Simplifying Enterprise Branding

Finding the appropriate and up-to-date graphics and document files used for sales and marketing purposes does not have to be so difficult. That's why Interwoven Inc., working with MediaBin Inc., WebWare, and systems integrator Interflow Systems Consulting Inc., launched its Interwoven Solution for Media Asset Management (MAM) last week at its third annual Interwoven user conference, GearUp 2002, in San Francisco. The solution enhances and protects enterprise branding, accelerates corporate training, and promotes products and services. Interwoven Solution for MAM extends the Interwoven 5 ECM (enterprise content management) platform by enabling companies to collaboratively publish media assets in conjunction with documents, portal content, and Web content in a unified environment. Through the agreement Interwoven will resell MediaBin's digital asset-management software, MediaBin Asset Manager. "It's very hard to deal with data types, especially when you are dealing with Photoshop files and various graphics files where one version is created and saved for the Web and another is created and saved for print," says Burt Smith, vice president of strategic alliances at MediaBin. What makes matters worse is the "explosion of assets that marketing professionals can't track," Smith says, referring to the adding, deleting, and changing of existing graphics and document files. "With MediaBin, users can go to a browser and download a copy of the asset in the form they need it. It simplifies life for marketing communication professionals, because they only need to keep one copy of the file." Leveraging its integrations with MediaBin and WebWare, Interwoven can provide customers with media-specific indexing, browse and search capabilities, thumbnails for graphical preview and inspection, heightened asset security, and automated tracking and updating of assets. Customers will also benefit from automated and ad hoc file transformation features, which automatically generate proper renditions of source assets. These renditions will allow assets to be easily reused across multiple initiatives, and will eliminate the inefficiencies associated with re-creating renditions within the desktop application. Digital asset management appears to be growing in popularity. MediaBin's client base already consists of well-known companies like Delta Air Lines Inc., Ford Motor Co., Microsoft Corp., Reebok International Ltd., and Lear Corp. "Ford saved $400,000 in the first two months after it started using MediaBin. The product had already paid for itself by that time," Smith says. Interwoven executives also acknowledge a boost in digital asset management recognition. "It was the general consensus at GearUp that content management has moved from Internet-centric to enterprise-centric. In other words, content management has become core to the enterprise application infrastructure, because the effective use of content is critical to productivity, business efficiency, and control of intellectual capital," said John Van Siclen, president and CEO of Interwoven, in a statement following the GearUp 2002 event.