Taxonomy & Structure: AEM’s Secret to Scalable Asset Management

Transcript

Hi, welcome to this session for the Skill Exchange. We’re going to talk about taxonomy and structure, AEM’s secret to scalable asset management. We’re going to unlock efficiencies, discoverability, and governance of your digital assets.

Hi, everybody. I’m Katie Jung. I’m a senior marketing technology product manager at Workdate. I’m also an AEM champion. And I’m Melanie Bartlett, a partner development director at MRM, an AEM champion, an AEM assets user group leader, and a certified AEM asset librarian. Welcome.

Awesome. Okay, so for today, we are going to be talking about the challenges of digital asset management. We’ll dig into the photo organization, taxonomy, and metadata. We’re really going to cover a lot when it comes to governance and scalability, and then we’re going to wrap up with some key takeaways and a quick Q&A. All right, so now let’s go ahead and talk about the common challenges of digital asset management. First, we have exponential growth of digital content and assets. We are being asked to create so many more assets or so many more pieces of content with less. And it’s very difficult for us to do that and make sure that those assets are easily found and searchable for other people, other teammates. Making sure again that those assets are in one central location is also very hard because right now people are finding assets across different repositories or different siloed approaches, whether that’s an email, whether that’s in G drive, whether that’s in a SharePoint, things are being found across multiple repositories, which is making it harder for our marketers to spend time on what matters. Instead, they’re spending time on searching for assets.

Another common problem is missing that metadata and incorrectly tagged assets. This is leading to a problem with poor search results. If assets are going to be found in multiple locations, or if they can’t even find them in those multiple locations, again, our marketers are spending time on what doesn’t matter.

Another common problem that we run into is difficulty in ensuring brand consistency and legal compliance without central controls. And when you pair all three of these together, we have different usage across multiple teams and across the globe. Again, we want to make sure that it’s very easy for our marketers to find what they need when they need it. But again, these are common challenges for digital assets.

While we do know that AEM DAM provides us with a central solution, its effectiveness is really going to hit an organization. So really, it’s not going to work at all unless we are able to fix all of these problems. So let’s take a look at how we can solve for a lot of these pain points. So think of an intuitive folder structure as your digital filing cabinet. This is going to eliminate and guide your users on exactly how to effectively organize and store their assets.

This clearly ensures everyone knows where to put files and more importantly, where to find them. So when planning your folder structure, here’s a few critical points that you need to consider. First, future governance. Who is going to manage your access permissions, the read, modify and delete access for your folder structure? Your administrators need to know how to control who can do what.

Second, scalability. Your organization is going to grow, your content library is going to grow. So your structure needs to be designed to adapt to these future needs and easily scalable without breaking them.

Third is a size. Folders are great, but too many assets in a single folder can lead to usability issues. So it becomes difficult to manage, difficult to browse, difficult to find those assets. So you need some balance. But it’s important to note, you should not add more than about a thousand assets per folder. So it’s important to keep this in mind when you’re building your folder structure.

And then finally, it has to be intuitive. Users need to be able to find those assets. They need to be able to easily browse and quickly identify where the new assets have been uploaded and where they can find them. So if it’s not intuitive, people won’t know how to use it correctly.

Now let’s talk about the power of those folders. So to make this more concrete, here’s a couple of common examples of effective folder structures. Now no two folder structures are going to be the same. These are going to be based on your organization needs. So there’s no one size that fits all. But let’s illustrate just a couple of different approaches. So you might want to organize folders based on a function or a category. This could look like going to Content Dam, looking at the programs like program one or program two, and inside there having whatever campaign that was run and the assets for that particular campaign.

Another example would go deeper would be a channel based structure where assets would be stored by their channel, perhaps website, social, media, email campaigns and so on, or maybe even the year. This could also go into a regional based approach where you need different markets or different languages and those assets kept separate, also helping govern with user groups and permissions.

If you have a diverse product profile, perhaps organizing your assets by product and having a product based structure is applicable where you would have the brands, the product, and maybe the year of those products.

