1. Managing Assets with Oracle Content Management
  2. Introduction
  3. Set Up a Digital Asset Management Environment

3 Set Up a Digital Asset Management Environment

Oracle Content Management is a next-generation content hub for managing any type of digital asset, from images and videos to documents, structured text, and new formats like content for 3D and augmented reality applications.

This section provides guidance on the key activities needed to provision and configure Oracle Content Management as a digital asset management (DAM) hub. The reference implementation plan is divided into two-week sprints. Both the duration and number of sprints may vary based on your specific requirements.

Stage 1 – Discovery and Requirements Definition

The first phase is focused on defining the details to be implemented in subsequent phases. By the end of this phase, you should have a solid set of requirements for the initial go-live, including a content model, a migration plan and security roles and responsibilities.

Define Your Requirements

Oracle Content Management offers a sample application for configuring a generic DAM deployment. However, for a real-world project, you'll need to customize your Oracle Content Management setup to better align with your business requirements.

If you are migrating from an existing solution, you may have already defined the sort of metadata, categories, and integrations that you expect from Oracle Content Management. However, even in this case, it’s very likely that you will want to modify some of this configuration as you move to our solution.

The number of discovery sessions will depend on how much customization is required and how many different teams of users are involved. It’s a good idea to try to confirm most of the key requirements early, especially with respect to the types of assets and metadata that need to be managed in the DAM system.

Some of the requirements that need to be addressed are:

  • Asset Types—Oracle Content Management comes with a few seeded asset types (Image, Video, File). Typically, you'll extend these to create your own asset types. For example, you might create a “Product Image” type with metadata related to one or more products. You can create any number of asset types in Oracle Content Management, but typically, customers can manage most of their digital assets with six to eight asset types.

    When defining the metadata fields for each type, you should get details on the format of each field, whether the field is required, and the expectations on how users will fill out the field. For example, for a field referencing a product SKU in an external catalog, it may be necessary to perform a dynamic lookup against the catalog.

  • Taxonomies—Oracle Content Management allows you to categorize assets with any number of taxonomies and categories. These categories could represent lines of business, teams, campaigns, audience segments, or anything else. Typically, you'll have at least one taxonomy in a repository to help organize content. You can create new taxonomies and modify the structure of a taxonomy at any time, but it's useful to have a minimum set of categories for organizing migrated content and to get users into the habit of categorizing uploaded content.
  • Translation Rules—Oracle Content Management allows you to translate digital assets into multiple languages. Often, this is limited to translating the metadata (for example, image caption) for an asset. However, it’s also possible to manage different versions of assets by language. This would be more typical when managing videos or image banners with embedded text. It’s important to understand what languages and translation patterns, if any, need to be supported.
  • Publishing Channels—Oracle Content Management is designed to allow users to push content directly to one or more channels. Typically, you'll have a channel for your brand portal (possibly multiple channels if you have multiple brand portals), a channel for your marketing automation tools (for example, Eloqua, Responsys), a channel for social publishing, and one or more channels for your websites and mobile applications.

    For each channel, you'll need to understand the expectations around how content is going to be used by that channel. For example, Oracle Content Management can be integrated with Eloqua and Responsys to allow marketers to search and select images from the repository for use in landing pages and emails. You can add additional channels at any time as needed.

  • Approval Workflows—Oracle Content Management comes with a basic approval workflow where a single group of users is responsible for approving all content in a repository. Oracle Integration Processes can be integrated when more complex approvals and email notifications are needed. Processes includes three predefined workflows (1-step, 2-step, and 3-step). You should validate these workflows to understand if they're sufficient for your purposes or if additional workflows are needed. New workflows can be created and existing workflows modified at any time.
  • Access Control Rules—Oracle Content Management allows administrators to quickly define who can access and modify content in a repository. It’s also possible to define more fine-grained roles on a repository, limiting access to only certain asset types or certain categories of content. Access control rules can be modified at any time as needed.
  • Brand Portal—Oracle Content Management comes with a preconfigured Brand Portal application when access to the full Oracle Content Management user interface isn’t desirable. The Brand Portal allows users to search and navigate through taxonomies to find the desired assets. Assets can then be linked or downloaded to use externally. Typically, you'll adjust the logos and colors of the Brand Portal, as well as customize the home page. Multiple Brand Portals can also be created, each with its own branding. More advanced customizations are also possible if desired.
  • Legacy Content Migration—If migration of legacy content is part of the project, the basic requirements should also be addressed as part of the discovery sessions. It’s important to understand what sort of existing metadata will need to be available in the new platform. Many legacy platforms organize content by folder as opposed to taxonomies. You must determine whether the folder structure needs to be migrated, and, if so, whether it will be represented by a taxonomy or a metadata field.

