CMS Watch – Submitted by: Kas Thomas, Analyst 

We’ve been talking to a number of DAM vendors lately, and it’s exciting to see so much new R&D and “capability buildout” going on at a time when activity in certain other spaces is (by comparison) rather slack, due to cost-cutting and other factors. As a member of OpenText‘s Artesia group said: ”The DAM market, right now, is where WCM was five years ago” – meaning, interest is keen, people are starting to “get” what DAM is about (and why it’s needed), and vendor stories around DAM are starting to become quite interesting. What can you, the end user of these technologies, look forward to as a result? How should this influence your future plans around rich media?

One of the more noteworthy trends that’s emerging that’s wise for all to embrace is an understanding that rich-media types (Flash, AVI, MPEG, mp3 and others), because of their growing pervasiveness, need to be treated as “first-class” content types in the enterprise. This means they need first-class “content services” supporting them: version control, security, logging, workflow, collaboration services, lifecycle management, and so on. Traditionally, DAM systems have not done these ECM sorts of things well, and so-called ECM tools have been more document-oriented than media-oriented (hence the need for DAM in the first place). It’s going to be a while before DM and DAM fuse together (if indeed they ever do).

Continues @ http://www.cmswatch.com