Interview

SKILLS OF DAM PROFESSIONALS

MM: Are there any other particular technologies or other kinds of complementary skills that a DAMster should have?

JK: I think a DAMster should have as much knowledge about Adobe’s Creative Suite as they can obtain. I know that’s a very broad statement. There’s so much to extract from the Creative Suite.

But what I’ve seen over the past several years, I think a DAMster could really benefit from learning as much as they could about Adobe’s Creative Suite and Adobe’s future direction when analyzing the Creative Suite.

ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE AS A CAREER

MM: Adobe’s Creative Suite has evolved beyond just a set of tools and technologies. The Creative Suite has become a career platform—a toolset for innovating new workflows and processes, as well as career and business opportunities.

JK: I couldn’t agree more. I think from what I’ve seen, that trend will only continue.

MM: Would you speak to becoming more skilled in the particulars, not just of the Creative Suite, but how to engage and thrive in the whole ecosystem of tools, technologies, and plugins that fit into that?

JK: Yes. Think about how those tools could possibly overlap in the future. I’ll give you an example.

In Flash at one point, you might need to know how to do some coding and scripting and whatnot. I envision Adobe pushing more of that work back to the designer. When the designer creates, the code will somehow be generated in the background. And maybe that piece as a whole gets passed off to a developer, to a client, to a database, et cetera, et cetera.

Adobe is going to make it easier and easier for creative types to do more exciting, innovative work as we progress out.

CREATIVE WORKBENCH

MM: We’ve seen in the new Creative Suite 4 that Adobe added a whole bunch of tools for Web, print, and multimedia. In one respect, the creative professional no longer works in the isolated ghetto of just a print or an online group. Rather, the creative professional has emerged as a multimedia, multimodal communications specialist.

JK: Yes. And the one thing they’re missing is a DAM to organize all of that for you. They don’t do workflow, per se. Combining the two can really help your organization tremendously.

FUTURE PROOF

MM: Fabulous. Would you have any final summarizing statements for DAM and related systems at Newsday?

JK: Yes. I would say in everyone’s busy work career, sometimes we get so caught up in the day to day that we don’t have time to think strategically about the future. Think strategically about a DAM and how it can benefit your organization, and you won’t be sorry.

MM: Okay! James, I want to thank you very much for the time that you’ve spent with us. Great success in terms of continuing to drive process innovation into Newsday.

JK: Thank you, Michael. It was my pleasure.

Hands-on skills

MM: Perhaps you can speak to some of the more human and/or professional dimensions of a DAM practitioner? You led off today talking about your 19-year career and working your way from the bottom up. Now you have 150 or so people reporting to you.

If you were advising or coaching somebody that was 28 or 32 years old today, and who asked you, “Hmm—what’s this DAM thing?” And, “What are the career upsides for that?” What do you envision as necessary skills that someone should possess in a DAM-related environment?

Also, what other kinds of jobs should an innovation leader such as yourself think about having under his or her belt that would prepare him or her for the current and anticipated future of advertising and the publishing business?

JK: To the first point, I’d say to spend time on workflow. It generally will always come back to help you. Listen carefully to your users and get multiple opinions.

MM: By that, James, do you mean getting an academic or a structured education / orientation around definition and modeling of workflows?

JK: I was thinking more of a hands-on approach and using flowcharts to map things out—to clearly understand every step of the workflow. That’s what I was thinking.

Secondly, if you want to get into DAMs—and I see them just growing and growing and becoming more and more prevalent—think about the DAM as more than just what you need it for. Try to think about how it may touch every department in your organization and how you can help those departments.

I’ve mentioned several times today that all of the creative and production folks are on it. And the advertising folks. I didn’t mention that the marketing team at Newsday—as soon as they heard about Cumulus—wanted in. So we said, “Sure. Why not?”

When the Pennysaver or Star Community Publishing wanted in, we said, “Sure. Why not?”

So think about more than just your local department. That can go a long way in helping the company and your career.

MM: So daily production workflow would then include pulling many large files across the network. How did you accommodate that? Do you have a separate network over which you pull these files? Or does it take place on your basic corporate network?

JK: It’s the basic corporate network. And I’m glad you asked that question, because I do want to share something with the readers.

The basic core network is 100mb to the desktop. It’s nothing super-super sophisticated.