Now what’s most important, and please don’t forget, you have company assets that the teams need. So these need to be stored in a location that would include any of your brand guidelines, logos, or maybe other assets that you might need for your organization, perhaps bios, photos, etc. Now note, once your assets are uploaded, you do have the ability of viewing them in a card view, a list view, or by name. You also have the ability to sort by recently uploaded, as well as the name of where those assets are located. Now effortless asset discovery, let’s talk about the power of your taxonomy. So folders provide the where, but taxonomy provides the what. Taxonomy is absolutely essential for organizing assets in a searchable way. This enables your users to quickly find and reuse the content, regardless of where it lives in the folder structure. So a well-structured taxonomy is going to support your metadata-driven automation, as well as your governance, which we’re going to discuss more later. But this is the backbone of intelligent asset management. So when planning your taxonomy, consider these points. First, you want to define your top-level taxonomy based on your content inventory, your product structure, your audiences, your business requirements. This is what’s important to your organization and helps users find those assets, ensuring that consistently. Second, utilize AEM Smart Tags. This is where AEM truly shines. This is Adobe’s AI and machine learning capabilities to automatically tag those assets, providing a powerful layer of discoverability that’s going to complement those manual tagging efforts.

Now let’s dive a bit deeper into Smart Tags. So again, Adobe Smart Tags are powered by Adobe Sensei, and Smart Tags is using that machine learning algorithm to help with the task of adding metadata to those assets. So Smart Tags can automatically tag images, either on demand or as you choose, with those keywords based on the photo type, maybe activities, emotions, objects, colors, and so much more. This significantly is going to reduce that manual effort of tagging and improve that consistency. However, it’s not a set it and forget it solution. There are key considerations for using Smart Tags effectively. You need to manage your Smart Tags to ensure that they confirm to your brand and its values. So you want to review those tags that are being generated and refine them as needed. You also want to utilize block tags to exclude specific keywords from your organization that are being applied to those assets. This prevents the unwanted or irrelevant tags that your users don’t need. You also want to determine a plan to train your Smart Tags. The more you use and refine them, the smarter they become, aligning better with your organization’s specific content as well as terminology.

Great. So after hearing all of that goodness from Melanie, now we really need to dive into governance. We’re going to talk about the what, the why, and the how. So first, to start us off with, what is Dam Governance? Really, it’s a set of policy roles, standards, and workflows. It’s making sure that our assets are being used correctly and consistently. It’s going to involve the entire asset lifecycle. This is going to be from creation, approval, all the way through to archival. It’s going to make sure that we balance our user flexibility with organizational control. And then it’s going to, again, make sure that we’re critically aware of our compliance, efficiency, and scalability when it comes, again, to making sure that our dam is successful.

Now let’s talk about the why. A little bit of a pop culture reference. For those of you that watch the show Friends, you know that Monica Geller is a big fan of having everything neat, tidy, and in order. She’s got a label for things. She’s got everything fancy and in its place. However, there is one episode where you get to see inside Monica’s closet, and it is just complete disarray. Everything is everywhere, and it is absolute chaos. The reason why we need Dam Governance is so that our dam doesn’t end up like Monica’s closet. And really, to kind of get more back into the dam conversation of what we’re having, what it’s going to do is it’s going to prevent us from misusing assets and making sure that people are having the right authorized access to them. It’s going to make sure that we have the right metadata standards. We have the right agreement on our metadata schema and making sure that, again, we have the right categorization that everybody is aware of. It will help us promote a consistent and clean naming convention, and we’ll also have a consistent taxonomy, again, going back to what Melan just talked about. It will help support any legal or brain compliances that we have to be aware of. And then finally, it’s going to make sure that we are enhancing any user accountability through any roles or permissions that we have to set up on the back end.

Now let’s go ahead and look at how we do this. What you’re going to see on this slide is a circle with five different steps, and we’re going to go counterclockwise across the circle, around the circle, I should say. So first, we’re going to start with setting clear goals and building out the right team. So we need to make sure that we’re aligning with the business needs, brain consistency, compliance, and efficiency. And to do that, we have to make sure that the right folks have a seat at the table. Now depending on your business, and depending if you’re a bigger business or a smaller business, those teams are going to be different. But you should really make sure that you’re considering marketing, creative, IT, developers, all of those folks.

