The events of recent months have upended many of the norms and routines of our everyday lives. While there are some upsides to our new professional setups – improved commutes, status meetings with pets, custom Zoom backgrounds – there are undoubtedly a lot of challenges when it comes to working well as a team from different locations.
As a cloud-based efficiency tool, OpenAsset is designed to make workflows simpler and help teams work collaboratively. In this blog we have outlined some of the features and resources that can help save users’ time and help teams who are working remotely to share ideas and keep projects moving forward.
Sharing assets with other users
Albums
Albums offer a flexible way of compiling selections of images to share with colleagues. If your team is working together on the same proposal or marketing document, albums are a great way of reviewing images and deciding on the right ones to use in your work. You can easily control who can view or modify an album, and you can share an album one of these three ways:
- Web shares – for team members or external viewers who do not have access to OpenAsset
- Sharing with a group – for team members that are all apart of the same group in OpenAsset
- Sharing with individual users – For sharing internally with individuals
Contact Sheets
Our Contact Sheet tool allows you to generate a PDF from a selection of images. You can customize what file metadata is displayed alongside your images, making it a useful tool for more data-driven work.
Saved and Shared Searches
Once you have entered a series of search terms, you can save the search with a memorable name and then access the same results by searching for this name. You can share the saved search with members of your team.
Finding the right assets
Field Filters
We have recently introduced Field Filters that enable you to search for projects and employees by information stored in fields. For example, you could filter on employees hired after a given date, or projects with a specific term in their description. Read more about employee field filters and project field filters.
Image Similarity Search
If you want a quick way of finding images without needing to think of search terms, simply click the ‘brain’ icon on a file thumbnail to launch a Similar Image search. This will return search results from across your entire image library.
Using your assets more efficiently
Download the InDesign Plugin
To avoid broken links and unnecessary data storage on your home computer, be sure to use our InDesign Plugin. You can find download links for the InDesign plugin on our Help Site, and a getting started guide for using the plugin to create documents in InDesign. You can also learn about storing InDesign files in OpenAsset, which will make collaborating on documents easier.
Include images in company update emails
Including images from OpenAsset, or links to albums and projects, in monthly newsletters can be a great way of keeping your users up to date with the latest news from your marketing team.
Customisable document templates
Customisable templates increase the efficiency and consistency with which organizations generate documents. Some of the benefits of implementing templates in your OpenAsset system include:
- re-sized images and project information pushed directly from OpenAsset into your documents
- maintain control of your approved, branded documents and ensure that everyone uses the latest templates
- quickly react to re-branding projects by just updating the core template
- enable users without graphic design skills to produce professional marketing documents
- control which users have access to particular templates with Group Permissions
Improving the quality of your OpenAsset data
Covid-19 has impacted businesses in lots of different ways. Some clients have reported that having their users all working from home has resulted in a big influx of users requiring access to cloud-based assets. Other clients have fed back that the drop in expected new business has created time for marketing teams to pick up on tasks like tagging files and projects with keywords, which will be crucial preparation for when business picks up again in future. In either instance, now is the time to focus on how assets are stored and organised in your DAM.
There are data tools in OpenAsset that you can use to identify gaps in your system’s metadata coverage. Learn how to:
Adding locations for projects
Setting project locations is a really useful task for a system administrator to work on. Once this data is inputted, you will be able to make use of the Maps View, which offers a powerful way of visualising your projects within the context of the built environment.
We’re here to help!
You can always contact our Support Team or your CSM for advice and best practices around using OpenAsset. We also offer training sessions that can be recorded and shared throughout your company. They are organised through GoToMeeting and offer a great way of improving the product knowledge of your system admins or onboarding users who are unfamiliar with OpenAsset.
We are aware that these are challenging times, requiring quick adjustments to how businesses operate. We have lots of ideas for how businesses in the AEC industries can successfully adapt their working practices to stay on track.
