Platinum sponsors
Extension Key: dam
Language: en
Keywords: dam, digital, asset, management
Copyright 2000-2008, The DAM development team, <typo3-project-dam@lists.netfielders.de>
The DAM Team: Michiel Roos, Ben van 't Ende, Volker Graubaum, Jigal van Hemert, Georg Kuehnberger, Benjamin Mack, Dan Osipov, Ingo Renner, Uschi Renziehausen, Stanislas Rolland, Michael Stucki
This document is published under the Open Content License
available from http://www.opencontent.org/opl.shtml
The content of this document is related to TYPO3
- a GNU/GPL CMS/Framework available from www.typo3.org
A Digital Asset Management System (DAM) system is a tool to handle digital content like images, text files and virtually any other data format. These media files can be attributed with meta information. Such information can describe the content (description, keywords, location), provide technical data (image size) or copyright information for example. All these information can be used to handle, find and categorize the media files.
Two different forces drive the necessity for advanced management of such assets:
Large number: Even smaller sites tend to produce large numbers of assets, often stored in random folders and with incoherent naming, making the organization and overview increasingly hard over time. Digital asset management adds a meta-layer of information to every file in a semi-automatic indexing process, allowing users to search for attributes in a database associated with the files.
Automated retrieval: Assets as building blocks for content often are used to produce automated output, like image galleries and download areas. Digital asset management serves these output functions by providing an interface for retrieving assets filtered by any combination of meta data criteria.
The Digital Asset Management for TYPO3 was developed to address the growing demand for professional asset management in TYPO3 applications and implementations. Even though the first final version is still to come, previous versions have been used in various production settings.
The DAM is similar to the File module integrated into the TYPO3 backend as a main module. It will replace the File module when finished, which means all file handling like copying, deletion and renaming of files is provided by the DAM. Nevertheless the DAM doesn't use a new storage type for files. The files are stored into the file system as before.
This document is a work in progress.
The most up to date version of this documentation can be found at:
http://forge.typo3.org/wiki/extension-dam/Documentation
