A DAM migration can be a daunting task for anyone who relies on digital asset management to do their job effectively. Whether you’re in a creative, marketing, sales, or other DAM-related role, migrating to a new system can feel like starting over. Instead, try to frame it as the start of a new chapter that builds upon the previously established foundation!
It’s like packing up your old apartment and moving into a new home. No matter if the last spot for your files was a simpler DAM system, Google Drive, Dropbox, hard drives, or a discombobulated mix of all the above, migrating to a new system with better capabilities and features should be exciting!
As bright as the promise of a new chapter in DAM may be, the migration process is thorough, tedious, and critical to successful implementation. Here at Stacks, we pride ourselves on making work enjoyable for you and creating solutions to the barriers you face as a professional working in DAM.
We’ve created this all-encompassing digital asset management migration guide for you to use as a tool and informative resource as you navigate the process. We hope you find it helpful and that it eases your concerns about migrating to a new system. If you’re still not confident with the aid of this guide, you can learn about our DAM consulting services and how we can serve as your trustworthy partner to achieve success every step of the way.
Continue reading to learn:
- What DAM migration is
- Why it’s important
- How to migrate to a new digital asset management system
- Why you should partner with an experienced consultant
What Is Digital Asset Management Migration?
Digital asset management migration is the process of moving digital assets and files, along with information like filenames and metadata, from one storage solution to a new DAM platform.
When migrating digital asset management systems, you have a chance to reset your entire process. From weeding out old, irrelevant files to restructuring metadata standards and taxonomy, a DAM migration is a breath of fresh air to organizations looking for efficiency and results.
Why Is DAM Migration Important?
DAM migration is important because it sets your organization up for success when moving from one storage solution to another.
Whether you’re using a solution like Google Drive or an existing DAM user upgrading platforms, the migration process impacts you in several ways. A DAM migration:
- Reduces clutter. In gathering all of your existing assets for migration, you can remove any outdated or irrelevant files (including duplicate versions of the same file) and clean your library.
- Optimizes searchability and accessibility. Never a better time to revisit metadata and taxonomy structures to ensure they’re optimized for users to find quickly than when migrating to a new platform!
- Establishes standards. One of the keys to preparing for migration is establishing standards like file naming conventions, folder structures, permissions hierarchies, and core DAM workflows. Standards make it easier for all teams to create, manage, store, access, and share digital assets without wasting time or brainpower.
- Depends on and strengthens collaboration. To create an efficient system and maximize your migration, you need key stakeholders from all teams impacted by DAM to work together. Collaboration is essential to success, including:
- Gathering one centralized asset library for an entire organization
- Planning and developing a roadmap to launch
- Establishing standards that impact all departments equally
- Executing the migration
- Testing and identifying issues/inefficiencies
- Creating training materials and onboarding users
- Produces results. Migrating to a new digital asset management system opens new doors for growth and scalability in content creation, marketing, sales, and overall business goals.
How To Migrate To A New Digital Asset Management System: A 7 Phase Approach
It’s intimidating to stare down a DAM migration project! You’re moving all of your organization’s valuable content, and its essential information like metadata and filenames, into uncharted waters. There’s a reason behind every migration and, though unfamiliar, your new system should improve efficiency, accessibility, or other business goals.
Choosing the right DAM platform won't solve all of your problems, but it will go a long way in making your eventual migration and implementation efforts successful. Because of the importance of this buying decision, we've developed a separate guide for that process (the Consumer's Guide to Choosing a DAM Platform), full of valuable tips for determining what kind of platform will work best for you.
Platform aside, successfully migrating digital asset management systems requires a sound, strategic process.
Here at Stacks, we break DAM migration into a seven-phase approach:
Phase # | Name of Phase | Description |
1 | Discovery |
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2 | Planning |
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3 | Preparation |
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4 | Execution |
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5 | Validation |
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6 | Launch |
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7 | Sustainability and Growth |
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In the sections below, we’ll expand upon each phase in greater detail and explain how they build off one another to get the most out of your DAM migration.
