The job of managing a large and growing store of marketing images led camping and outdoor apparel firm Kathmandu towards a SharePoint solution using Equilibrium’s MediaRich platform.

Getting kitted out for a hiking or camping adventure is no longer a matter of just throwing on a duffel coat and slipping into a pair of  disposal store army boots. Specialist suppliers such as Kathmandu have carved a formidable presence in bringing the type of  clothing and equipment used for travel and adventure up to date with high tech new quick-drying materials 

From its first store which opened in Hardware Lane in central Melbourne in 1987, Kathmandu quickly followed with its first New Zealand store in Christchurch in 1991. It now has over a hundred stores, distribution centres and offices spread throughout Australia, New Zealand and the UK, with around 200 backoffice staff. The range of clothing and accessories available from Kathmandu is now vast, and for each year’s  new range the marketing team travel globally to photograph the gear being modelled in the world’s more exotic outdoor locations. By 2011 this was presenting Kathmandu CIO Grant Taylor with a problem.

“We have compiled a lot of imagery and video and were beginning to wonder how to store it so that it would be easier to find it again when we need it.”

Taylor identified the need to deploy a dedicated digital asset management (DAM) system with a disciplined approach to applying specific metadata to stored images.

As Kathmandu was using windows network folders for storage of images and documents, the DAM platform would also represent the company’s first step into looking at a more structured content management environment.

Taylor explored a number of dedicated DAM platforms, however after engaging with NZ SharePoint solutions provider Intergen began to look at moving ahead with a solution that integrated with SharePoint.

Early in 2012 Intergen approached DataBasics, Australian distributor of Equilibrium’s MediaRich ECM for SharePoint, with the details of the project they were engaged with for Kathmandu. This lead to the creation of an in-house trial system being created in the offices of Intergen in Christchurch which was presented to Kathmandu. 

“The immediate need was in the marketing department for digital asset management but Kathmandu has a business vision to move towards having document management as well,” said, Julian Brown, Senior Technical Consultant at Intergen.

“So being tied to the Microsoft stack SharePoint made sense for that as they already had the liceses under their enterprise agreement.”

Intergen and DataBasics technical teams worked together to refine the details of the solution that best fitted the needs of Kathmandu, and present a full proof of concept in a working environment after seven weeks of development and analysis. The solution went live at the end of August 2012. Kathmandu acquired the MediaRich for Sharepoint SMB license with additions for extranet access plus staging and development environments. 

“We worked closely with the Kathmandu marketing team to learn how images and data were being searched and accessed. When we presented the proof of concept it was a great success, they were quite impressed with the functionality we were able to deliver,” said Brown

Over 500GB of marketing images and video were transferred from file storage to MediaRich ECM for SharePoint in a data centre in Christchurch. Growth is expected to be in the order of 200-300GB per annum.

By structuring the media content to live in individual site collections that do not exceed 300GB each,  Intergen  was  able to keep the SQL database clean and agile and remove the need to go to external BLOB storage.

“Its meant a bit of extra work for marketing as they can’t search on images unless they’ve been tagged and imported into the DAM. But the ease of searching just cannot be compared. Previously they would have all the images from a particula photo shoot in the USA arranged in a single folder and they would have had to trawl through hundreds of images to find the one they wanted,” said Taylor.

“During the bulk uploading to MediaRich we could apply core metadata across common categories, to  apply a tag across 1000 images really fast. Once we had established the MediaRich DAM for marketing photos and videos we began to think about what else we could use it for, so we are now also storing product images.”

Media agencies that Kathmandu works with require different resolution copies of these images and MediaRich provides them with the ability to access that image in any size they want.

“Its been very much the tip of the iceberg as a first phase for us. As we move down a Microsoft path with other systems product information will be able to integrate quite natively within our digital asset management (DAM) system,” said Taylor.

Images on the Kathmandu website presently live in a Magento Web CMS although this may change going forward.