Sitecore Content Hub™: Beyond DAM — Part One

In part one of this two-part interview series, we explore the benefits of content consolidation and the importance of creating a single source of truth for your assets. We discuss how Sitecore Content Hub (Content Hub) can enhance the delivery of multibrand, multisite and multilingual digital experiences for global organizations.

Makenzie Barket

Many of the world's leading brands have implemented Content Hub. What are some of the primary business benefits these organizations experience?

Chandra Sekaran

The biggest benefit is the return on investment (ROI) you get from saved time and costs. Content Hub makes it easy for users to find assets, supports the reuse and repurposing of existing assets and eliminates duplicate efforts. It makes marketing teams more productive and accelerates speed-to-market.

When it comes to content creation, organizations spend a lot of money, and they engage external agencies and internal creative teams to produce assets. Once they are created, the assets sit in the different systems used by each team, like OneDrive or a local file system. Often, the teams responsible for content creation spend a significant amount of valuable time digging through those systems to try to find assets. To put it simply, there are a lot of inefficiencies and disconnects between teams when it comes to file management that cause major delays in the content creation process.

Content Hub removes these inefficiencies by standardizing workflows for content creation and management and enforcing brand compliance. It also gives you the ability to create user accounts for external agencies so they can integrate their favorite tools into Content Hub, which enables them to seamlessly work in the system and manage assets.

MB

What are some of the digital asset management (DAM) challenges Content Hub solves?

CS

One of the most significant challenges businesses face with DAM is that there is no single source of truth for their assets. Different teams within an organization have different tools and processes that they use. Some teams manage their assets in a local file system, OneDrive, SharePoint or a cloud storage solution. Some teams may even use their own DAM system, which other teams don’t have access to.

This leaves the assets scattered between systems and disorganized, which puts the company at a disadvantage. When assets created by one team cannot be found and leveraged by another team, that creates a major issue. In those situations, organizations are forced to spend a lot of time and money to recreate those lost or siloed assets. Content Hub solves this issue by providing a single platform where you can efficiently manage the entire content lifecycle and all your assets.

Another common challenge businesses run into with DAM systems is poor search capabilities. Businesses that have thousands of assets need a solution that has robust search capabilities, faceting functions, tools that enable file and content sharing between different teams and metadata association. Those are some of the capabilities businesses look for in DAM systems today that Content Hub provides.

End users can easily leverage full-text and advanced search capabilities with the click of a button.

Another challenge organizations face today is that their assets don’t cater to different business uses, and they aren’t easy to change. Businesses want to be able to change assets to different resolutions and renditions, they want to crop them and they want technologies baked into assets so they can be resized on the fly for the channel that they will be published to.

MB

I would imagine for multinational or multibrand organizations, it's important to have a variety of renditions that are used in omnichannel publishing.

CS

Exactly. Businesses don't want to upload 10 different versions of an asset for 10 different channels. They want to upload one asset and have the system generate various renditions for different channels. They don't want to spend time creating those renditions, they want to just use one version of an asset. 

Content Hub provides renditions out of the box (OOTB) and gives you the ability to create custom renditions. It also enables you to instantly resize and crop renditions. And once the renditions are ready, Content Hub makes it easy to generate public links via the content delivery network (CDN), enabling fast, simple omnichannel publishing and delivery.

And when it comes to managing all of these renditions, it is critical to ensure the organization is in compliance. A lot of organizations have DAM systems that do not have digital rights management (DRM) capabilities, and they find it difficult to manage DRM on their own. If they wanted DRM, they would have to spend additional money on a third-party tool because it's not baked into their DAM system. Content Hub boasts DRM features that address this prominent pain point for businesses. Content Hub’s DRM provides capabilities to enforce asset compliance for various markets and regions. It also tracks and controls asset usage and any associated licenses. DRM is especially important for companies that are multinational that need to ensure every asset is used properly across different brands, channels and countries.

MB

That is another point that speaks to the return on investment Content Hub provides as well.

CS

Absolutely. All of these benefits boil down to the outstanding ROI businesses get from saving time and costs. Plus, with Content Hub’s expanding landscape and powerful integrations with composable applications, the advantages are manifold today and in the future.

To learn more about EPAM’s expertise in Sitecore Content Hub or to view a demo, visit: www.epam.com/sitecore-content-hub.