Understand Digital Asset Repositories

Digital assets are critical for effective customer engagement across touchpoints. Even small organizations might have tens or hundreds of thousands of digital assets in different formats including text, images, videos, or structured content items. Managing these assets effectively means providing business users the right tools to collaboratively create, organize, version, approve, and publish your assets. Let’s look at some of the Oracle Content Management features available to manage and publish your assets.

Oracle Content Management allows users to manage digital assets in one or more asset repositories. A repository is a storage location for assets that you need for building web, mobile, or other user experiences in your organization. An asset can be a content item that represents an individual piece of content, such as a blog post, case study, or product information; or a digital asset that represents an image, video, or any other type of media needed to create engaging experiences.

As a repository administrator, you define which asset types can be managed in a particular repository, which defines what asset formats can be stored in the repository and what metadata needs to be associated with each asset. You can assign taxonomies to a repository to allow users to categorize assets, configure workflow roles for approving assets, and define the valid languages to support translation requirements.

Administrators can also assign publishing channels to the repository. This allows business users to preview assets in different channels and devices before approval. Once approved, assets can then be published to one or more customer-facing experiences, where they will be automatically cached with the embedded CDN for scalable delivery worldwide.

You can create multiple repositories to handle your different business needs. For example:

• You could set up one repository to support content publishing to your corporate website. Associate a localization policy with one of the repository’s assigned publishing channels to define which languages are required to allow global delivery of the site. To enable content translation by external language service providers, assign translation connectors to the repository. Before publishing assets to your corporate site they need to be reviewed and approved by business owners; facilitate that by assigning relevant workflows to the repository.
• Set up another repository to support managing digital assets for you marketing automation system. Assign digital asset types with custom attributes required to support personalized campaigns. To allow asset categorization for individual products or customers, assign taxonomies that represent your product hierarchy or industries, as applicable for your business. To help contributors categorize assets or simply find relevant digital assets, enable the smart content feature on the repository.
• Your organization may work with external design agencies who create content for marketing campaigns. You could set up a repository for collaboration with these agencies. Assign content connectors for Google Drive, OneDrive, or other third-party content providers, allowing designers to upload digital assets from these external repositories.

Let's use Oracle Blogs as an example to guide you through the setup of an asset repository to allow content contribution to a similar site. Here's the process you could use to create the required dependencies and get your repository set up:

• Asset Types

  The core content elements on Oracle Blogs are blog articles, short write-ups about blog authors, images, videos, and PDF files that some articles allow you to download. In Oracle Content Management this content will be represented as assets of one of two types:

  • Content type which defines the structure of data that a content item can store. To store information about the blog authors, define an Author content type with a text field Name for the author's name, a text field Job Title for the job title, a media field Photo for the author's picture, and a rich-text field Author Bio for a short bio. For the blog articles, define an Article content type with a text field Title for the article's title, a text field Summary for the summary that will be displayed on a list of blog articles or on a search results page, a rich-text field Content for the article itself, a media field Cover Image for the image that is displayed in the article header, and a reference field Blog Author to reference to the blog author content item.
  • Digital asset type which defines the file media types that a digital asset can store and the structure of attributes (metadata) to describe the asset. Use the out-of-the-box Image, Video, and File types to manage images, videos, and PDF documents for the blog site; or, define custom digital asset types. For example, define an Author Photo digital asset type with a text attribute Attribution to store the image creator's name, and define a Blog Document digital asset type where the media type is restricted to PDF files, allowing contributors to publish PDF files but not other files such as Microsoft Word documents on the Blog site.

  Then assign all these asset types to the repository for the Blogs site, allowing repository members with the Manager or Contributor role to:

  • Create content items from the Author and Article content types.
  • Upload photos to create digital assets from the Author Photo digital asset type, which can then be referenced in the Photo field in content items created from the Author content type.
  • Upload images or videos as needed to create digital assets from the out-of-the-box Image or Video digital asset types, which can then be used in content items created from the Article content type or other places on the site.
  • Upload files in PDF format to create digital assets from the Blog Document digital asset type, which can then be linked to blog articles.

  Remember, contributors will be limited to uploading only those file types specified in the digital asset types that are associated with the repository.

• Languages (Localization Policies)

  If your organization operates globally, published content typically needs to be translated into regional languages. To enable content translation, the repository needs to have required languages assigned to it. You can assign languages directly to repository. However, as a best practice, you should define required and optional languages for key countries or regions via a localization policy. You assign the localization policy to the channel that is used for publishing content to the site, then assign that publishing channel to the repository, and thus the languages defined in the associated localization policy are automatically assigned to the repository.

• Publishing Channels

  Publishing channels allow you to make assets managed in a repository available for consumption on a website (or any external application that can use REST API for that). The channel defines publishing rules such as whether assets need to be approved before they're published, whether the published content is public or secure, and, if secure, it can be limited to a subset of people with specific user roles.

  If you use Oracle Content Management to create your Blog site, a publishing channel will be automatically created and assigned to the repository you select for the site. If you use a different technology to create and manage your Blog site or if, for example, you plan to publish some Blog articles to a mobile app or another site, you can create additional publishing channels and then assign them to the repository for the site.

  After you assign publishing channels to the repository, repository members can target and publish assets to these channels, subject to any publishing channel restrictions.

