Understand asset management as a contributor

In this video, you will learn how to:

  • Use the Edit menu on an asset
  • Set an expiration date
  • View notifications
  • Establish individual notification settings
  • Upload an asset version
  • Create a new folder
  • Apply a metadata template to a folder
  • Establish folder permissions
Transcript
Now what we’re going to look at next are some things that maybe you won’t necessarily be doing at Workfront. I’m looking at my outline here. Actually, we’ve already talked about a lot of it, you know, sharing an asset, that editing kind of thing. But let’s just take a real quick review here, okay? Anytime you see the pencil, that’s an edit icon. And you can see here on an individual asset, you’ve got a lot of different options. Some of these things you can do elsewhere, some of them you can only do here from the edit menu such as renaming your asset, okay, or deleting an asset. Thing to keep in mind, a delete is permanent, there is no undo, okay? We can edit the expiration date on an asset. So we can set an asset to expire after a certain amount of time, okay? We can just come in and select the date, okay? And then depending on your system settings, your system admin or a designated person will get an email maybe three days, maybe five days before the asset expires and they can go in and take a look at it, make sure they want it to expire on that date. But a lot of customers that do that as a way to review things that they only had a copyright for a certain amount of time, or just to, you know, kind of clean out their system, okay? You know, there’s a lot of stuff you can do in here. There’s the relay. You can rotate, activate and deactivate. You know, the same thing as hitting the red and the green buttons. Publish and unpublish up here at the top, it’s the same as hitting our little publish icon here, okay? So just remember there’s plenty of ways, multiple places you can do things in the Workfront DAM.
Now, we talked earlier about watching an asset or watching a folder. You can even watch a Lightbox so that when changes are made to it, you get a notification. Now, notifications in Workfront or DAM are tucked down here at the bottom corner. Don’t know why they put it all the way down there. I like it up in the toolbar or the nav bar myself, but they’ve tucked it down here in the corner, okay? So to view your notifications, just hit the little notification icon and it’ll pop up a list for you, okay? And you can even access previous downloads, or if I hit View all, I’ll just get that nice list of everything, okay? And you can see it looks like Kendall was logged in earlier and he added some stuff in.
But this is also where we can change the settings for our notifications, and that’s right here. Now, notification settings are an individual thing. They’re not a global thing. So that’s why I want to show you today before class is over how to do this. So we’ll do it now. Go ahead and hit Change settings, and you can see right here, notify me when the following changes occur to watched assets. So any asset you’ve gone in and click that little eyeball icon on, okay? If it’s created, moved, deleted, new version, it expires, it’s modified, a comment’s added, you can get a Workfront DAM alert or a notification, or you can get an email, or you can get both, okay? Notify me when Lightbox changes occur.
And then I can watch assets if I upload 'em, I download 'em, or I can just watch everything, okay? I, as you can tell, I don’t have those selected because that would be a lot of notifications and a lot of email for what I use the DAM for. Maybe for what you want, maybe you want to watch the ones you upload perfectly fine, okay? Of course, be sure to save those changes when you’re done.
Now, as we’re working on things, as whoever’s maintaining your DAM, maintaining the assets in here, of course we’re going to run into the situations where we need a new version of something, okay? You know, maybe in this marketing folder here, we’ve got a new version of this “Frustrations” ebook, okay? Or this “9 Levels of Marketing Hell” ebook, and we want to get the latest and greatest version in there. Now, there’s a couple of ways that we can do versions or iterations, or rounds, or proofs, whatever you happen to call it, okay? Here in Workfront DAM.
The first method is by having automatic versioning turned on on your Workfront system. And you’re just going to have to talk to your system admin, talk to your Workfront DAM experts and find out if it’s turned on.
If it is turned on, if you put an asset with a name that matches something that’s already there into the same folder, it will automatically version for you, okay? But if you drop it into a different folder, then you’ve just got two different assets floating around, okay? So “9 Levels of Marketing Hell MSG” ebook, okay? If I had a new version of that, if I were to put it into my marketing folder, okay, my ebook folder, it would version it for me. If I were to go in and put it in the photographs folder, it’s going to be a totally separate asset file, okay? So that’s what’ll happen if the automatic versioning is turned on, and this is explained in the course manual also in case you forget later, okay? If the automatic versioning is off, everything just goes in as its own asset, okay? Which means that I could have 16 assets with this exact same name on it, okay? But what I can also do is I can manually version, okay? I don’t want to take the chance of it going in as a separate thing, I’m only going to version one particular thing. So I’m going to go ahead and select it, go to the edit icon on it, and I’ve got a menu option here called Upload new version, okay? And it’s simply going to let me navigate to that file, okay? So there’s my latest version of it, and load it in, okay? So I can only do one at a time this way.
And when you do the manual versioning like this, the file names don’t have to match, okay? In this particular case, they did, which is fine, but I mean my other file name could be named Pink Fluffy Bunny, it could just be named Marketing Work Hell. You know, it could be anything that I wanted it to be.
Now, any item that has a version on it, you’re going to see the V and then a number right here beside the file name. And that’s a quick, easy way to tell that something has multiple versions, okay? And in this case, we can tell that we’re on version number three.
Now, what if we need to get to one of those earlier versions? Not a problem. Just double click the asset to open it up.