Next, we’re going to move into defining standards and access policies. This is where we’re going to establish the metadata schema. We’ll take a look at metadata fields. We’ll take a look at the naming conventions, making sure that the folder structure that Melanie discussed, all those options are correct for our business needs.

Not only will we do that, but we’re also going to set role-based permissions and document any sort of usage rights that we have to have documented on the back end and the dam, so we don’t run into any issues with legal or stock photography so forth.

When we move around the bottom of the circle, we are then going into creating and automating workflows. This is where we’re going to build approval chains with notifications, and we’re really documenting the entire asset lifecycle. This is going to go from upload to review to approval all the way through to archival.

Now once these three areas are defined, then we can move into step four. And that’s where we’re going to be training users and driving adoption.

At this point, we want to make sure that we have a very strong change management strategy. We want to make sure that we’re offering role-based training and onboarding. We want to make sure that we’re offering up different ways and opportunities that people can learn and consume the information, whether that’s through cheat sheets, lunch and learns, videos, whatever it is, we want to make sure that we have a lot of opportunities. We want to make sure that we want to have different offer role-based trainings because of course an admin training versus a regular user versus a librarian, all three of those will have different things that they need to focus on. And you don’t want to bombard any of your users with information that they don’t need Finally, we’re going to end up with monitoring usage and optimizing it continuously. Like Melanie mentioned, the dam is something that you cannot just set it and forget it. It is something that has to constantly be monitored. We want to make sure that we’re using dashboards to track performance and compliance, making sure that we’re taking a look at system health.

And then two, we want to make sure that we’re constantly updating any sort of metadata schema, you know, taking into account any new campaigns and new programs and new geos that we’re targeting for the next fiscal year. We also want to make sure that we’re archiving assets so that only relevant search results show up. So again, there’s always something to be doing in the dam and making sure that we’re policing it appropriately and that it’s the best tool we can have for our marketers. Now if we were to go think through how we can scale appropriately for the future, we need to make sure again that we’re bucketing those four items that we’ve been talking about through today’s conversation. So that’s going to be taxonomy and metadata, the folder structure, governance, and then automation and integration. If these four things are set up appropriately, then we’re going to just benefit completely from everything listed on the right hand side of this slide. So what you’ve got here is a strong foundation for growth. Again, well-structured taxonomy that’s going to support a growing asset library. And it’s also going to make it easier for us to organize our assets across teams, geos, programs, campaigns, whatever it is. When we go to onboard users for new hires or for people who come in through an acquisition, if we have everything documented appropriately, they’ll be able to consume the information and get going in the dam. Once we want to integrate the dam with another tool, we’ll be able to do that easily because of course we’ll have a taxonomy that’s cross system and a folder structure that makes sense to all of our users.

Now these last two items, prevents chaos as you scale and avoid costly cleanups later, these go hand in hand. We want to make sure again that we are preventing any chaos at the very beginning. We want to make sure that we’re not having any dupes in the dam. We don’t have any inconsistency with our tags, the duplicate tags either. We want to make sure that we can maintain as much order as possible while our volume of assets grows plus our contributors grow. I can tell you that personally I have cleaned up a day or two in my dam and having those costly cleanups are just outrageously tedious and it also downplays a lot on user adoption. If you’ve got one librarian who’s working to clean up 100, 120,000 assets, that’s a lot and of course that’s going to make sure that then our users aren’t able to find what they need because they’re not able to work quick enough. So again, we want to make sure that we are scaling appropriately and setting up everything from the beginning to get it done right in the future. Alright, to summarize our discussion today, the strategic advantage of an organized AEM assets is going to boil down to these key takeaways. Proper taxonomy and folder structure are not just nice to haves or good practice. These are essential for maximizing the value of your AEM assets investment. These are foundational elements that are going to unlock its full potential. So this approach leads to significant gains in efficiency, productivity, and brand consistency. When assets are easy to find and govern, your teams can work faster, produce more, and maintain a unified brand message. Ultimately, this provides a scalable and future-proof solution for managing your critical digital assets. It’s an investment that pays dividends in the long run. So we strongly encourage you to invest in planning and implementing a well-defined organizational strategy for your AEM assets. This is the path to unlocking true efficiency and control over your digital content. It’s important to also have DAM champions to support your digital asset management efforts. So please feel free to use the QR codes to connect with us on LinkedIn.

