How to manage assets in the absence of a DAM

[honstar]

I was wondering if we have a solid idea already how we're going to manage assets in milo? From an earlier authoring recording from last year October, I took away the following (which is probably way outdated but for the sake of discussion, I'll bring them up here):

• images can be copy/pasted or dragged/dropped from any browser window into a word document
• in order to reuse images, one can leverage fragments
• some sort of DAM like repo will be made available for (product) icons/mnemonics

I kinda like the idea of using fragments where such asset docs can be attributed with additional metadata via a corresponding block. However, having to manage word documents that contain assets feels counter-intuitive.

I also heard about something termed Franklin Assets which the product team has planned on their roadmap.

[sukamat]

Franklin assets has a MS Word plugin that loads the DAM in the MS Word app itself. The user can then add those images to the word doc.

Here is a demo.

(The demo shows integration with AEMaaCS and Franklin. Franklin specific demo starts at 15th min)

It is not fully refined yet as you can see from the plugin UI but they said they are actively working on it to make it production ready. Usage of DAM definitely simplifies the assets storage and re-use of the images and perhaps removes the additional step of creating fragments just for adding images. It might be good to explore this option further and perhaps figure of their timelines.

[auniverseaway]

I built a basic assets integration into Milo Library. You can see it used with Pfizer Assets here.

This is hopefully how Franklin will proceed in the future since library is becoming a product feature and its Word / Docs plugin agnostic. To my knowledge @sukamat, the integration you saw was only for Google Docs. Am I mis-remembering?

I'm not totally convinced we actually need a robust assets solution. Adobe has historically treated their DAMs as a dumping ground with very poor management and curation of assets. The DAM and good use of it has always seemed aspirational. Maybe someday that changes, but I haven't seen it.

---

@alexkli @trieloff @rofe @davidnuescheler @tripodsan

In my mind, what I would love to see is the library gives you a low-res proxy version of the asset in word, and then helix-admin can replace that low-res version with the correct asset from the DAM. Including low-res PNGs mapped to SVGs. Preflight (or admin) would then also flag any images that were uploaded directly to Word so someone would know an un-approved asset is being used on the live site.

Having a low-res proxy image would be extremely useful for localization purposes, too. Today, our word docs are capped at 60MB. If someone was to upload raw bitmaps or have a heavy document, this creates issues. Even today, we get into the 10MB size range and it makes sending this content to localization more difficult. And, before you ask, "Why not send MD to loc?" this is a good question. A lot of times, there's more rich formatting we can author easily (such as a "do not translate" style) that becomes cumbersome or impossible to do in MD.

[sukamat]

@auniverseaway

To my knowledge @sukamat, the integration you saw was only for Google Docs. Am I mis-remembering?

In the demo, they used google doc but they did mention that the feature would be in Sharepoint too. That said, I am not aware if it is available today in Sharepoint.

[jenssingler]

I agree with this, @auniverseaway :

Adobe has historically treated their DAMs as a dumping ground with very poor management and curation of assets.

Before we think about building anything, we should carefully evaluate what we need. The "more minimal" the better.

Historically in the AEM world we used mainly some workflow features for prevent PDF editing and to resize images. Plus upload an asset once and re-use it in multiple pages.
One thing that could become rather important (and which is along the same lines as the last point): include assets via reference. If we directly embed assets in the Word document and therefore increase the file size, this can come back and bite us. I.e. any manipulation of the documents will take longer and we will hit any throttling limits faster - think of FG or Loc, where a lot of documents will be downloaded, altered and reuploaded.

[Davfrank1]

What is this about hello