This article explores strategic guidance, foundational best practices, and practical tips for getting started with Adobe Experience Manager Assets. This essential guide focuses on why you need a content strategy and considerations for gathering requirements before you build out your DAM.

If you are new to Adobe Experience Manager Assets, welcome!

Adobe Experience Manager Assets can help your organization establish a central hub for storing digital assets such as images, videos, documents and more. Key features of AEM Assets can be configured to help your organization simplify and streamline the process of storing, discovering, sharing and distributing assets across the entire lifecycle of assets - from creation, classification, distribution, creating variations, ingestion, even archiving.

This guide hones in on why you need a DAM content management strategy. Added guides will dive deeper into fundamental concepts for Digital Asset Managers and Administrator on topics such as:

• Folder structure & naming

• Access & permissions

• Metadata, metadata schemas & metadata profiles

• Taxonomy and Tagging

• Governance

Why you need a DAM content management strategy

Before diving into the capabilities in AEM Assets for driving content velocity, discoverability and reuse, let’s begin with why you need not just a DAM tool, but also a content strategy for managing assets.

Not having a content strategy can introduce some common challenges and make your DAM library difficult to use and can add to the time, effort and cost of running the DAM.  Below are some of the most common challenges to avoid, or things to prevent, when planning and implementing your content strategy.

• Overwhelming assets volumes – organizations are seeing an explosion of assets, asset versions and variations, but organizing assets with metadata and tagging can help bring structure, scalability and discoverability into play.

• Duplicated assets   - user created duplicate assets, variations and renditions can leave users struggling to find what they need, but introducing best practices can help prevent this.

• Lack of discoverability -   organizations can find it hard to find assets possibly due to:

  • An unintuitive folder structure – issues arise if there is no systematic approach to organizing content, but enforcing a permanent folder structure, one that can scale, can reduce the effort of classifying, uploading or searching for assets.

  • Absent metadata or tagging - with metadata and tagging, users can more easily describe assets for information purposes, findability and delivery, and better support asset lifecycle tracking.

  • Non-conformance to asset naming standards - With AEM as a central Enterprise DAM, new asset naming standards can be enforced, helping users find assets more easily when an intuitive naming standard is enforced.

  • Inefficient search capabilities – AEM enables users to find assets in a more efficient way using metadata and tags, helping users repurpose assets and avoiding excess renditions.

Not planning to address these common digital asset management issues preemptively can cause serious problems for your DAM and your users, and can even have potential implications for performance or compliance.

Importantly, the underlying risk if you don’t have a robust content strategy, one that is aligned to your business needs, is content chaos.

Content chaos can happen quickly and be very difficult, time consuming and costly to correct. Taking steps to prevent content chaos in the first place is essential to reaping the benefits of content searchability, discoverability, and reuse.

Defining your Digital Asset Management requirements

To eliminate and avoid the common content chaos challenges, undertake requirements gathering to capture the business needs, giving you insights and inputs for your implementation to ensure that you set up the DAM for optimal asset utilization and management. Here are key elements to include in requirements gathering:

• Identify business use cases

  • Capture personas for user stories: e.g. Author, DAM Administrator, Marketer, Agency collaborator, etc.

  • Use a User Story format for each use case: As a <specific user/persona/role> I want <desired outcome / key issue that needs to be solved>, so that <benefit from implementing the feature>”.

  • Include acceptance criteria: I’ll know this is done when… (defined via metadata).

• Gather functional requirements - comprised of persona profile specification, this work allows for the clear and accurate capture of user goals, business asks, needs and benefits, altogether in one concise statement. Define user goals by persona for each of these:

  • Taxonomy

  • Metadata

  • Workflow

  • Reporting

  • Search

  • Expired assets

• Gather non-functional requirements - specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviors, covering these areas:

  • Performance requirements
  • Security requirements
  • Authentication
  • Authorization and access controls

Additional Learning Resources

In additional to the foundational topics above, these resources contain added best practices which can help you get underway successfully with AEM Assets:

• Empowering your team with a strong content governance strategy for implementation success by Adobe Champion Gary Howell

• Accelerating adoption through training and enablement  by Adobe Champion Erin Brown

• Change Management Essentials for Success by Adobe

• Building your Adobe Experience Manager Assets team by Adobe

What's next?

To ensure the successful implementation of Adobe Experience Manager Assets, focus acutely on making your assets discoverable and reusable. When you have completed requirements gathering to understand key considerations to meet your business needs, translating the requirements into how AEM Assets works is the next step.

To get underway, review and follow related guides and align with stakeholders to streamline processes and optimize the management of your digital assets. Setting the right foundations will ultimately drive efficiency and help you better achieve your organizational goals.

These related guides will dive into fundamental concepts the AEM Digital Assets Manager and Administrator should understand, including practical considerations, best practices and tips from Adobe Champions on these topics:

• Folder structure & naming

• Access & permissions

• Metadata, metadata schemas & metadata profiles

• Taxonomy and tagging

• Governance

• Training and enablement