Now I’d like to open this up for any questions that the teams may have. Great stuff. Katie and Melanie, thank you so much for joining us. That was an awesome way to close out our final session of the day. Thanks, Will. We’re super excited to be here. Yes, thank you. I’m damn excited to be here. And a big thank you to helping us as a champion and very excited. I love it. Fantastic. Well, as usual, everyone, we have time for some questions. We’ll get into those.

Rafael, I saw that question. That’s interesting. I like what you’re thinking. What I would recommend for that is feel free to, all of our speakers today have put up their QR codes to connect to them on LinkedIn. I’d recommend getting in touch with any of our speakers from today and digging a little deeper into that question.

Each of today’s speakers is part of the AEM Champion Program. So not only are they subject matter experts, but they’re evangelists and they have certainly looking for career growth opportunities as well as part of the Champion Program. So I think that would be a great match for that conversation.

So I recommend that. Getting into some other questions. I like this one from Anne a lot in regards to determining the value of smart tags. So Anne would love to see some more real world examples. She’d love to use it in her brand, but she’s looking for deeper tagging and deeper intelligence and beyond just, you know, this is a running shoe versus a sneaker. Specifically looking into what brand, product and season it is with any lifestyle images. So I’m going to pass that to Melanie first, because I know you have a good amount of expertise in smart tagging area. Just talk about how it fits in your strategy and what your recommendations for best practices are. All right. Thanks. Well, yeah, this is a great question. When you’re looking at utilizing Adobe Smart Tags, what you definitely want to do is upload your images to AEM and see what does AI automatically already detect? What does it see as far as the portraits, the landscapes, what’s in the image? What are going to be effective keywords that are going to be great for your brand and how you’re going to utilize smart tags? I see in here, your inquiry was if it has a running shoe or a sneaker. The answer is yes. Some of it is going to be based on how you train it and what keywords are going to be used for your environment. I hope that helps. Yeah, that makes sense.

To me, at least, hopefully it makes sense to Anne as well. But I want to follow up with another question from Anne, specifically in regards to smart tagging and facial recognition. Do you have any use cases that bring facial recognition into your smart tagging strategy? Is it able to learn a face and then tag matching assets of that same person from image to image? I can see where facial recognition would be very helpful. You want to have a photo of somebody who’s smiling or you want something that goes along with smiling inside of a campaign that’s going to be utilized for that. So I can see where a happy couple would be a great example of a smart tag that would be applied to an image. But again, some of it’s going to be dependent on what your organization’s use case is. If you are looking for photos of happy couple, then yeah, I can see where that would be applicable for your strategy and how you’re going to utilize it.

Great.

We have a question from Shelly here around one of my favorite AEM asset rules of thumb, which is does the recommended 1000 file limit in a folder take into account subfolders? For example, a folder containing 100 files, but also has 10 subfolders with 100 files in each, which would then put it over the 1000 file limit.

Yep. I can see that one. Go ahead, Melanie. No, no, please go ahead. So, yeah. So the recommendation there is it does go by the folder itself, not by the subfolders. So the subfolders are the nodes and the assets are contained inside of those nodes. But the goal is to not make it too complex. You don’t want too many folders where users don’t know where to go to find what they’re looking for. Granted, tags and taxonomies can help you get there. But think of that as a best practice and think of your overall governance and your strategy as how you’re going to organize those folders. I’m sure Katie might have something else to add to that. Yeah, I do. I have one other thing to add. I mean, I think a lot of people put a lot of work and a lot of thought process into their folders, and sometimes they can make them over complex. But the one thing to remember, too, is that you want to make sure that you’re using that Omni search bar and searching for your assets that way. You should think of files for actually storing the assets as opposed to searching. You don’t want to have to go and search through thousands of folders. That’s where the metadata comes in, and that’s where it’s super important to make sure you’re tagging things appropriately. Excellent.