Discovery (Phase 1)
In the initial discovery phase, we cover steps to take before buying a new DAM platform to make sure the migration process is less of a headache for your team.
Questions To Consider in The Search Process
Before any migration can happen, searching for and evaluating other systems and platforms must occur. As you navigate the search for a new DAM platform, do your future self a favor and answer the following questions, ensuring a smoother DAM migration:
- Are there any integrations or links between your current platform and your new one?
- Do you need to add metadata, update file names, or reorganize assets before you migrate them?
- How large is the library you intend to migrate?
- What kind of help is available from the DAM vendor team or their partners?
Consultants like Stacks can help you manage a DAM request-for-quote (RFP), all while scoping the migration process for you in more detail. You can read more about these services on this page.
Collect, Audit, & Prioritize Digital Assets
This task requires collaborating with stakeholders from each team impacted by DAM. It can be helpful to complete this phase in tandem with migration planning, after defining key users and ensuring all bases are covered regarding existing assets.
Regardless of where in the DAM migration process, it’s mandatory to collect, audit, and prioritize the digital assets you’ll be migrating to the new platform.
Collect.
Gather all assets living in the various storage solutions across your organization (cloud storage, desktop, download folders, on-site server, hard drives, etc.). It’s best to bring all your assets into one central repository in order to assess what you have.
Audit.
Review each file or category and determine a course of action. An audit of existing assets allows you to cleanse your library of duplicate or irrelevant content.
We’ll discuss auditing in-depth (metadata, taxonomy, and more) later in the guide, but this high-level review eliminates any waste. Migrations are an opportunity to identify which content should be archived and removed from current operations, and which is being underutilized or forgotten.
Prioritize.
Due to the hustle and bustle of day-to-day marketing and creative operations, organizations often aren’t aware of the sheer volume of valuable content they have. They’re aware of the content most valuable to them. For that reason, you’ll want to break your migration into batches of assets sorted by organizational priority.
Within the team leading your migration, decide which assets or buckets of content are essential to daily operations company-wide. These common assets, referred to as “evergreen”, and other important files are the first batch to migrate.
High-priority items might include:
- Logos
- Customer testimonials and reviews
- Case studies
- Style guides and design templates
- Website assets (banner images, headshots, etc.)
- Top-performing general marketing materials
- Legal documents and copyright information
The next batch, by priority, could have assets your team uses once or twice a month. Then lower, until you reach archive materials and assets you don’t use but want to keep.
Planning (Phase 2)
Once the project is properly scoped, the plan can be developed, from the high-level, big-picture decisions to the in-the-weeds minutiae that often prove more important. In this phase, we outline what pieces of information should be included in your migration plan and best practices to make executing that plan easier.
The foremost thing to keep in mind at this stage is how the project will impact the day-to-day operations of your organization and thus the end-users of your existing DAM system.
Some of the more important components of DAM migration planning, and essential details to define in your plan, include:
- Timeline
- Technology
- Users
- Assets
Timeline
A timeline keeps your DAM migration on track, providing guide rails to follow and checkpoints to work towards. Start by establishing when you'd like to ideally launch the new system and work backwards through each step that you'll need to execute to ensure the pieces are in place for launch.
Your timeline documents a roadmap to go-live, but remains flexible for adjustments throughout the process. Digital asset migrations rarely go 100% according to the original plan, so you need to bake adaptability into yours.
Technology
There will be a time when your old and new systems will overlap. Plan carefully for this period to minimize confusion and ensure users continue to have access to assets.
As you create your project roadmap, keep both managers and employees in the loop and ensure they can easily raise issues and identify risks.
Users
When will you gain access to the new platform, and who should be trained first on how to use it? Think about the people you want to be executing the projects required to launch the platform to the rest of your organization, and make sure they are trained first.
From there, plan to onboard users based on their level of involvement in the DAM program, as the assets they need access to are added to the platform.
Assets
As referenced above, you'll want to align your schedule for uploading assets with your schedule for training and onboarding the users that need them. Take time to outline what kinds of metadata you want added to your assets before they are uploaded to the DAM platform (segues into the preparation phase).
