The Digital Asset Management Symposium brings lessons on "having a centralized content management repository" for creating new products.The Sept. 11 attacks compelled at least one publisher to respond rapidly by recruiting its digital asset management system to repurpose content for the homeland security niche.
Speaking to attendees at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium (PDF file) in New York on Tuesday, Christian Mairhofer, director of content architecture at The McGraw-Hill Cos., described how his company swiftly pulled content from several existing properties to create McGrawHill-HomelandSecurity.com while the niche was still in its earliest stages.
Content drawn from Business Week, Aviation Week and the company's construction magazines was recalled to service with unusual speed because of the company's DAM (digital asset management) system.
The key is "having a centralized content management repository" that all business units can draw upon to create new products that may be appropriate to their niche, Mairhofer said.
Click here for more on the challenges of digital asset management.
Since a new property can be prototyped in just a few weeks now, rather than the months it used to take, a publisher can test new niche markets inexpensively, creating the opportunity to expand into new markets with a minimum of risk.
"Once you have [content] in the repository, it's flexible enough through XML to really do whatever you want with it," Mairhofer said. Another DAM-enabled initiative was the creation of a private portal for The Boeing Co., which drew upon content from Business Week and Aviation Week.
Read the full story on Publish.com: Asset Management Helps Publishers Find Their Niche
