DFS 11.1 - 1 Understanding DAM for Sitecore

Digizuite™ DAM for Sitecore is a module that connects a Digital Asset Management system with Sitecore.

The purpose of DAM is to provide a single location for all digital assets within the organization. Any employee in the company will be able to use DAM to find what they need. The latest PDF for a convention, images for the website, images for Word documents or PowerPoints or images for InDesign productions. All final material comes from a centralized DAM.

A DAM system is a digital archive and functions as the heart of the company. Digizuite™ offers a suite of tools, making collaboration internally, as well as externally, easier. Digizuite™ Media Manager is one of the tools used as an accelerator for collaboration. The integration between Sitecore Experience Platform and Digizuite™ DAM is called DAM for Sitecore.

As a Sitecore developer, you are used to considering Sitecore as the center of the world. However, when it comes to using DAM, Sitecore is a distribution channel among others. This will give you a new perspective on multi-channel management. All media files (assets) are no longer 'owned' by Sitecore, but just received from the 'owner' Digizuite™ DAM.

1.1 Benefits from using DAM

Introducing a DAM into an organization presents multiple advantages. The two most important benefits are:

1. Everything is stored centrally and distributed where it is needed. Anybody in the organization knows where to find needed assets. No more local storage of assets or images. In this respect, Sitecore is a local storage too.
2. With the help of automated workflows and approval workflows, you can spend more time on value-adding tasks and remove manual processes. For instance, the system will automatically convert your video into the desired quality and format, and your PDF file will have a thumbnail of the front page etc.

Ultimately, the users save time by working much smarter than before.

Note: As a Sitecore developer it is important to ensure that DAM is owned by the entire organization, not just the web department.

1.2 DAM for Sitecore benefits compared to Sitecore Media Library

Sitecore can resize images to any size out-of-the-box. Upload a large image to Sitecore Media Library and then you can specify the size you need in one specific location programmatically. Sitecore will resize and cache this resized image. Later, when the website requests a small version, it will be delivered from the cache.

Digizuite™ DAM goes beyond resizing images. It can generate different predefined qualities of an image. 'Qualities' is something new added to Sitecore through DAM for Sitecore. A quality is more than just a size in terms of x by y pixels. A quality includes an image format and image compression; is it a JPEG, a PNG or a TIFF file?

Sitecore resizes a PNG to a JPEG, and transparency is lost. All JPEGs resized by Sitecore would have the same JPEG compression. Digizuite™ DAM can handle resizing (transcoding) much more flexible. Digizuite™ DAM is able to resize a PNG to another PNG, and control the compression for any quality individually.

Digizuite™ DAM can convert anything to anything, and publish it anywhere. This goes beyond Sitecore's capabilities.

One of the strong benefits are automated workflows. A specific channel will receive the needed quality from a workflow that automatically transcoded the quality. In info screen in the reception, a converted video will be shown differently on e.g. mobile devices, desktop, tablet, and it might even have a watermarked video for download too. Automated workflows will generate all of these qualities and deliver them.

Digizuite™ DAM generates a thumbnail of a front page from the PDF file. This thumbnail is visible on the website with a link to the actual PDF file. All this is automated in Digizuite™ DAM.

Sitecore is incapable of doing any of this out-of-the-box, you will need to do some code. This feature comes out-of-the-box in Digizuite™ DAM, and is offered to Sitecore through DAM for Sitecore.

1.3 Sitecore channels compared to Digizuite™ channels

As a Sitecore developer, you are used to perceiving Sitecore as the hub for all information as Sitecore delivers information to the right channels. Mobile devices, commercial platforms and corporate websites all get information from Sitecore.

But what if you also needed to deliver content from Sitecore Media Library to an FTP, CDN, make it available in Microsoft Office products, as clip-arts or anywhere else? Again, you would need to code something as Sitecore is not capable of performing this action out-of-the-box. Digizuite™ DAM can push assets to virtually any destination in the right quality, making it a desired solution for efficient multichannel management.

By combining Sitecore with Digizuite™ DAM, you will get a strong multi-channel platform and a powerful foundation for a uniform omnichannel strategy.

1.4 Don't use Sitecore Media Library too

Using both Sitecore Media Library and DAM for Sitecore is not recommended. Not for technical reasons, Sitecore will perform equally well, but for organizational reasons. Using Sitecore Media Library along with Digizuite™ DAM is preventing the customer from gaining the full advantages and savings gained from using DAM as a single source. As a partner, it is important that you understand this.

To achieve the maximum output from DAM for Sitecore, leave Sitecore Media Library behind and switch to DAM for Sitecore.

Because they co-exist, it is possible to make a gradual transition from Sitecore Media Library to DAM for Sitecore, but it should only be a transition, not a permanent state. It is a way of cutting expensive maneuvers in a conversion project. Add the corresponding DAM for Sitecore fields in any template that has a Sitecore image field. In the code, make a switch that uses the DAM for Sitecore field if it is non-empty. As time goes by, most Sitecore image fields will be relieved with DAM for Sitecore fields. A smaller manual effort could change the rest.