I was fortunate enough to get some Intel Macs last year, and we did notice that the ingestion of the assets and the calling of the assets out of the database did seem to perform better on the Intel Macs as opposed to maybe some of the older G5s or whatnot.

This is because of the engineering effort made by Canto in Berlin. The Cumulus client is designed to handle much of the workflow processing itself, only going to the server to write metadata or draw out info and assets when required. So the more powerful the workstation, the better the performance.

The users are very picky in many cases, and performance has never been an issue. We do embed all the high-res artwork in the InDesign documents that we store in the database. But when the users call them out, I haven’t heard any complaints about things taking too long.

So clearly, the architecture of the system must be doing something right because we don’t have complaints on that end. And the searches too, Michael—finding the assets.

MM: Yes. That makes sense. You’re just hitting metadata and thumbnails at that point. Right?

JK: Yes.

File Delivery System

MM: Let’s step outside the firewall of your advertisers and field organization. Do you use any kind of special bandwidth optimization or asset-delivery systems? Low-end systems might entail services YouSendIt and at the high-end, services from Radiance or Aspera, or other kinds of bandwidth optimization systems.

JK: No. We have not.

MM: Is that something that you anticipate being an issue? Or does it seem that everyone’s fine with their basic HTTP connections and FTP servers?

JK: I think it’s a topic that will need to be explored, especially as the system grows. But as of right now, Michael, it doesn’t seem to be an issue.

MM: Would you speak to your IT infrastructure? How has it grown since the inception of your Cumulus DAM, in terms of your network topology, bandwidth requirements, storage, servers, and stuff like that?

JK: That’s an interesting story. The Canto Cumulus solution was originally purchased as a small workgroup solution for the small group of artists.

MM: As many are!

JK: It’s a wonderful solution. I’m sure it works fine.

Strategically, it didn’t take long for us to see that it could be much more than that. It could not only support all of our internal folks—advertising included. We wanted to take it outside and have the folks tap in with the clients, out on the road, and keep the feet on the street.

When you go from a small workgroup solution, of course, to a pretty big enterprise version solution, when you start talking about hundreds of users on the system, we needed a good partner to support us. Then of course the IT structure came in to play.

We started, Michael, with one Windows server that was running both the Canto Cumulus solution and its Web services on the same exact box.

MM: This was a 4-wide Dell or Compaq type box?

JK: Yes. Exactly. It’s going to the point now where the whole solution is being ported to Linux. Full disaster recovery.

MM: That would be like a RedHat Linux?

JK: That’s correct. And a separate Web server.

MM: And you’re running on probably the same kind of Intel box? Or are you moving?

JK: Yes. I believe it’s that same type of Intel box. It’s going to be high availability and recoverable, et cetera, et cetera.

I guess the plans for the future could even be porting it to Solaris. The IT folks here are certainly comfortable with all of the solutions between Windows, Linux, and Solaris. But they felt that the best solution for now was to go with Linux. They want the user to have the best experience.

Another thing I’ve learned many years ago, Michael—sometimes with the users, the advertising folks, et cetera. You have one shot to grab their attention and to get their buy in. IT plays a role in having the system perform well and help you with that. Certainly your support vendor plays a huge role in that, as well.

MM: So right now, you have 200 users and a quarter million digital assets on one 4-wide Dell server or Compaq server?

JK: Correct.

MM: Let’s get your take on three basic philosophies for workflow. First, we have the top-down, complex, and expensive policy-managed routing systems that can model and automate for complex enterprise-wide workflows. Second, you might have a prebaked workflow system that says, “Here is a procedure.” It’s a matter of turning on and off switches, configuring a prebaked workflow system. You see a lot of those in traditional DAM systems, where basically I’ll call it “workflow light.”

The third workflow philosophy, that we find in Cumulus, says, “We’re going to work bottom up with individual users and say, ‘What does this particular user need in terms of access, metadata and automated activities?” This might entail installing embedded Java plugins (EJaPs) to the end-user client or server-side equivalents of embedded server plugins (ESPs).

This third workflow philosophy enables you to optimize the productivity at the level of activities and tasks for individual users from the server’s entire classes of users or the whole operation.

Would you amend or expand upon any of that?

JK: The only other thing I would amend on that is certainly, I always like to keep the IT professionals in the loop, as well. They weigh in on certain items that will help and protect our organization, as well on the way things should be engineered and how best to do it—not only for the users, but also for the organization.

But yes, you hit it very well, Michael. Very accurately.

MM: If I were to summarize; one, you had a technology that integrated seamlessly with Mac and PC users.

Two, Cumulus accommodated all the file types and media formats that you use and has plugins and a developer community to address new or specialized file types.

Three, you and your consultant, Vince, got involved up front with the creative and production staffs, getting them to participate in creating customized look and feel dashboards that reflected the elegance and the efficiencies that they’ve come to appreciate and demand from tools like the Adobe Suite and the Mac platform.

Four, over time you began to add new automated tasks, services, and capabilities, using scripting and the functions of the operating system—as well as plugins to the end-user client or DAM server. Basically, you evolved into a pretty complex and powerful workflow that continues to evolve one small innovation at a time. Now, you have a pretty sophisticated ecosystem and a platform that supports very complex multidimensional workflows.

JK: Yes. I think you covered all the points. There’s no need for the organization to try to do this thing and try to customize it and script it right out of the box. You can start small and evolve a little bit each month—over a year’s time, it really adds up. And we don’t shock the user community with big changes. We’re closing in on a quarter million assets—and we started in July of 2007.

MM: How many users and assets do you have now?

JK: We have probably over 200 users, a quarter million assets, and I’d say we average 100 assets per day. But we can certainly put 600 or 700 in a day on a busy day. We could hit 1,000 new cataloged assets on a very, very busy week, between all the different departments—especially over the Christmas holidays. We support videos and Flash and PDFs and Photoshop files and InDesign files. Every file type that Cumulus supports. My groups are under strict instructions, “If you touch it, it goes into Cumulus.”

MM: This calls attention to another core concept of creative support DAMs: optimization for creative workflows and work-in-process files—as opposed to repository and distribution DAMs optimized for central management and access-control functions.

In particular, DAMs that work well in creative and work-in-process workflows tend to have a pretty well-behaved Mac and PC native client by which to really do very fast, fluid drag and drop. Things like Apple scripting or other forms of scripting, so as to automate a lot of the oft-repeated activities and tasks associated with opening a file, resizing it and so on.

Could you take us through some of the finer points from a production/technology or workflow perspective—some of the finer points of the Canto Cumulus DAM solution?

JK: When you receive the Canto DAM, in the beginning it’s very overwhelming when you start to think about workflow and how you want to lay things out. But I learned a long time ago to get the creative folks involved from the beginning—to allow their input.

They can be a very demanding, intelligent group. They want the best. I feel partnering with Vince DiPaola and Moksa, we put some serious demands on the system. We built a workflow that they not only accepted, but they like much more than anything they’ve had in the past.

Part of that is because the Canto solution is a very visual solution. The Cumulus software works very well on the Macintosh. The collaboration we did with Vince DiPaolo—Vince comes from that background, and that helped a great deal.

We use the KISS method, Michael—Keep It Simple Stupid—but to create a sophisticated workflow.

So what do I mean by that? The artists populate a database themselves. They are responsible for entering the metadata. The artists know that the metadata they enter—in certain cases—is critical to the database and to all of their colleagues searching for that asset one week or five years from now.

Vince helped us come up with a solution to get that metadata associated with the assets very quickly. In essence, you drop an asset into a certain category. The metadata window pops up and you answer a few simple questions. That asset—again—is in the database forever. We don’t plan to purge it at all.

From there, we looked at all the different file formats that we had—whether video or Flash or InDesign. All the image types we have, Michael. Everything behaved fairly nicely. Then we had the curious challenge of, “How do we get all of the InDesign print documents and the Flash files and the videos to the sales assistants without overwhelming them with file types that they don’t need?” That’s where Moksa came in and we did custom coding and some advanced workflow automation.

We actually have a flag that the artists can change on a print document. It will take that document, and in the background, create a PDF and send it to the Web catalog for the sales associates.

PDF is a word that they understand and that they can show to a client when they have their laptop out in the field.

The solution I have found, with the right partner on the support side, can be a very scalable. It’s a system that you can mold and make what you want to make it.

When we started, I thought maybe it would just be a DAM. Now it’s turned into an actual workflow solution for us, as well. The artists are much, much happier with Canto and Cumulus than with anything we’ve had previously. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that they were involved, and that the Canto solution is a very visual solution.

On the 19^th of this month, Star Advertising will begin the process of migrating their current solution to Cumulus. This will entail a great deal of custom coding and XML migration from the content server.

