Adobe Experience Manager Assets allows you to work on your digital assets in many ways to allow for robust asset processing. You can use the default or customized processing methods to ensure end-to-end business process completion, audits and compliance, discovery and distribution, and basic sanity of your digital assets. You can do the asset management tasks while achieving the required scale and customization.
For asset processing, Experience Manager uses workflows. Workflows help automate the business logic or activities. Granular steps to accomplish specific tasks are provided by default and developers can create their own custom steps. These steps can be combined in a logical order to create workflows. For example, a workflow can apply watermark on uploaded images based on a specific criteria, such as folder it is uploaded to, resolution of the image, and so on. Another example is a workflow configured to watermark and simultaneously add metadata, create renditions, add intelligent tags, and publish to a datastore.
By default, all uploaded assets are processed using DAM Update Asset workflow. The workflow executes for each uploaded asset and accomplishes basic asset management tasks such as rendition generation, metadata writeback, page extraction, media extraction, and transcoding.
To see the various workflow models available by default, see Tools > Workflow > Models in Experience Manager.
Figure: Some of the default workflows available in Experience Manager.
Applying workflows to digital assets is the same as for website pages. For a complete guide on how to create and use workflows, see start workflows.
Use workflows in digital assets to activate the asset or create watermarks. Many of the workflows for assets are automatically turned on. For example, the workflow that automatically creates a rendition after an image is edited is automatically turned on.
If a workflow available in Classic UI is not available in Touch-enabled UI such as Request to Activate and Request to Deactivate, see make workflow models.
To apply a workflow to an asset, follow these steps:
Navigate to the location of the asset for which you want to start a workflow, and click the asset to open the asset page. Select Timeline from the menu to display the timeline.
Click Actions at the bottom to open the list of actions available for the asset.
Click Start Workflow from the list.
In the Start Workflow dialog, select a workflow model from the list.
(Optional) Specify a title for the workflow that can be used to refer the workflow’s instance.
Click Start and then click Proceed. Each step of workflow is displayed in the timeline as an event.
From the Assets console, navigate to the location of the assets for which you want to start a workflow, and select the assets. Select Timeline from the menu to display the timeline.
Click Actions at the bottom.
Click Start Workflow. In the Start Workflow dialog, select a workflow model from the list.
(Optional) Specify a title for the workflow, which can be used to reference the workflow instance.
Click Start and then click Confirm in the dialog. The workflow runs on all the assets you selected.
The procedure to apply a workflow to multiple folders is similar to the procedure to apply a workflow to multiple assets. Select the folders in the Assets interface, and perform steps 2-7 of the procedure apply a workflow to multiple assets.
See apply a workflow on a collection.
Administrators can configure workflow to automatically execute and process assets based on pre-defined conditions. The functionality is useful for line-of-business users and marketers, for example, to create custom workflow on specific folders. Say all assets from an agency’s photoshoot can be watermarked or all assets uploaded by a freelancer can be processed to create specific renditions.
For a workflow model, users can create a workflow launcher that executes it. A workflow launcher monitors changes in the content repository and executes the workflow when the pre-defined conditions are fulfilled. Administrators can provide access to marketers to create the workflows and configure launcher. Users can modify the default DAM Update Asset workflow to add the extra steps required to process specific assets. The workflow executes on all newly uploaded assets. Use one of the following approaches to limit the execution of the extra steps on specific assets: