Our digital asset management (DAM) system, the Widen Collective^®, supports a range of short- and long-term business goals. From improving brand consistency and cross-team collaboration to optimizing workflows and brand management practices, DAM is an essential part of any marketer’s toolkit.

Leveraging the full value of a DAM investment begins with effective and engaging user training. That’s why we have recently enhanced and expanded the learning opportunities available to every Widen customer. Through a collection of on-demand and live training options, Widen users of all abilities can advance their knowledge of the Collective to achieve business goals. 

There are many ways to find an asset in the Widen Collective^Ⓡ. You can search, filter, browse categories or collections, access a portal...the list goes on. Each way has its own uses. Our newest ways to help you discover assets are available while you’re already looking at an asset.

As countries around the world respond to the coronavirus pandemic, many people have made the shift to working from home. For businesses that had already adopted agile digital tools, this transition might not have caused many disruptions. But for companies who relied on face-to-face meetings or physical tools to execute their content workflow, these changes upended processes and forced teams to search for new ways to work. As a result for many, today’s working life is more chaotic than ever before.

To dig into these new challenges and understand the additional impacts they’re having on businesses, we interviewed Nick Barber, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, who says the coronavirus has changed consumer behavior. 

Products are becoming whatever shoppers can read, see, and hear. They use everything from product descriptions and technical specifications to inspirational videos and detailed photographs to inform their purchases.

We believe all of that content should be organized and reusable.

We bring you Entries, the new Widen Collective^Ⓡ app to manage your product content.

COVID-19 precautions are requiring teams to work in new ways. Across the globe employees are working remotely for the first time, and many are without access to servers or tools they typically rely upon. 

While in the past the responsibilities of a digital asset management (DAM) admin might have been considered “nice-to-have,” in today’s world they are critical. You have the opportunity to help your team overcome the challenges of the present to create a better way forward for your company using DAM. 

There’s a new way to notify anyone about the latest assets – it’s called Paths. Paths is a new feature in the Widen Collective^Ⓡ that allows you to create custom, automated notifications when assets meet a specified state – no coding required.

The first thing users see when they log in into the Widen Collective^® is the dashboard. As the homepage for your digital asset management (DAM) site, the dashboard is the gateway to your digital content and sets the tone for your user experience. 

Dashboards are comprised of three main features, in any combination: dashboard messages, spotlight searches, and saved searches. Admins are able to control the placement of these tools and customize the overall design to help users find what they need with minimal effort.

In this article we’ve rounded up some noteworthy examples of Collective dashboards to showcase best practices, creative thinking, and what’s possible for your own dashboard design.

Empathy is central to Widen’s values and culture. It is reflected in our respect for teammates, our exceptional customer service, and our commitment to employing people with developmental disabilities. Our CEO, Matthew Gonnering, speaks about the importance of empathy in business, in his TEDx talk.

So our interest in building software that’s accessible to all users is a natural extension of our mindset around empathy and inclusion. We’d like to share where we are in our effort to meet accessibility standards across our digital asset management (DAM) platform, the Widen Collective^®.

Accurate metadata allows users across your organization to find and retrieve assets quickly. With rapidly growing libraries of content, keeping metadata up-to-date can be a time-consuming challenge. Digital asset management (DAM) admins are often tasked with applying metadata for large batches of assets from activities like photoshoots, product updates, and rebrands.

A digital asset management (DAM) system is only as valuable as the content in it. A consistent flow of new, useful, and usable assets keeps teams coming back for more. Eventually, using the DAM system becomes a key part of their workflow. But enabling content creators to properly upload assets can be a challenge. So our team set out to make the process simpler.