MM: It seems to me that having a gallery of multimedia assets in front of a creative person stimulates all kinds of ideation—”what ifs” and “how abouts”—that almost train or install by example the need to create in a multimedia and multimodal communications and engagement context.

JK: The creative artists, in a way, you could say they had some of these galleries in the past—when you talk about stock art and about these various websites for purchased content. But now they have a whole new thing to look at.

They can look at the messages created by their colleagues by using Adobe Flash, and the points that are driven home, and the way those messages are composed. They can collaborate and be inspired much more easily than in the past, without DAM.

In the past, I guess you’d have had to walk over to that person’s computer and strike up a conversation to see what they were working on. Now it’s in front of their fingertips. They’re literally in the DAM all day long, putting their work there or retrieving it.

I think it is inspiration. They do view each others’ work much more often now.

MM: I’m sure that you’ve seen that in the process of thinking through, “How do we repurpose things,” many of those ideas or notions filter back into the actual creative process so you create multipurposed assets from the get-go, as opposed to trying to shoehorn a print asset into a Web space.

JK: Outstanding point. I believe that the messages and the way you grab people’s attention on the Web could be very different from print. I have to confess that I don’t come from a creative background—I come more from a production background.

But what the artists are telling me is that just the ability to take those elements from InDesign and port them into Flash…

But you’re right. The main point you were making, Michael—I agree with this. At the point of creativity and as they’re conceiving these ideas, they’re thinking about that at that time. At least this is our goal–that they think about that, at that time.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that many places have walls between the print folks and the interactive folks. We broke down those walls several years ago, and I made a bet on the future of DAMs and on the Adobe Creative Suite.

I told the company, “Let’s take those walls down,” because the artists will be able to repurpose their content for the Web. It’s all coming together now. This is the way. You’re exactly right. The artists are thinking about this at the time of creation.

MM: My wife has a business in which she coaches solo practitioners and owners of small professional and business services. Specifically, she has really mastered the art of how to market yourself as a provider of personal or business services—from real estate brokers to life coaches to massage therapists. Her work makes it clear that many business people become paralyzed in terms of, “How do I really create engaging multimedia content that expresses my vision, values, what I offer that stands unique and valued?” This just goes to the fact that creating engaging multimedia content constitutes hard work and few have mastered it.

James, the mission for your creative service and production shop means that you think about how to improve the creativity of your group’s work in print,which is the core of your business, as well as the online and broadcast portions. Would you take us through some of the changes that you’ve encountered in the creative process, its tooling and, perhaps, the workflows of how to manage the multimedia dimension of most creative and production?

JK: Sure. Well, let’s take a step back 3.5 years ago. A creative services artist would do a special section for—let’s say—breast cancer awareness or some such item. It would be done in print, in a vacuum. It would be stored and backed up on CDs and put in a cabinet.

So the next year when someone was looking for it, you’d have to sort through all the CDs, think about who did it, and maybe you could find it in an hour because there were another 200 CDs in there, and they weren’t labeled properly, et cetera.

Fast-forward 3.5 years. Boy, a lot has happened!

Now when you’re doing that breast cancer awareness section in Adobe InDesign, I think we’re just starting to create this mindset where, as you’re doing the section for print, you’re thinking about, “How can I bring that section to life on the Web?”

“The components and the elements that I’m using in print—what else can I do online that can’t be expressed in print?”

For example—maybe there are some statistics on breast cancer awareness that tie back to a database. Maybe we incorporate videos in the interactive piece. So we’re using tools like Adobe InDesign and the Creative Suite to help us do that.

Up until a few months ago, you’d have to do that section in InDesign, and you pretty much had to think out of the box and start all over again in Flash. Now Adobe InDesign allows you to export the InDesign document to Flash, and take your work and make it come to life on the Web. We’re extremely excited about that.

The digital part of this is you’re working and creating, using these wonderful tools, and on the DAM side, it can go into a DAM like Cumulus where not only can the artist and their colleagues see it, and if the managing editor wants to see this and look at it from her desktop—to make suggestions? It’s all right there.

That’s an area where I told you it would take two hours to find a CD or a DVD from a couple of years ago. Now if you type in metadata that has “breast cancer awareness,” you’ll find the needle in the haystack in seconds, literally.

These are some of the things that we’re thinking about with taking that print content and repurposing it for Newsday.com.