5 steps for successful DAM migration

Overall, there are 2 reasons why you want to migrate your content to a digital asset management platform:

             1. You were traditionally doing things and now, you want to start using a DAM platform to manage your digital assets and make your brand guidelines accessible to everyone that needs them.

Curious about the Customer Success Story of Scouts en Gidsen Vlaanderen?
Read now!

             2. Over time, your needs may change and you may find that your current DAM system no longer meets your requirements. If this is the case, you may need to migrate content from your existing system to a new platform.

In both cases, you need to migrate your assets to the platform to help organizations manage and store their digital assets in a centralized location. When it comes to DAM, successful migration is key. Having successful DAM migration ensures that all of your organization's assets are properly transferred and stored, which can save you time and money in the long run as well as being able to find the assets easily when you need them.

There are many factors to consider when migrating to a new DAM system, but successful migration comes down to careful planning and execution. By following these tips, we’re sure that you can ensure a successful DAM migration for your organization.

1. Defining your goals and objectives

Before choosing a DAM platform, it is important to sit down and define your goals and objectives. You should ask the following question to yourself and probably discuss it with your colleagues: ‘What are we hoping to achieve with a DAM platform?’

You should bear the problems you have in mind. Are you struggling to keep the files up to date? Do you want to be more organized? Do you want a specific user group to be able to have access to a specific category? Do you want to save more time in converting files? We can add more questions but instead, we suggest you make a list of all the problems that you’re having related to your digital assets and the things that you want from a DAM system. Also, always consider your future growth!

Secondly, you need to classify who needs to have access to your DAM platform. To be more specific, you need to check "what do you want to achieve" and "what category tree do you need" for the specific users and/or departments to give access.

Once you have these questions settled in your head and wrote these things down, you can start checking the DAM solutions.

2. Choosing the right DAM

This is the part where you check all the DAM platforms and compare them. It is important to make a table to have a clear view of all the points you have so far.* For example, you should consider the following points:

• general feature set of a DAM,
• how many categories do you need,
• how many users do you want,
• other possibilities of the platform like automation, branding, etc.,
• integrations with other platforms, and so on.

Once you’re sure about your comparisons and you should minimize your list of possible DAM platforms. For example, if you started your list with 7 DAM platforms, you should be able to drop it down to 3. If you think you can directly choose your DAM platform, go ahead! But, we suggest you have a few options and from those options, you can check their subscription models related to your needs. Later, you should request a demo and/or pricing from those possible platforms to learn more about what they can offer you or ask for a meeting with them to decide on the best subscription model based on your use case.

*Some websites also allow you to make comparisons between the platforms.

3. Setting up user groups, permission structure, and categories

Remember that we suggested you classify who needs to have access to your DAM platform before? This is the step in which we are going to use that information. Get your list out and go to your DAM platform where you can set up the user groups.

How are "user groups" managed‍

By assigning groups to a user you can define which content the user is allowed to see and which authorizations they have in one of the extensions. User groups can be used in many ways and allow you to meticulously create the authorization scheme for your installation.

How to set "permissions"‍

You should choose wisely how to use them. The simpler is better!

On the other hand, setting up your categories is important since categories are used to organize your assets. So, creating a category structure for your digital assets will assist you in the long run. As a result, involving your team in the decision-making process is critical. The idea is to organize your materials so that they can be browsed, searched, and found. After you've gathered everyone's thoughts, create a category scheme that makes sense for your company.

How to use "categories"

4. Migrating your assets carefully

If you have many digital assets, we suggest you do a clean-up before migrating your assets to your new DAM platform because cleaning them up once you uploaded everything can take lots of your time, and outdated assets will clutter your new installation. confusing in the future. So, you may not consider migrating your outdated digital assets that are:

• not following your current branding style,
• not used for more than 3 years, and not going to be used in the future,
• the resolution is bad to use for the current standards.

You should pay attention to this because the storage of the platform might affect the pricing. We suggest you do this at least once every year. This process will be easier with the help of metadata you enter like the expiration date.

Let’s consider that you did the clean-up process, and now, it is time to upload your assets to your new DAM platform.

There are different ways of uploading them and they can change from one platform to another. For example; for Kadanza the following uploading options are available:

• one by one: you can drag a file from your computer and drop them in the gray box (we call this a 'drop zone') or use the blue 'Browse' button and select a file on your computer.
• bulk: the same process as one by one, but you can also choose up to 100 files to upload at once.
• bulk import via the back office: this is used for uploading a large number of assets where you need to provide the assets via a secure File Transfer Program (sFTP) and add metadata.

In the process of uploading files, Kadanza gives you the chance to add categories and metadata to your asset as shown below:

Now, you can assign your assets to the right category or multiple categories at once. Make sure that it is done correctly since categories help you to organize your materials to make them browseable, searchable, and findable by your colleagues based on permissions.

The next and one of the important steps is adding metadata to your assets because metadata is searchable as well. It’ll save you a lot of time if you use it effectively and have a good metadata framework in place.

Also, with Kadanza you can decide if you want to add the metadata to the individual files one by one or add the metadata to all the uploaded files at once while uploading multiple assets at once.

Need help? At Kadanza, we advise you on cleaning up and adding categories and metadata via workshops.
Contact us!

5. Training users

The last step is showing your colleagues how the platform works. In this step, it is important to inform them about the following more or less:

• their limitations,
• how to work with the assets,
• metadata,
• exporting and converting documents,
• requesting approvals (if applicable),
• creating and editing pages,
• creating documents (specific for Kadanza related to creative automation).

In this step, you need to make sure that everyone is aligned and understood the way of working to save time and be on-brand.

In conclusion

Successful DAM migration is important because it helps organizations manage and store their digital assets in a centralized location. Having successful DAM migration ensures that all of your organization's assets are properly transferred and stored, which can save you time and money in the long run.

Even though each content migration is different, following these recommended practices will help you to have a smooth migration process. Overall, we believe that successful migration is also a result of a good onboarding session with your DAM provider to get their suggestions based on your use case.

Curious about what else you can do with Kadanza? Get in touch with us today!