What do you like best about the product?

Our organization - a museum library - needed a new DAM that would help us store, find, and retrieve assets for our user community in ways that our old DAM system could never do. We researched and interviewed a wide variety of DAM candidates and found that OrangeDAM was the only one that could help us effectively manage our media assets: moving images and sound. Their caption management tool allows us to easily caption and make searchable film/video and audio files and provide our user community with a new level of access that wasn't available to them (or us) before. This is a game changer in making our media collections findable/searchable for our users. We also have the ability to link assets so that video or audio files are presented with their accompanying scripts, press materials, etc to provide users with a more holistic view of our media collections. They also worked with us to integrate into OrangeDAM a new tool (similar to OCR) to help better transcribe handwritten manuscripts, of which we have many thousand in our special collections area. There are a lot of tools that exist to help make a better user experience and we're still exploring them after a year of working with the product. And they just released OrangeMAM, which we are also looking at to further assist us in managing our video workflow. We're excited to see that as well.

What do you dislike about the product?

There is so much to learn about the system that it can overwhelming, especially if you don't have much DAM experience. However, they just released a new learning center that is more in depth and intuitive than the former help center and has helped us answer internal questions and complete more advanced tasks. OL also provides 'office hours' in which customer's can ask specific questions about OrangeDAM in a live virtual enviroment. That is very helpful for clarifying how tools work or for questions specific to customer's specific instance of the system.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

One of the biggest issues for us was making our media collections available to our user community. These are moving image and audio assts. We couldn't ingest them into earlier systems because they couldn't handle them. Now we can and for the first time users can see our videos/film/audio assets in one central place. They had previously only existed on an internal server with a single gatekeeper. Users couldn't search, much less find the content they needed or worse, didn't even know that it existed. We were also able to merge two local DAMS into one central system so more users had access to a greater number of assets to assist with their work.