Ooh, that’s right, this one’s a PDF, okay? So you can see here, you can scroll through, you can go page to page, you can zoom, or you can even go full screen, okay? If that window’s a little bit too small for you, okay? But we’re focusing on the versions, okay? So to access or to view earlier versions, you do have to have the asset open, you have to double click on it, and then you can hit the versions icon and it’s going to show you all the different versions. So version one was the very first thing uploaded shows me when and who lets me comment on it or view comments that were previous made. I can download it, I can restore it, which will make it in my current version, or I can even delete a previous version, okay? And you’ll have those options for all of your previous versions. And then the most recent version will be right up here at the top labeled Current version. And you’ll notice you can comment on it, but really nothing else, okay? These comments on the versions are going to be available only here in the version history window, you’re not going to be able to see 'em elsewhere, okay? Why would I want to comment on something? Maybe just, you know, I want to put a comment in there. Sorry, it’s doing something weird on me. I want to put a comment in there and say why I put a new version in or what the changes were, okay? Maybe we took out some pages, maybe we swap some images, just this way that we can kind of keep track, you know, throughout the different versions if we need to.
Now, another thing that you might be responsible for doing or might have the ability to do is to create new folders, okay? Now, I generally leave the folder creation to a system admin or a designated person, okay? We don’t want everybody in your organization going through and just willy-nilly creating their own folders when they feel like it, okay? So there needs to be some sort of hierarchy, some sort of permissions to let people do this, okay? But let me show you, just in case you do have those permissions to make a new parent level folder. I’m going to start by clicking on Home and then I’m going to use my new folder icon right here, okay? And let’s call this Training Materials.
Now, when I create a new folder, I’m going to hit this Advanced options because there’s a lot of information I can set with this folder, okay? If I want to, I can set a date for this folder. Maybe the assets in the folder were tied to a seminar or a conference, or, you know, maybe the state fair or something like that, okay? If you want to password protect this folder, you can’t. This is some legacy permissions things from Workfront DAM. I’ve heard that this is going to be going away, but they keep telling me that and it keeps showing up. So I don’t have any kind of timeline on it. But if you do want to password protect a folder, you can do that.
You can tell a folder to inherit the permissions of the parents, meaning who has access to it, what the different settings are. That way you don’t have to go in and set it individually on each folder, okay? Of course, where do you want to add the folder at the beginning or the end? And then here in the preferences, there’s a lot of different options, okay? I don’t need the JavaScript to protect the assets, but what I could do, if I have a watermark, I could set it so that every asset coming into the folder gets the watermark applied, okay? I can allow somebody to email an asset out of this folder, okay? I can allow sharing, display the photo capture date, display the file size. I’m going to add display the asset owner, okay? When it comes to downloading, I can get notifications of the download. So if I want an email or a notification every time somebody downloads something, I can set that there or I can enable a download request, and what that would mean is that anybody who wanted to download something would have to send a request to the selected email here and I would have to give permission, or whoever I selected would have to give permission, okay? Just depends on what kind of walk down and that kind of stuff you need to do, okay? Last but not least, you can apply a metadata template. So we looked at those a little bit ago when we were editing the metadata on multiple items all at one time. But what we can do is as we create this folder, we can set it so that every asset that comes in gets the education team assets’ metadata applied to it, just saves me some time and kind of does it all at once, okay? Now this is only going to apply to new things coming into the folder if we were just making this change on an existing folder, it’s not retroactive.
So there we go, so there’s our Training Materials folder. And of course, we can create nested folders. So just hit the little icon right next to it here and we could do new nested folder, and we’re going to say Recordings, and again, set whatever options you want. It’s easier just to hit inherit, okay? And we can continue creating our folder trait. Another way you can do it is when you’re in the folders here, you could just hit it right here, recordings, we can do Manuals.
Okay, there we go.
So pretty much, you know, similar to creating them on your desktop or on a file server or something like that.
But now that the folders have been created, we have to make sure that people have the right permissions, or the right people have the permissions, okay? So what we’re going to do is we’re going to come in on our parent folder here on the little arrow and we’re going to select this permissions option, okay? And that’s going to give us a grid that’s going to let us decide which groups of users in Workfront DAM get permissions to this folder, okay? And therefore the assets in the folder.
Now I can see here that already under the View folder option, which would essentially be a read only. I can go see the folder, I can see what’s in it, but I’m not going to be able to do anything, okay? I probably need to go ahead and assign some more permissions. And you can even see down here at the bottom, apply changes to all nested folders. So if you want the nested folders to have the same permissions, you can do that. If not, you can go in and set 'em separately, okay? In the download, what kind of download permissions do they have, okay? Are we going to allow downloads? Are we going to make 'em use one of the download presets? Are we not going to allow them to download at all from that particular folder? So let’s go ahead and change those.
On individual assets, what kind of permissions do they get? Can they upload? Can they edit? Can they move them from folder to folder? And I’m not going to let 'em do that. Or can they delete? And then the folders themselves, can they create additional folders? Can they edit the folder? Can they move or can they delete the folder? I’m not going to let 'em do any of that, okay? So we’re going to go ahead and save.
There we go. And those folder permissions have been set. If we want to do separate settings on the Recordings folder and the Manuals folder, we can do the same thing. Just go to the arrow here, hit Permissions and set 'em that way.
Now, there is a way to do this in the system setups area that your system admin can do. Goes a little bit faster, lets you do multiple folders at the same time. So if that is something that you need to learn, you’ll want to take the admin system setups class to learn how to do that. -

