or time-consuming to work with. The result? Users start implementing their own work-arounds (email, their personal file sharing apps) instead of using the DAM system because they become frustrated with it.
Nuxeo fully supports approval workflows of all types. Asset states can be changed from “draft” to “in-review” when a draft is complete, then back to “draft” when a creative needs to make edits. “Draft” status can lock an asset, so downstream users don’t accidentally use it for revisions … or, worse, deploy unapproved content.
Nuxeo’s easy-to-use DAM interface gives users contextual information about assets, so that reviewers don’t need to look in several places for information about an asset. For example, an asset can be tagged with its target audience, planned channels, or project information to make sure that every reviewer is on the same page.
Compliance Workflows
Nuxeo’s workflow capabilities go far beyond creative content approvals. With highly-configurable parallel and serial workflows, assets can be flagged for additional compliance reviews at any stage of development.
For example, let’s say a company offers a money-back guarantee under very specific, limited circumstances, and wants to avoid using language that would depict their guarantee as being broader in scope. Using Nuxeo’s workflow management tools, any assets mentioning the guarantee could be sent for a quick review by the legal department, ensuring that all deployed assets meet compliance standards.
Digital signatures and audit trails can also be created using the nearly infinite configurability of the Nuxeo platform. The best part: there’s no need to purchase add-ons to gain access to these features. All workflows—ad hoc and structured, serial and parallel, at all levels of customization—are included natively in the Nuxeo Platform at no additional cost.
Maintaining Security and Permissions with Workflows
Handling approval and compliance workflows on an ad hoc, manual basis creates an environment with inherent security risks. Unapproved assets, as well as those containing time-sensitive or audience-restricted information, often set the stage for embarrassing gaffes with partners, public relations disasters, and countless other negative outcomes.
With Nuxeo DAM, security and permissions are embedded within assets throughout the entire project lifecycle, so that everyone who should be able to see an asset can—while those who shouldn’t are kept out.
Workflow Integrations
Nuxeo’s API-first architecture makes it easy to integrate with a wide range of project management tools. Many Nuxeo customers have integrated leading project management solutions into their Nuxeo installation in order to provide robust, interdepartmental oversight of assets and project completion. Full campaigns and tasks from project management interfaces can be synchronized with Nuxeo’s workflow management capabilities to ensure effective, efficient interdepartmental collaboration.
Nuxeo also integrates with the tools you already use to manage security, permissions, and digital signatures, so there’s no need to reconfigure—simply maintain your existing security settings in the Platform.
Digital Asset Management that Scales
We’re living in the age of the content explosion — with no end in sight. According to an IDC survey, 85% of marketers say they’re under pressure to create more assets, with 71% saying they’re creating 10 times as many assets today as they did just a few years ago.
Today, scalability is at the heart of what it means to create a future-proof DAM. The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management (DAM) for Customer Experience, Q2 2018 included a subscore that looked at the relative scalability of different DAM products. What score was computed for Nuxeo’s scalability?
Based on Forrester’s objective evaluation criteria, Nuxeo was one of the providers rated a 5.0, the highest score possible, in the scalability criterion for having “superior capabilities” relative to other technologies in the evaluation. Forrester gave a score of 5 to companies that support the ability to manage at least 500,000 digital assets.
500,000 might sound like a lot. But here at Nuxeo, we know that today’s “a lot” can be tomorrow’s “not nearly enough.” That’s why our architecture is designed to go beyond 500,000. Way beyond — to at least one billion assets.
Check out Nuxeo’s DAM performance in a test that goes beyond where any DAM benchmarking has gone before
Content At Speed
What’s more, those assets can be managed fast. Even with a billion assets, Nuxeo DAM puts content at your fingertips, with search times of just milliseconds.
How does it work? Consider a picture in a DAM that has complex usage rights and other complex metadata — hundreds of fields in all. The fields aren’t just disconnected pieces of data. They involve intersecting groups, defined independently and applied to a given asset: “rights for the US,” “relevant fields for video files,” “campaign details.”
These complex relationships between fields must be linked, or joined, in complicated ways. This level of joining has a massive negative impact on performance when using traditional database technology (SQL). Using MongoDB instead of SQL, the Nuxeo Platform can manage these intricate intersecting relationships without lag or other negative impacts on performance.
We’ve seen customers who, before starting to use Nuxeo, used systems that required waiting 10 seconds or more for every search query. Waiting 10-15 seconds every time adds up, and leads to your team being frustrated, getting distracted by other tasks while they wait, or worse, giving up on the DAM altogether.
Nuxeo acts like an Elon Musk-style hyperloop, using modern technology to bypass the traffic problems. Instead of taking 10-15 seconds, searches now return results by the time a tenth of a second has gone by. That’s a time savings of 99%.
File previews are also fast and scalable using Nuxeo. The platform can ingest and transcode 1TB ProRes 4444XQ video into H.264 previews, or transform 20 GB, 38 billion-pixel PSB files into .jpg previews, without breaking a sweat.
Speed is also a priority when it comes to file transfer: long transfer times can massively limit productivity for your team members. With Nuxeo Edge Cache, customers have reduced their download times by 95% and bandwidth consumption by 90%.
Scaling your DAM For the Future
20 years ago, digital assets were generally confined to documents and image files, with little rich media in the mix. Since then, it’s not just the type of content that’s changed: it’s the scale, both in terms of file size and metadata complexity.