As you run the discovery sessions, you might consider creating a repository directly in Oracle Content Management and making changes to the configuration during or after each session. This will allow the users to see how their decisions are reflected in the user interface.

Get Stakeholder Agreement

Once you've defined the key requirements, it’s important to validate those requirements with your stakeholders. Even though it's possible to make changes later, especially as your usage evolves, it's still easier to make changes to the content model and architecture prior to setting up the system.

Stage 2 – Setup and Configuration

The second phase is focused on getting the Oracle Content Management instance up and running. In general, this stage should take no more than one sprint.

Provision Your Account and Create an Instance

Account provisioning is a mostly automated task and requires activating the Oracle Cloud tenant. This may take a day or two, depending on internal Oracle processes.

Once this activation process is complete, you can create one or more instances of Oracle Content Management from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console in a few minutes. For this phase, we recommend creating a single instance of Oracle Content Management. This instance should be configured as your production instance, so you should assign a name that reflects this. The name of the instance can't be modified once created. However, you will be able to assign and modify a custom DNS name for end users to access.

In later sprints, you may create non-production instances for testing or development purposes. For example, you might need to test custom portal development or test integrations with other applications.

Configure Access to the Platform

Users and groups can be created and managed from the Oracle Identity and Access Management (IAM) console that is created as part of your Oracle Cloud tenancy.

When you created your Oracle Content Management instance, several predefined application roles were created in IAM and associated with that instance. These application roles define the access rights to specific features in Oracle Content Management. From the IAM console, you can create users and groups, and assign them to each of these roles.

Oracle IAM can also be configured to federate authentication of some or all users against an external directory, like Active Directory.

For this sprint, we recommend configuring the needed users and roles directly in IAM. Configuring federated authentication and SSO can be done later or in parallel by the security team.

Stage 3 – Design and Build

At the end of the discovery phase, you should have most of the information you need to start the configuration of Oracle Content Management for your specific requirements. This third phase is focused on implementing the core configuration identified in the discovery sessions. By the end of the phase, you should have a fully configured DAM repository and significant customizations based on your requirements.

In general, this stage should take no more than one or two sprints.

Configure Main Repository

Oracle Content Management supports the creation and configuration of any number of repositories. However, you'll generally have a main repository where most of the management of your digital assets is centralized. This phase will focus on getting this repository configured.

You can start by creating an empty repository in Oracle Content Management. As you create the other artifacts (for example, asset types), you'll need to edit this repository definition so that users can see them from inside the repository. You'll need to create the following artifacts:

  • Asset Types—Create the different asset types you identified in the discovery sessions. If there are no requirements for metadata, you can use the default asset types: Image, Video and File.
  • Publishing Channels and Localization Policies—Create one or more publishing channels to represent the different ways content will be consumed from the repository. If integrating with one or more Oracle Marketing tools (for example, Eloqua, Responsys), you can create a single channel with a name like “Oracle Marketing”. You don’t need to create a channel for the Brand Portal. This will be created later if needed.

    For each publishing channel, you'll need to define the languages and policies supported on that channel. You can create a different localization policy for each channel where you publish content if desired or create a single localization policy to be shared across all channels.