• Taxonomies

  Articles on a website, such as a Blog site, are typically organized into categories to help visitors find relevant information by filtering blog posts by an area of interest, product name, or specific area of expertise or knowledge. For example, Oracle Blogs features a Blog Directory that you can use to narrow down published articles to Analytics Advantage Blogs, Developers Blogs, or Netherlands Blogs.

  To facilitate filtering and searching on your published site or application, Oracle Content Management enables you to define relevant taxonomies, assign them to the repository, and then use them for asset categorization. You create a taxonomy by defining a vocabulary of business terms, arranged into a hierarchy of categories that represent how content across your organization is defined and classified. For example, you could define taxonomies for your products, industries, and geographical regions where your organization operates, or any other hierarchy of subject categories that is relevant for your organization.

  After you assign taxonomies to a repository, repository members can categorize assets, either when adding them to the repository or at a later time. A faceted search user interface allows filtering assets by categories in one taxonomy or across several taxonomies to find relevant content. You can publish the taxonomy to make categorization information available on assets that are published to the same channel, thus you can leverage the taxonomy to support asset filtering and search on your published website or application.

• Repositories

  After your asset types, localization policies, publishing channels, and taxonomies are defined, create the repository and associate the objects you created with the repository.

That completes basic set-up. At this point, your repository is ready for use. Optionally, you can enable additional capabilities on your repository to provide contributors with tools that make content authoring more efficient or to allow you, as repository manager, to govern the content before it's made publicly available on a website:

• Translation Connectors

  By default, Oracle Content Management provides the ability to manually translate content into required languages—you can add new language to a single asset at a time or export assets in bulk as a ZIP file with text strings extracted for translation. If your organization uses an external vendor, like Lingotek, Lionbridge, or SDL for content translation, you can register the relevant translation connector with Oracle Content Management, and then assign the translation connector to the repository, so that contributors can easily submit assets for translation by the external vendor.

• Content Connectors

  If your organization uses external cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive for sharing digital assets with external design agencies, you can register a content connector for the relevant storage service with Oracle Content Management, and then assign the content connector to the repository, so that contributors can easily add files to the repository directly from the external cloud storage.

• Smart Content

  You can help contributors find relevant images in search, add relevant images to content items, or categorize assets with taxonomies by enabling the Smart Content feature on a repository. When you do so, all images added to the repository and all content items created in the repository are processed by built-in artificial intelligence and natural language processing services, auto-tagging them accordingly and extracting keywords from the text.

• Workflows

  Typically content requires review and approval by peers or managers before being published. You can enable such governance in your repository by making sure that all publishing channels assigned to the repository are set to Only approved items can be published.

  By default, Oracle Content Management enables contributors to submit assets for review by repository managers.

  If your organization requires content to be reviewed in a multi-step workflow by piers, technical editors, managers, compliance, or your legal team, you can register your Oracle Integration processes with Oracle Content Management, and then assign them to a repository. Then contributors can submit assets for review through a relevant workflow. Workflow participants receive notification when a task is assigned to them and can take actions on the assets as per the role that is assigned to them in the workflow.

• Audience Attributes

  Recommendations are a way to provide personalized experiences for website visitors by showing assets based on location or areas of interest. Audience attributes are what recommendations use to find and display that personalized content. They can include things like viewer location, the date a viewer is visiting the site, or what products interest a viewer.

  For example, when a viewer in California visits a site with recommended content, they may be shown upcoming events in Los Angeles about cloud computing. If a person in France visits the same site, they would see upcoming events in Paris.

• Ranking Policies

  Oracle Content Management uses an out-of-the-box ranking policy by default to sort search results by relevance (provided there are no orderBy clauses on the search request). However, you can create custom ranking policies to better control the relevance score of indexed items returned by a search request.

• Video Plus

  Video Plus provides a rich video management and delivery experience, including all the standard video features plus advanced capabilities for optimized streaming, automatic transcoding and conversion, and more responsive playback options.

Archiving Assets

At some point you may have assets that aren't currently being used, but you're not ready delete them yet. You can archive those assets. Archived assets are billed at 1/200th the cost of normal assets.

Permissions and Roles

To access the content management user interface (Content under Administration in the left navigation menu), you must be assigned the Enterprise User role and have one of the following administrator roles:

• Content Administrator—this role allows you to create asset types and taxonomies.
• Repository Administrator—this role allows you to create asset repositories, publishing channels, and localization policies, and to register workflows.

Here's what you need to know about who can see or interact with different content management objects:

• Assets area—The Assets area is only available to enterprise users.
• Repositories—When you create a repository, you're assigned the Manager role on it which allows you to edit repository settings and membership. You can add other administrators to the repository as Managers to allow them to manage the repository. You can add other enterprise users to the repository as Contributors to allow them to add assets to the repository or as Viewers to view assets in the repository.
• Asset types—When you create an asset type, you're assigned the Manager role on it which allows you to edit the asset type and membership. You can add other administrators to the asset type as Managers to allow them to manage the asset type. Asset types can be used to create assets in the associated repository by any repository member with at least Contributor role on the repository.
• Publishing channels—When you create a publishing channel, you're assigned the Manager role on it which allows you to edit channel settings and membership. You can add other administrators to the channel as Managers to allow them to manage the channel. You can add other enterprise users to the channel as contributors to allow them to publish assets to the channel.
• Taxonomies—When you create a taxonomy, it's created in a draft state. To allow users to categorize assets with the taxonomy, you have to promote it, and then add it to a repository.