Protecting Your Digital Valuables
By Bill Pitzer
As companies continue to build their Web presence, they're realizing the importance of their digital assets. These assets—such as photos, marketing collateral, Word documents, and multimedia files—are traditionally associated with companies that deal specifically in print or other media, but organizations in other sectors are beginning to see the value of properly managing these files. Not only must internal users be able to quickly access various media, it's critical to properly safeguard this valuable intellectual property.
That's where digital asset management (DAM) tools enter. Originating as simple archiving tools, DAM tools are now much more sophisticated and allow a single search to span the archives of various media types. Assets no longer need to be organized by media type, but logically, by the type of content they contain. This cross-media access allows your employees to spend less time searching and more time working on projects. However, most important for many organizations are the built-in security features. Many companies would have a hard time replacing their valuable intellectual property, so they want to take every precaution to protect it.
Teams is part of this new breed of DAM systems, offering not only efficient storage of an organization's media assets but also elaborate searching and retrieval features. (See "Other DAM Tools.") Built on a secure platform, it also offers additional security and auditing features that traditional archiving systems lack. Artesia hopes that its customers see the value in having an efficient digital asset management system.