How asset versions work

Part of your workflow may include managing multiple versions—or rounds, proofs, iterations, whatever you call them—of an asset. You can manage all versions through Workfront DAM.

The system allows for automatic asset version control when a file with the same name as an existing file is uploaded to the same folder. Check with your system administrator to see if this functionality has been turned on.

If automatic version control is turned on, an asset will version only if it’s loaded into the folder that holds the original asset. Both assets must have the same filename. If the asset is loaded into a different folder, the asset goes in as a new file.
If version control is not turned on, a file with the same name as an existing file uploads as a new file, regardless of which folder it’s put in. This could result in having two assets with the same name in the same folder.

You can also manually upload versions of a specific asset. Click the edit icon on the asset, then select Upload new version.

If you publish an asset with versions to Brand Connect, the Brand Connect user sees only the latest version of the asset.

Folder and asset status and expiration

Statuses are another way you can manage access to folders and assets in Workfront DAM. Statuses can be used to hide certain assets or folders from Brand Connect users or to expire an asset or folder so no one but the system administrator can access it.

  • Active—Used for assets and folders. Assets and folders with the Active status are visible to all users with permissions and can be published to Brand Connect. Active is indicated with a green dot on an asset or folder.
  • Inactive—Used for assets and folders. Assets and folders with the Inactive status are visible to Workfront DAM users but are not visible in the Brand Connect. Inactive is indicated with a red dot on an asset or folder.
  • Unexpired—Used for assets only. This is the default status of all assets. Unexpired assets that are also Active are visible in the Brand Connect.
  • Expired—Used for assets only. Assets with the Expired status cannot be downloaded by any user except the system administrator. Expired assets are visible/not visible in the Brand Connect, depending on system configurations.
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