Chances are, your enterprise has at least tens of thousands of digital assets – videos, photographs, graphics, and so on. And it might not surprise you that many companies use shared drives to manage all these files.
Shared drives, or file hosting services, are very common – and millions of people use them both for business and personal reasons. In the words of Google Support, shared drives are “shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device.”
Enterprises often use these shared drives – solutions like Dropbox or Google Drive – because of their simplicity. And, they tend to have very inexpensive or free options.
It doesn’t take much to get one of these drives set up as a place to store all of a company’s files – images, videos, audio files, manuals, tutorials, eBooks, and so on.
How does a shared drive work?
One of the most common shared drives in the world is Google Workspace, so we will use this as an example.
Google Workspace includes an integrated set of applications for users to create and store text documents, spreadsheets, slides (similar to PowerPoint slides), photos, sheets (like Excel spreadsheets), and more.
Since these drives are all cloud-based, you can access the assets that you create within them from any device or location. All you need is your associated login.
Dropbox is another similar system.
Companies both big and small use shared drives like those of Google and Dropbox because these solutions allow multiple users to simultaneously log into the same system – the same document or project for example – and make real-time edits at the same time.
In this way, theoretically, they shorten project timelines and make teams more efficient in completing work that requires multiple team members.
There’s no doubt:
Shared drives provide a guaranteed place for asset storage and access, at the same time as providing a mechanism for collaboration.
Convenient, right?
In some cases, yes. However, when companies rely on shared drives, they often rely on manual processes in order to effectively organize assets and store files.
Unfortunately, many actions beyond basic tasks are either complicated or impossible with shared drives.
The 6 main issues with relying on shared drives
Oftentimes, enterprise decision-makers assume that a shared drive is equivalent to a digital asset management platform. However, you cannot use a file sharing system to truly manage files and thus the lifecycle of content. In other words, there’s no substitute a true, modern DAM.
Here are six reasons why enterprise marketers often regret choosing a shared drive as an alternative to a DAM for storing and working with their files.
Search capability limits
With a shared drive, there aren’t sophisticated ways to search for specific documents, images, and other assets. To find the exact file you need, you absolutely have to know very specific keywords. And still, you’ll likely have to do some sifting.
With such time-consuming searches (and without a guarantee that people will find what they need), people are not efficient, are more likely to miss deadlines, and miss out on opportunities to maximize the quality of their content.
On the other hand, a digital asset management system is built on metadata. As a result, searching for a digital asset takes seconds.
With filters and keyword searches, users get exactly what they need so they can instantly create, edit, distribute, and overall manage their content accurately and in a timely manner.
With metadata at the foundation of DAM platforms, many of these platforms also have AI tagging enabled. In other words, the system can automatically scan an asset like an image and assign it with basic keywords as the asset is loaded into the DAM.
This way, there are certain keywords that users don’t manually have to add to images themselves.
This is especially timesaving, and thus, efficiency-driving for organizations with an uncountably large amount of assets – removing what can equate to hours of metadata tagging.
Scalability
There are serious limits to how many files you can store within shared drives.
For example, according to Stanford University IT, a Google shared drive – one of the top ten shared drives on the market “can contain a maximum of 250,000 files and folders, and a single shared drive can nest up to 20 subfolders.” Also in Stanford University IT’s words, “users can have difficulty organizing and navigating content.”
Shared drives also tend to have file size limits – so it’s not a given that you will be able to upload certain types of files like Augmented and Virtual Reality projects into the system. Often, if you need extra storage, you have to pay for more gigabytes.
If you need to establish a hierarchy of a growing number of all sizes of files and folders, your best bet is to go with Digital Asset Management.
A DAM scales with your enterprise as you add thousands more assets to your system, and there is never a need for “extra” storage.
For example, KeyShot customers store millions of assets in their DAM platform without compromising the speed of the system. With Microsoft BLOB storage and powerful processing capabilities, a DAM allows you to store and work with massive amounts of data with ease.
File conversion and [lack of] automation
With a shared drive, converting files is all manual. If you want to convert a Word document, for example, into a PDF file, it requires saving the original file to a virtual location and then saving it as a PDF – or whatever format type you need.
Resizing files is also manual within a shared drive. So, in essence, converting one file into the exact versions you need of it – to use on different channels, for example – can take hours.
This isn’t the case with a DAM – a system that is designed for building automated workflows.
When you upload a digital asset into a DAM platform, it automatically stores the original file in multiple file formats and sizes. This means you instantly have the correct version of a file for every medium.
File preservation and versioning
One of the most frustrating things with Google Drive, Dropbox and shared files is accidentally deleting a file. And it’s so easy to do.
Then, unfortunately, within shared drives, if you don’t realize you’ve trashed the file within a certain time period, it is gone forever.
Also, within a shared drive, there is no easy or automatic way to create new versions of documents, images, etc., while also keeping the original version. There are no automated processes for version control.
A DAM platform will automatically preserve the original version of every file uploaded into it. Every time you alter an asset or create a new version of a file, an additional, clearly tagged new version is created and stored into the platform.
Not only is this important for content creation and accurate distribution, but it is critical for compliance. After all, if you can’t clearly determine the correct version of a file you need to publish or otherwise distribute, you put your company at risk.
For the best possible version control, you need a DAM system that ensures that you will never delete or retouch original files.
A lack of full-on integration with other MarTech solutions
The optimal way to manage your digital assets and marketing content is to have an ecosystem of marketing technology solutions (aka, a MarTech stack).
And, ideally, they will all integrate with one another and operate as though they are one seamless content marketing machine (i.e. integrates with Sitecore, Optimizely and Adobe Creative Cloud).
For example, for the ultimate time-saving efficiency, the system you use to store your files will connect with your other digital content related solutions. With a fully integrated stack, you don’t have to manually transfer files between systems to create, edit, manage, and distribute them to different digital locations.
Your shared drive won’t seamlessly integrate with an enterprise-grade content management system (CMS) or a Product Information Management (PIM) system, which means you won’t be able to create workflows that have assets traveling from your asset repository to your website or to your eCommerce site. Everything will be manual.
With DAM, on the other hand, content management is a whole different story.
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A sophisticated platform will seamlessly integrate with:
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Content creation software
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Website management software
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eCommerce systems
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Social media platforms – like Hootsuite
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With a DAM, you can create a true ecosystem of marketing technology. A shared drive is more of an island.
No personalized experience for users
Finally, shared drives don’t have brand portals, which personalizes the experience of managing files and digital assets.
A brand portal is what a user sees when they log into a digital asset management solution, so that they only have the exact files that they need at their fingertips.
Ideal for brand management, it is a user interface that is custom designed for specific users, and in a very aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-absorb layout.
It’s like this:
Imagine your file storage system is a giant mansion, with digital assets packed in every room. A brand portal is the beautifully laid out foyer that clearly points you in the direction of the exact files you need to find so that you can navigate this building.
It is a sleek, effective starting point to ensure that you get your customized tour through the mansion off on the right foot.
Conclusion
It would be easy to think that a shared drive provides everything you need for storing and thus managing all the files that come together to create your marketing and other business material.
However, that’s simply not true.
Don’t get us wrong: Shared drives are effective resources for getting all your files in one place. But, if you’re looking for a solution that actually facilitates marketers as they create and move content through its entire lifecycle, then you need a DAM solution.
While a shared drive is a static system, a DAM is a versatile, interactive platform that not only stores your files, but allows you to execute an omnichannel marketing strategy with these files.
To learn more, contact us today.
