Australian Wool Innovation (AWI) is taming the task of delivering content in multiple digital formats to any destination with a Cumulus digital asset management (DAM) platform.

AWI implemented centralised content management for its wool.com website using OpenText “RedDot” CMS in 2008, after integrating 18 websites into one website, and has since been migrating asset management from shared drives to a Cumulus DAM acquired from Australia’s Databasics.

The Cumulus DAM is currently used by around 70 staff on AWI’s internal network and another 10 located externally.

The current system includes:  Cumulus Workgroup Server;  OpenText Bridge and  Cumulus Web Publisher Pro. Of particular importance to AWI is the bridge between Cumulus DAM and the Open Text CMS. This connects the user to the DAM library to choose appropriate media for the CMS.

The marketing team at AWI create material for a range of different websites, print campaigns and a new YouTube video channel launched in 2010 at www.youtube.com/WoolmarkOnline. 

Web services Manager Elly Chang has championed the usage and expansion of Cumulus in co-ordination with the rest of the AWI marketing team and IT staff.

“We had a massive amount of material sitting on shared drives which we are slowly migrating to Cumulus,” said Chang.

“Copyright is a big issue as we need to be able to manage the correct accreditation for images that are displayed on our public-facing websites and publications.”

The OpenText CMS serves up content for wool.com and a new consumer-focused site Merino.com, managed by a small marketing team in Sydney.

“We have been able to implement a strict workflow for wool.com to ensure that copyright and credits are correctly managed. All images must be sourced from Cumulus and every page must go through a workflow for approval in OpenText,” said Chang.

Adding the metadata to all the historical images as they are ingested from the shared drive into the DAM is a huge job being tackled in stages by dedicated part-time staff.

As well as formatting specifications, the metadata fields include information on the category, source and expiry date for copyright.

The task is not so hard going forward as all of AWI’s contracts with photographers and video production companies now specify that the necessary metadata must be supplied with the image or video. This is also the case for material acquired from photo and video libraries, and then the metadata can be automatically ingested.

AWI is also planning to migrate the Web Publisher Pro web interface to the current Cumulus Sites interface later date year.