In our recent product tour webinar, George Bains, VP of Customer Success walked through the OpenAsset platform, shared exciting additions, and answered questions from the audience. Here are some of the top questions your peers asked, and George’s response.
For even more details and information on OpenAsset’s platform, be sure to check out the full product tour demo.
Can you explain the process of transitioning our library of assets into OpenAsset? What does implementation look like?
Our onboarding and support team is in place to offer you guidance on where to start based on what data you have. If you’re waiting for things to be perfect on your end, perfect is the enemy of progress. We look at the data that you have and make sure that we are bringing it into OpenAsset in a way that’s manageable for you. If your data is not perfect, let’s start with what you have and what you know is reliable.
Oftentimes, the best way to get value quickly is to think of the 25 to 50, maybe 100 projects that your marketing team is regularly promoting and including in proposals in your pursuit work, and bringing that into OpenAsset. Once that content is in OpenAsset, you can start using our Indesign plugin, which ensures that you can reduce broken links on the majority of the work that you’re doing. And then, as additional projects come up you can add that into OpenAsset.
Everybody has a lot of projects, a lot of employees, and a lot of data that feels very disorganized. After onboarding hundreds of clients, we understand that the starting point is always a bit disorganized. Our goal is to help you boil it down to asking where are you spending your time, what projects are you promoting, and what employee resumes are you managing. Once we know that, we can focus on a group of content that we can get into the system quickly to help you start improving efficiency and getting time back in your day to tackle the rest.
Are the keyword categories (e.g., Services) customizable? If so, are there limits to the number of categories?
Yes, all of the keywords that are in your OpenAsset system are curated by you and your team. We can certainly make recommendations based on what we’ve seen across our 900-plus clients, but they are curated by your team. So whether it’s a services sector, geographic location, or something else, you can curate that into OpenAsset, and customize it to what works for you. There are no limits.
We have clients that have long lists of keywords on the left-hand side for their projects as well as their files. The goal is to make sure that you know that what you have in the system works for you. Think about how your teams are finding content, and drive your keyword selection or keyword banks off of those. You want them to be manageable over time. We also offer a field type for fields in OpenAsset as a pick list value. It’s a drop-down where you’re selecting certain items rather than leveraging keywords to quickly search and find things.
Can OpenAsset be used to manage pure text content like value messages and other proposal content?
Yes! Not only can you store and write documents in the PDF (as demonstrated in the webinar) for project sheets or employee resumes, but you can also store, employee headshots, brand collateral, etc. As far as text-based assets, it’s a great question. We’ve heard a lot from our clients in the last year about the need to be able to store additional text-based assets in OpenAsset. This is something that we are actively working on in discovery, understanding the scope, and how that would look within the product. It’s on our radar and something that we hope to include in OpenAsset in the future.
How would you use OpenAsset to store different versions of project summaries? For example, to tailor the description towards specific services.
We recommend having different fields for different descriptions. If you have a website description, let’s have a field for that, if you have a reserve description, let’s have a field for that, and if you have certain healthcare or other descriptions for a project that spans multiple services, you can have different fields that we offer as part of your implementation or onboarding.
When you work with an implementation manager they will look at your data and let you know the best way to structure it within OpenAsset to make finding things easier or to make creating collateral easier using the information you have. You can store additional descriptions or multiple descriptions against projects, or any piece of data against projects or employees. Our team is here to help make sure that you’re doing that in a way that’s sustainable for you and your team to future-proof your system as you build.
Could we see an example of what the generative AI Content Assist might create for a profile?
Absolutely! Please reference the on-demand Product Tour at 51:00.
Is OpenAsset comparable to Unanet?
Good question. Unanet is a CRM, and OpenAsset is a DAM. The main difference is that Unanet is, at its core function, in place to help you track the relationships that you have with your clients, the accounts, and all of the different aspects of that including projects and the employees who work on those projects. But our friends at Unanet would certainly say that they are not a DAM. They are not in place to categorize, organize, and curate imagery to enable marketing-focused workflows around your visual assets.
We have several clients that use OpenAsset alongside side Unanet, alongside Deltek. We hosted a recent marketing efficiency webinar, where Haley Smith, the regional Marketing Director at Balfour Beatty talked about the ability to use them side by side, and the difference between them. You can think of it this way: OpenAsset is a visual tool that brings efficiency to marketing workflows, whereas Unanet CRM is a CRM focused on managing the data around projects and employees and those relationships.
Get Started with OpenAsset
For more information on how to take the next step with OpenAsset, check out our Most Common Questions about OpenAsset blog. And if you’re ready to receive a custom demo for your team’s unique use cases, reach out to our digital asset experts to book a demo.
