3 Things in Assets 6.3 that are the Real Deal
Product releases and updates always come with a flurry of PR, but here are 3 things in AEM Assets 6.3 that will make our clients and their DAMs very happy.
1. Collaboration Accelerated
Adobe has the market share when it comes to state of the art design tools with the Creative Cloud. The integration in version 6.2 to the Creative Cloud did so much to connect content creators and marketers, compress the communications process and get assets ready for campaigns. In this new version of Assets there are significant improvements to the creative workflow process that will seriously speed up the creative process by containing the workflow right in the DAM.
**From conception to delivery, these Assets improvements nail it:**So much time is taken up in the back forth in the creative to delivery process. AEM Assets looks to compress this time by containing as much as possible in one system. Now the review and approval processes are streamlined with a side by side view in the review panel and actions to request changes. Taking a note from social media, you can use the @ in comments, annotations and change requests to notify the user.
Annotations were a cool feature in the last version and here they get a make over with the ability to choose colors to differentiate users and make the conversation easy. There is also a new export option to push all those comments and annotations to PDF for offline review, for that last guy in the office that still needs a print out.
Now this one is something that many clients have asked to have solved - locking assets to editing while they are being worked on by a user i.e. check in / check out. Now there is a web as well as Desktop App ability to lock assets to editing. Of course, there is the ability to override it by an admin to make sure that assets are not stuck in limbo.
2. The Holy Grail of Meta Data
DAMs often fail because assets are uploaded without any context or identifying information putting them into a black hole. Impossible to find in search, these "dark assets" can cause duplication which can clog up storage. Finally fully out of beta, Adobe is releasing the Smart Tags service that allows content managers and DAM admins to automatically tag assets based on Adobe's machine learned service. Set the property to a folder or bulk action, assets are analyzed with tags and an accompanying confidence score indicating how sure the system is that this tag matches. A new Manage Tags panel allows the managers to easily curate the smart tags added and to promote them ensuring true relevancy for search.
Tags can also now be boosted. By boosting tags in the advance tab of the asset properties, the search relevancy increase for that tag. It increases this tag's potency to rank even higher than a normal tag or the appearance of that word in one of the descriptive fields like title. Content managers have even more control over how assets can be found.
To that, search has been improved to allow for configuration of matching multiple tags. Before, it was only an OR operation for example, when searching with two tags, the search would return images with "dog" or "cat", not both. Now there is a "Match All" feature which acts as an AND operation, so the search will return images with both "dog" and "cat" tags. This makes the already powerful search that much more easy for content managers and marketers to find what they are looking for.