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.

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.

The search system within the Widen Collective^Ⓡ allows our 500,000+ users to find the digital assets they need. Across every Collective site the search system's job is to store all of uploaded asset information in a format that can be searched in a wide variety of ways; so that it can return results that are accurate, complete, and in compliance with the platform's governance structure. All in a matter of milliseconds! This is a highly complex system that has gone through several major overhauls over the past 15+ years to keep pace with the exponential growth of data that Widen handles. This post is the tale of that evolution over time, and the steps we take to ensure its ability to scale into the future.

“I think when implementing something new, or when something comes with a change, fear is completely natural...the audience reaction to the new site was our biggest fear.” – Maria Jose Torres, Steelcase

We had so many amazing entries for the 2019 DAM Good Dashboard Contest. It was a tough call, but we have our winners!