Preparation (Phase 3)
Before moving into a new DAM platform, you’ll need to do some prep work to prevent overwhelming yourself and your team. The most important part of that preparation is establishing your DAM standards and answering the technical questions to ensure a smooth migration.
Establishing DAM Standards
Whether you’re moving from one DAM to another or dipping your feet in for the first time, defined standards create a clean, efficient system. We call it creating a Governance Plan.
As you prepare for migration, revisit or establish DAM standards, including:
- Metadata Taxonomy (including cleaning your metadata structure)
- File Naming Conventions
- Folder Structure
- Permissions Hierarchy (By folder, asset, and user group)
- Core DAM Workflows (Ingestion, Approval, Archiving, External Sharing)
Answering Technical Questions
With a plan in place and assets organized, you don’t want a technical mishap to derail your migration. Think about how your systems will work together, and if there are any loose ends you need to tie up before moving forward.
Be sure to address the following technical questions before entering the next phase (execution):
- What other systems will the DAM need to integrate with?
- Will assets be moved directly from one DAM system to the new DAM platform, or will they need to be stored in a separate repository as they are enriched and organized?
- Do integrations and scripts need to be developed to handle large-scale metadata enrichment or asset upload?
- Who will own the publication of assets to the DAM platform when they are ready?
- Who will quality control the freshly uploaded assets to ensure they meet the established standards?
Execution (Phase 4)
You’ve done all the work necessary to ensure that your file migration runs as smoothly as possible. Be sure to keep in mind that nothing ever goes fully to plan. Now all that’s left to do is to implement your project roadmap and DAM standards!
While proper scoping, planning, and prep help this process run efficiently, migrating assets can still be time-consuming. Especially when you’re adding new metadata that wasn’t there before. Consider who’ll be doing this work and if you and your team can execute it well and on time, given your other responsibilities.
Throughout the course of your migration, problems will arise, progress will be made, and questions will need to be answered.
Below are some things to consider throughout the execution phase of your DAM migration to ensure the outcome you desire can be achieved.
- How frequently will progress be reported? By whom and to whom? In what format?
- How will risks and issues be identified and escalated? Who is responsible for solving them?
- Who has time to oversee the migration and enrichment process?
- Do you have personnel to execute necessary migration tasks on a day-to-day basis?
Validation (Phase 5)
Moving all your assets into their new home isn’t the final step in the migration process. Validation ensures your assets end up where you can find them and use them the way you need to.
Double-check the metadata, organizational structure, integrations, and workflows— basically everything critical to your DAM program’s continued success.
Quality Control to Ensure Continued Success
With a project as large and comprehensive as a file migration, quality assurance is key to sustained success. There are a lot of moving parts and pieces of technology (not to mention humans) that need to communicate with each other. If not managed well, this can lead to things slipping through the cracks, which can damage end-user experience in the future.
Be diligent in quality controlling and auditing as many of your freshly-uploaded assets as possible once they're in your new system. Be sure to pressure test your newly-created standards, workflows, and processes, as well as each new piece of technology, to make sure it will stand the test of time.
Continually identify ways to clean up the newly built library to ensure you can start from a clean slate. When you build or rent a new home, the builder or owner will have you walk through the unit and make what's called a "punch list." This is essentially a list of things to be fixed or addressed before you fully close the deal. Punch lists are an important tool for your team as you close out the DAM migration process.
Launch (Phase 6)
During the migration, your attention was solely focused on executing it well. Now you can consider how your new DAM system, along with updated standards and workflows, can enable your organization to grow and excel by enhancing its content, creativity, branding, and marketing efforts.
Below are some ideas for how to begin making your new DAM platform a home.
- Execute clean-up projects identified by the quality control team
- Create training materials for each user group
- Roadmap short- and long-term DAM goals
- Plan expansion of the DAM program to include other assets and departments
Push The System Live in Waves
Once you’re assured that everything is working as it should be, it’s time to roll the new system out to your end-users. Don’t introduce it to everyone at once.
Determine waves of user groups based on impact, technical capability, need, or other factors. Start with a select group of power users who can learn the system quickly and then help you troubleshoot it and train the next level of users.
