Blog / mediagraph™ Sneak Peak

Migrating from a folder share

Peter Krogh
Fri Jan 15 2021

One of the most important challenges facing a new DAM implementation is the onboarding process. If people can’t find their stuff quickly, they get frustrated and avoid the system. Likewise, if it takes too long to get things set up, the administrators can become discouraged. We’ve got some nice solutions for that. Here’s one of them.

Upload folder trees

DAM systems are often replacements for a shared folder on a network drive. People get nervous when you tell them you’re about to take this away. One way to make the process as smooth as possible is to simply replicate the folder structure in the DAM. And a number of systems can do this. But we take it several steps further.

Duplicate the folder tree to permission-based collections

MediaGraph separates the storage containers (Folders) from the member-facing containers (Collections). With a single click, you can replicate any folder tree in MediaGraph into a collection tree. This gets added at the root level, and is only visible to Library and Content Managers. You can drag the Collection tree into another collection, such as your general Library, or a particular group’s library, and it will inherit the permissions of the new parent collection. Take a look here.

https://vimeo.com/500175624

Add multiple permissions, make multiple versions

Okay, with a couple simple operations, we’ve been able to build a copy of our folder tree and make it available on a permission-controlled basis to the stakeholders. Your account members can find stuff in the same tree structure they already know. Great. But wait, there’s more.

Multiple

You can run the command to make a collection tree more than once. Perhaps you want a complete set of files in a collection tree for your Library Managers, but only want to show some files to the members. No problem. Make as many collection copies as you need, and put them into the proper parent collection.

Alternate organization

One major limitation of folder-based organization is the need to organize in one particular way. Is it going to be date, department, event, person, or product? What if you need to organize in a second (or third) way? This is where collections really shine. You can make multiple collection trees using the same set of files, without uploading duplicates.

Curated Collections

Collections allow you to do something else. You can create a collection tree according to your member needs, and help members discover great stuff they may be unaware of. (You can also highlight to often-used media to make it really easy to find, which is a huge timesaver for the media manager.) The video below shows a quick example of the way this can work.

https://vimeo.com/500175598

And this is just the beginning...

Of course this is just scratching the surface of the advantages of MediaGraph over folder share. MediaGraph offers a lot of other ways to discover useful media in your collection. You can do a metadata-based search, browse the taxonomies, or use the filters to find files.

https://vimeo.com/500175646

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