  • Taxonomies—Create one or more taxonomies based on the categories you identified in the discovery sessions. Additional taxonomies might be added later as you create brand portals and migrate content from legacy repositories.
  • Translation Connectors—If you need automated translations, you may want to consider activating the preconfigured translation connector for Lingotek or adding your own translation connector. Most automated translation services, including Lingotek, will have an additional cost associated.
  • Content Connectors—Oracle Content Management offers a few built-in connectors for ingesting content from common cloud services like Google Drive, OneDrive, and such. If any of these are important for the project, then you'll want to configure these according to the documentation.

Once you have created the different artifacts, you'll need to make sure to add them to the repository.

Assuming you have the right level of details from the discovery sessions, configuring a new repository with these artifacts is quick and easy. The work itself can typically be done in a few hours. However, it’s not uncommon to make a few iterations of changes to your content model or identify other changes to ensure usability of the solution.

Set Up Approval Workflows (if needed)

You can review assets with basic out-of-the-box approve/reject workflow, or, if configured, you might be able to take advantage of workflow from Oracle Integration. It's possible for different repositories to have different review or workflow options.

If you need more advanced role-based workflow approvals, you'll need to create an instance of Oracle Integration Process in your Oracle Cloud tenant. This service carries an additional monthly cost.

Once your Oracle Integration instance is up and running, you'll need to follow the documentation to connect it to Oracle Content Management and deploy the sample approval workflows. After you deploy the workflows, you can map workflow roles to Oracle Content Management users from the Oracle Content Management user interface.

Assuming you don’t need to modify the preconfigured workflows, this setup can be done in a couple of hours.

Create a Brand Portal

Oracle Content Management includes a brand portal sample that can be customized as needed to support end users that don’t need direct access to the console. Installing the brand portal takes just a few minutes. It will create a new asset type, a new taxonomy, and a new publishing channel in your repository.

Once the brand portal has been created, you'll want to make a few simple changes, including:

  • Change the logo to your corporate logo.
  • Change the color scheme to match your corporate branding.
  • Update the home page to show key assets or share instructions on how to use the portal.
  • Adjust the localization policy to match your language requirements.
  • If desired, you can also make changes to the taxonomies and filters that allow users to navigate through the library of assets in the brand portal.

To make content available to users in the brand portal, all you need to do is to publish those assets to the Brand Portal channel.

Assuming you don’t need to make significant changes to the sample brand portal, getting the portal set up may take anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days.

Stage 4 – Content Migration

If migrating content from legacy repositories is part of the project, this effort should be kicked off as soon as possible, especially if the migration needs to happen before go-live. Technically, you can start using the platform before legacy content has been migrated. As the migration progresses, you will have access to the content automatically as it appears in Oracle Content Management.

In general, this fourth stage is the longest. It can take a few short sprints if there is little data to migrate, or it can take several sprints if there are a lot of assets that need to be migrated and mapped to the new content model.

Stage 5 – Additional Customizations

By the end of the third phase, you'll have a working DAM solution. That includes a central repository, a brand portal, and optional workflows. If all you need is simple image and video management, possibly integrated with Oracle Marketing tools, then you may not have any additional requirements and you can now go live. Otherwise, there are a few advanced customization or configurations that you may want to do.

Initiate Custom DNS Configuration Request (if needed)

By default, content published to public channels will be automatically cached by the embedded CDN service, leveraging a customer-specific DNS name in this format:

https://<<CustomerInstanceName>>-<<CustomerTenantName>>.ocecdn.oraclecloud.com

Optionally, you can configure the embedded CDN services to cache against a custom DNS hostname. To do this, you need to open a Service Request (SR) with Oracle Support. This process can take up to two weeks to complete, so try to start the process as soon as possible to ensure it doesn’t affect your project go-live.

Connect to Oracle Marketing Tools (if needed)

If you want to use Oracle Content Management as a central asset hub for Eloqua, Responsys, or Maxymiser, you can quickly configure these integrations. Integration with each tool is done a bit differently. In some cases, you can configure it yourself. In others, you'll need to open an SR. In all cases, the integration will require you to have the details for your repository and have a specific public channel created for accessing published assets.

You should be able to set up connections to all services in a day at most.