At this point, you can take a breath and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Next, it’s time to look to the future. What’s next for your DAM system? Where do you want it to be this time next year? How can it continue to provide a return on investment?
Sustainability and Growth (Phase 7)
Now that you have a fully-furnished DAM platform with the features and workflows you need to execute your day-to-day, you get to live in it, too!
After a successful DAM migration:
- End-users can find and use what they need in a matter of seconds,
- Your content creators can use and reference existing materials to improve their new designs more efficiently, and
- You can deliver that content to potential customers more quickly.
Below, our team lays out five steps to take post-migration to grow the program around it and continue to improve your digital asset management efforts:
- Onboard
- Integrate & Automate
- Clean & Archive
- Analyze
- Expand
1. Onboard
Obviously, you'll need to onboard certain DAM power users throughout the migration process to ensure the process runs smoothly. Likely, however, you'll have plenty of other users to begin onboarding in the weeks and months afterwards.
Adoption is the number one most important thing to build among users of the DAM program. To ensure users are bought in, plan precisely to have:
- Communications planned early and sent from the right stakeholder
- Training materials developed and sessions planned
- Troubleshooting techniques documented
- Help desk services set up
2. Integrate & Automate
As you roll out workflows and see how they run, you may notice places where processes slow down or hit roadblocks. These are often opportunities for integration and/or automation.
To develop these integrations, you'll first need to pay attention to your end-users' feedback. Once opportunities are identified, scope what kinds of integrations are available through your platform vendors and their partners, develop the right solution, and test that the updated processes work.
3. Clean & Archive
It's always best to try and get rid of out-of-date or off-brand content before you migrate assets into the new DAM platform. Sometimes this is difficult to do, however, and more content becomes obsolete every week, month, and year.
As this happens, ensure that you have a process in place to move these assets out of the current library and place them in their own archive. This will allow assets to remain searchable but will not clutter the current library.
4. Analyze
One way to ensure that your DAM program will slowly lose its efficiency and effectiveness is to ignore metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
On the other hand, building out KPIs, dashboards, and other metrics to regularly display the health of the DAM program allows your team to govern and manage the DAM program far more effectively. Doing this, you can more quickly identify issues and resolve them.
5. Expand
Often, DAM programs start small and grow over time. You may have only heard of DAM's application in the marketing or creative setting, but it impacts and can benefit sales, finance, HR, and plenty of other teams.
Due to this, the gradual expansion of the DAM program to other teams and departments is an important piece of every organization's DAM roadmap. Scope out how many users and assets will need to be added, how long it will take, and how it will impact your current workflows and standards.
Why You Should Partner With An Experienced Consultant for a DAM Migration
This guide serves as a useful resource for anyone considering or in the process of a DAM migration. It’s a lot to handle and can be intimidating. Know you’re not alone. At the very least, you should understand what DAM migration entails and why it’s important to make the move.
The seven-phase approach defined in this guide can walk you through the process, but there’s a lot to consider:
- You have to manage a DAM request-for-quote (RFP) and scope the migration process.
- You’ll need to develop organization standards, a metadata taxonomy that includes folder and file names as well as robust keyword and description standards, and a permissions hierarchy that ensures ease of use and security for your assets and end-users.
- While a DAM migration is an opportunity to get rid of things you don’t need (i.e., archive irrelevant files) and create new forms of organization (i.e., apply more robust metadata and structure), there are inherent risks. Assets can become disorganized, data can be misplaced or lost, and the platform may be configured incorrectly or run slowly.
- Change Management often gets neglected while managing and standing up something as large as a company's DAM - when that happens, adoption is drastically reduced.
That’s where Stacks steps in! We’re an experienced consultant and trusted partner in conquering your DAM migration. We've assisted and owned many migrations across DAM systems of all shapes and sizes.
If you need help handling any of the tasks above, minimizing the risk your organization faces throughout your migration, or simply want an authoritative source driving your DAM migration, contact Stacks! Our team is certified on a range of platforms and leadership techniques to ensure your team finds the DAM success you’re working towards.