Thank you, Katie. I actually have another question for you, Katie, which is for organizations, for companies just starting to establish a formal damn governance plan, what do you think is the most important first step to ensure that you’re getting buy-in from different departments like creative, marketing and legal, for example? Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s one that a lot of people face when they’re either bringing in a damn or they’re setting up a governance council, whatever that’s really going to be. And really my answer and my thought process around that is to make sure that everybody has a seat at the table. You want to make sure that security, brand, IT, all the admin and some of your heavier users, maybe like digital or creative, they also have a seat at the table. And then you want to make sure that you’re identifying all of the right business goals. That way you guys can take those into consideration. That way, when you go to set up your governance, you know exactly every all the steps you need to take into consideration when you’re doing things like that.

Awesome. Thank you for that.

I have another one for Melanie.

Throughout your presentation, you provided a few examples for folder structures like by product, by region. So how would you recommend handling assets that logically fit into multiple categories? Right. So, for example, there’s a product photo that’s used for a specific campaign in a product. Perfect. Great question. So your folder structure needs to be as intuitive as possible. So the key to handling assets that might fit into multiple categories is also to rely on a robust taxonomy. Your metadata, your tags, how can users locate and find those assets? So an asset really should live in a single primary location. But again, it’s going to be based on your business needs and how you find the asset. But metadata and tags are going to help make that asset more discoverable and more relevant to, again, your organization’s needs. Gotcha. I’m seeing a question I really like from Dario. That’s kind of following up on that thousand folder limit again. I feel like both of you can probably weigh on this again, but I’ll start with Katie. And Dario is asking if your company’s retention policy requires you to keep assets forever, the number of assets can get out of control, right? So that makes it really difficult to adhere to that less than a thousand assets.

How would you recommend navigating that in a manageable way? Yeah, and that’s a good question. It’s definitely a good question. I would implement an archival feature or archival workflow if possible, because then that way not only are you storing the assets and keeping them to make sure that you’re following any legal or brand compliance, but then you’re also ensuring too that all of your search results are still relevant. One thing that you don’t want to have happen is have like stale older assets showing up in search results. So every time you need to keep an asset, you can kind of move it even there to a to a secret folder that only admin can see. Or you can take advantage of some of the other workflows that are available in AEM.

That’s a great tip. Melanie, would you have anything to add to that or do you think that is a good way to navigate that specific use case? Well, the other thing you need to look at is what is your company’s retention policy? If you have to keep assets for 10 years, eight years, five years, so perhaps thinking of adding in a year folder to help organize those assets. So when that retention policy does come due and you need to archive, it’s easier to archive an entire folder. Yeah, I like that, too. So this kind of two routes I’m hearing. One is if you’re adhering to the policy, you know, maybe evaluate the archival folder route or maybe it’s time to take a closer look at the policy itself and see, you know, what can be done to make sure that your environment is staying efficient and optimized. Yeah, those are great tips. I have another smart tags question for Melanie.

It’s a hot topic and curious, what’s the typical level of effort required to effectively train the system, right, to train smart tags to align with your specific brand, the terminology you use? There’s a two part of it, but I’ll just start with that first part for now. All right. Well, the one thing I can’t say is our presentation doesn’t qualify the actual level of effort that it’s going to take in hours to do that initial effort. So the goal you need to look at is what are the assets that you have in your repository? What are they currently being tagged at? And how would your organization utilize those tags so you can come up with a future governance plan for what you will be doing to take those assets? And there’s a variety of different methods that you can use to kind of get to that situation where you’re ready to do that governance and get ready to train your assets.