At the start of the millennium, few enterprises even used digital video — images and somewhat-larger Flash animations were the types of digital assets that came into play. But in 2005, YouTube made its debut, and the age of on-demand digital video began.
Video content represented a huge file size increase over images and documents, and presented more difficulties for search. Metadata became more important than ever as the number of videos created for each enterprise exploded.
File sizes were already much bigger than some legacy technologies could handle, but content kept changing … and growing. HD video, which started out as a technology only a few broadcasters used, rapidly became consumer’s default expectation. Widespread broadband internet (and later, high-speed cell networks) meant that HD video could be used more than ever than before, and displayed on more devices at higher resolutions.
Today, it’s not uncommon for Nuxeo customers to have large numbers of multi-gigabyte media files, a situation that would have been unthinkable for the vast majority of companies even a decade ago.
No one knows what the “next big thing” in content will be, but it’s safe to say it won’t have small file sizes. A decade from now, businesses might be expected to use terabyte-size files to create multisensory virtual reality experiences, or have micro-detailed models of their stores to facilitate checkout-free shopping. The possibilities are endless — which is why it’s important to choose a vendor whose technology is able to keep up with a changing DAM universe.
Analytics for Digital Asset Management
At Nuxeo, we know that insight leads to improvement: analytics is key to maximizing the business value of digital assets. For any business that wants to get more from its content, analytics are no longer just “nice to have” — they’re a necessity.
Nuxeo’s content analytics capabilities go beyond the final product — deployed assets. Now, you can gain insight into the processes that are involved in asset creation and deployment, directly in the DAM interface.
In The Forrester Wave™: Digital Asset Management (DAM) For Customer Experience, Q2 2018, Forrester Research took a close-up look at how Nuxeo and other DAM vendors stack up in content performance analytics.
Nuxeo was rated a “5.0” (the top available score) for content performance analytics. According to Forrester, the 5.0 rating is reserved for providers with “superior capabilities.”
Content Workflows Matter
How your team gets things done is one of the biggest factors impacting how much they get done — and how effective their efforts are. What if you could manage your digital assets while learning more about how your teams and agencies are creating, editing, deploying, and using them? What if you could figure out which of your workflows are working for you … and which aren’t working at all?
Now, you can.
It all starts with Nuxeo’s native workflows capabilities. Out of the box, the Nuxeo Platform is equipped with robust analytics capabilities, including real-time graphical reporting on content, search, and workflow activities and durations. All the data is collected natively, so you have everything you need to analyze it.
Want to learn which people on your creative team are meeting deadlines — or whether a review process is holding up your content factory for longer than necessary? Using Nuxeo’s built-in capabilities, track your processes for inefficiencies and hidden problems.
Some Nuxeo customers use hundreds (or even thousands) of creative agencies. With Nuxeo DAM, they track content created by each agency. The result: a better understanding of typical timelines and results and a more accurate picture of which agencies are underperforming, and which types of content are easier for some agencies to deliver than others.
Boosting Efficiency with a DAM system
Nuxeo’s workflow analytics and reporting capabilities can also help you iterate content and improve the speed at which new digital assets are created. Let’s say your company starts using its new DAM solution to create a new spring campaign, complete with a range of digital assets including banner ads, emails, and print ads.
When spring turns into summer, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Just copy the campaign metadata, roles, and workflows (with names changed to reflect the new campaign).
The person you choose for the “lead designer” role, for instance, would receive the files from the spring campaign for each asset type, instead of having to hunt for previous files individually. The designer could then change the text and pictures using InDesign while leaving the company logo in the same place.
You can also use Nuxeo to monitor how workflow times improve over time, enabling you to measure the results of planned process improvements. In tests with Nuxeo customers, reusing creatives campaigns in this way has led to continued improvements in efficiency, with shorter times required to create new campaign assets.
Most DAM systems lack the ability to natively track and analyze workflows at this level of detail — which means it can be harder to make the business case for DAM. With Nuxeo, you can fully track adoption rates, so you know how your system is being used and who it’s being used by.
Analytics on your Workflows and your Content
Nuxeo gives you the view of your content workflows software you want with the level of detail you need. Nuxeo lets you dive deep: every system event on users and data state is captured and available for reporting and analytics directly within the Nuxeo interface.
See visualizations of your data natively using the Nuxeo Platform to get a more intuitive, easy to understand view at content performance over time, proportion of content types, or anything else you’d like to display about tracked events and data. Nuxeo is highly-flexible and configurable, empowering you to display results the way you want to see them.
You can also easily integrate the Nuxeo Platform with your preferred analytics system, like Tableau or Kibana, ensuring that you can obtain and visualize data from as many sources as you like. This includes tracking Nuxeo DAM events in conjunction with events tracked in a website content management (WCM) or social media management (SMM) system.
Want to learn which of your images or types of images are most overused? Interested to see which types of content are searched for most, and which frequent search keywords return few or no results? Want to generate suggestions automatically based on previous content searches? Nuxeo has these capabilities — and so much more — straight out of the box, with rapid implementation times that let you look deeper, faster.
This debut in the Forrester Wave Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience couldn’t be more exciting to us here at Nuxeo. We believe Forrester’s report validates our core capabilities as a DAM vendor, while highlighting some aspects of our performance that we believe set us apart from the competition.