How to stay ahead of the DAM-game, as told by our new product manager

Our new product manager Christian shares his insights to the future of DAM and how QBank will stay ahead. He also shares his top tips for working with DAM!  

Tell us about yourself!

After getting my feet wet building Image Banks (on CDs using Macromedia Director!), I’ve been working in the realm of Digital Asset Management since the end of the 90s. We built a CMS for one of the large pre-dotcom-bubble web agencies in Sweden - and already back then the functionality was skewed towards DAM so it felt natural to continue developing the concept in a new company that I founded with some colleagues. Starting a company in the wake of the dotcom bubble was interesting to say the least, but we kept going, and somehow I ended up working for our parent company in Paris.

What is your role at QBank?

My role is product manager for the QBank DAM, which means I will work together with our development team to strengthen the product, making sure we deliver a product that solves real-world problems for our clients, with an innovative twist.

Where do you wish to take QBank in the coming years?

QBank should be the “swiss army knife” of brand and digital asset management for smarter and faster companies, encompassing the entire lifecycle of an asset - from cradle to grave. The system should provide robust but also innovative tools for each stage of an assets life, making it an integral and time saving part of daily work. Also, not to be forgotten - the user experience! For any system to be successful, it needs to be inspiring to work with.

Where do you think the future of DAM is headed?

I think we will be seeing even more DAM-like features in the cloud offerings from Google, Microsoft, Dropbox etc, but I believe it will be hard for those vendors to find a balance between the needs of common end users and the specialized requirements of marketing and brand professionals that will make them serious contenders in the DAM market.

What are your top 3 tips for DAM-users?

• Review how metadata collection can be delegated by giving your vendors, photographers and agencies clear instructions how to embed relevant metadata already during the asset creation phase - this will save you a lot of time later in the process and ensure a higher value of your assets.
• Although working with any DAM system should be a collaborative effort, you need an internal DAM champion who keeps up to date with development, relays information between the users and vendor and oversees metadata, structure and taxonomies.
• If you are fortunate to work with a vendor that listens to your needs, use that opportunity to contribute your ideas and experience. We've created a LinkedIn-group for our users where we welcome ideas and feedback (we also post news and updates, and offer a forum for QBank-users to meet and discuss!) So if you're a QBank-user reading this, please join our group »

I hope you found this blog-post useful, and I look forward to sharing more with you in the future!