Gotcha. OK. And then as far as like ongoing maintenance for your smart tagging strategy, for your training model, what does that look like? What can you share about that? Oh, great question. So Adobe has the ability to manage those smart tags. So if any of the tags are tagged, double tagged in your repository, so you have an asset that’s been tagged with a keyword or something that you do not need, you can use managed tags to actually remove those tags or even promote some of the tags that are more important to your taxonomy and your structure to be able to have users find those assets more efficiently. There’s also additional tools called block tags that if there’s a keyword or something you do not want on your assets, you can utilize that functionality as well. So you have a couple of different options in your approach in managing your smart tags.

Gotcha. Nice. OK. Question from Prasanna here asking for your recommendations about maybe we’ll start with Katie since you brought up the archive, but do you archive within AEM or are you going outside of AEM to archive those folders or assets? Yeah, that’s a good question. So personally, I have set up an archiving folder within AEM itself. And then what I have done is I have restricted who can actually access that. So right now what we do is we take over with user permissions and we make sure that we have only admin being able to see that folder and then only certain people can actually move the assets to the archive folder. Did that answer the question? Yeah, I’ll let, if there’s a follow up question, I’ll let Prasanna weigh in in the chat, but that is helpful. So thank you for that.

Melanie brought up some great points about tagging and Katie, I actually have a follow up question for you on that front, which is just generally from your presentation, what are some of the best practices for creating and managing tags in assets? With the focus being to ensure efficient asset organization and retrieval for, you know, weeks, months, years to come. Yeah, that’s definitely a good question. I think we kind of have to go back to what we were talking about before when we take a hard look at what the business requirements are and who is having that seat at the table like we were talking about. We need to make sure that we have all the right elements kind of layered out within our tagging structure and making sure that we also have the right metadata fields, the ones that people are going to care about. That way we can ensure that the metadata is implemented correctly. That way the search results will show up relevant assets when people are looking for things.

Perfect. OK. And I’m seeing another great Smart Tags related question from Thomas here, so I’ll bounce back to Melanie. And Thomas is asking if there’s any solution for managing Smart Tags in bulk. So something, a challenge Thomas has run into with Smart Tags is having to manage them on an asset by asset basis. So is there any best practices you can share on that front, Melanie? Offhand, I’d have to look a little bit further into if there’s an ability to manage them in bulk. I do know through the managed tags capability, you do have the ability to scroll through multiple assets that have been tagged in Smart Tags, as well as the block tags can remove the keywords that you don’t need. But you do have to remember to rerun your workflow to be able to manage those particular assets.

Gotcha. Yeah, I love that question. And it’s one, it’s a great opportunity to follow up in your Beyond the Skill Train session coming up in a couple of weeks. But also, spoiler alert, Thomas and others who may be interested, in just a few minutes, I’m going to do a quick promo for a webinar that we actually have next week all around Smart Tagging. So there’s a lot of great questions today. So stay tuned. Just a couple minutes and I’ll share more details about that. And then we’ll drop a registration link in the chat. But it sounds timely.

Time for one or two more questions. We have another question from Spencer here. I’ll just pass this to whoever feels like you have a good answer for this. Spencer’s wondering, can AEM have split storage to allow for a Glacier version of storage to support archiving? I think I need a little bit more information on Glacier storage. But I think that’s definitely something that we can look into to come back for. But I have seen, personally myself, I have seen where you can have two folders with a lot of different assets in them. You just want to make sure that your strategy is appropriate and you have the right user groups and rules and permissions all set up for that.

Melanie, do you have anything to add to that? Yeah, I have also seen use cases where you are able to archive in an off-store storage type solution. You have to do APIs and integrations more at an architect level than my level to be able to speak to how that is done. But the possibilities and APIs are available to investigate. For sure. We’re happy to share more also on the office hours. Yeah, that sounds like a perfect candidate for that.

And once again, perfectly on time. That brings us to the end of the Q&A for our final session. So I want to say a huge thank you and shout out to our speakers for our last session, Katie and Melanie. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much for having us. It’s been a pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you, Will. And I really appreciate all of your support as an Adobe champion, as well as to my MRM teams for all the support and encourage me to attend today’s call. So thank you. Thank you. Well, of course, we cannot appreciate you all taking the time to share your knowledge with us enough. So thank you both.