1.5 Upload to DAM for Sitecore is different

There are many ways of uploading assets into Digizuite™ DAM. Most of the products part of the Digizuite™ product suite have an upload feature. But in addition to this, there is also hot folder upload, FTP upload, mobile application upload and, of course, upload from DAM for Sitecore. 

The process that follows right after the upload is quite unique. No matter how an asset finds its way into Digizuite™ DAM, it will end up in the job system, which will perform the following activities:

• Create an asset in the archive.
• Extract metadata an asset has (e.g. EXIF information on an image or video length) and store that on metadata of the asset.
• Store whatever metadata entered when uploading the asset on the metadata of the asset.
• Run workflows accordingly to the metadata on the assets.
• Generate the needed qualities of an asset.
• Distribute the qualities to the relevant channels (Sitecore being one channel).
• Notify relevant channels of the new asset(s).

Or as an illustration:

As you can see there are many steps, and it will take time. The larger the asset, the busier the server, the longer time it will take. It will take some time to transcode videos to several qualities because videos are large files. The job engine does all processing asynchronously, and the assets will appear in DAM for Sitecore as they get processed.

It is important for DAM for Sitecore users to know that upload to DAM for Sitecore is not instant, but asynchronous because Digizuite™ DAM performs several tasks to the uploaded asset. This is different from what they are used to.

This upload process is very different from uploading to Sitecore Media Library. Files uploaded to Sitecore Media Library are available instantly. Some processing time is needed when using a DAM system, and it is very important to explain this to editors who are using upload. This information should be given in advance.

1.6 Scalability of the Job System

The Job System in Digizuite™ is highly scalable. It can be configured to process specific asset types on one server or to use a specific set of CPU cores on a server. This way the system can be configured to have a set of CPU cores or servers to process videos, and leave other parts of the job system still available for processing other assets, e.g. images and PDF files.

The Job System comes out-of-the-box with a large number of standard tasks that can transcode almost anything into anything. Some of these might require a license for a specific codec.

1.7 Asset Quality is new in the world of Sitecore

One of the key features of Digizuite™ DAM is to deliver the right quality on the right channel. This means that it will deliver a suitable quality for a mobile device, rather than the maximum quality 4K video, or a small JPEG thumbnail, rather than a 500 Mb TIFF file.

Sitecore can scale images. If you upload a high-resolution JPEG to Sitecore, you can use it as a thumbnail for spots, as well as using it in larger versions for the primary content. Behind the scenes, Sitecore will scale the JPEG and store it in the Media Cache. Whenever a large or small version is requested, the relevant version is delivered from the cache. 

However, when Sitecore scales an image, no matter format, it will always create a JPEG with a fixed compression level. While this may be fine in most cases, in other scenarios it is not. For instance, a PNG with transparency will lose its transparency when transcoded to a JPEG.
Digizuite™ DAM offers a full-blown, highly configurable transcoding engine and has a complete framework around qualities and asset types. Sitecore can only do so much with images, and what it does is quite limited.

Digizuite™ DAM can transcode images to any format at any quality. A PNG can be scaled and maintain transparency, and it can also have individual compression levels per quality. A high-quality, high-resolution file can be made available for the 'press room' on a website. At the time, the very same asset can be a huge background image in high-resolution, but in a low quality. You would need the low quality to keep the file size low for performance reasons. Sitecore would not be able to perform this automatically.

A PDF file will generate a thumbnail as a quality out-of-the-box, which is part of the same asset. An asset has two very different representations, a document and an image. The website can now show thumbnails of any PDF file uploaded to the DAM system, and the editor still only works with one single asset.

It is important to understand that qualities are a part of the same asset, even if they are different file types. It is one of the primary benefits from using a DAM, and it takes a little practice to get all the way around it.

Anybody managing videos knows the complexity of both video and audio codecs. Digizuite™ DAM simplifies this for editors by transcoding video formats to common standard codecs.

Note: Videos might require a license to specific codecs.

DAM for Sitecore comes with a set of predefined qualities available out-of-the-box. Digizuite™ DAM Center controls the qualities, and you can define custom qualities in Digizuite™ DAM Center.

1.8 The link to Sitecore

Assets from Digizuite™ DAM are represented in Sitecore by standard Sitecore items, and are synchronized from Digizuite™ on a schedule or on-demand. The items are stored in buckets in Sitecore Media Library, but with some differences. DAM for Sitecore only stores a subset of the data from Digizuite™ DAM within the Sitecore databases.

The asset data files (the actual files) are stored in Digizuite Media Cache, and not within the Sitecore database. A streaming server will hold the video files. The Digizuite™ DAM Center can also stream the video files.

Storing limited data in Sitecore ensures that the Sitecore database does not grow out of control, and yet you still have the advantages of features from Sitecore Experience Platform, because some data is inside Sitecore.

The synchronization is two-way.