Another DAM blog

With Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, or any system containing intellectual property within an organization, unique logins (username and password) for every individual user with access is common. Unique logins should not be limited to people with a specific level of access, a particular role nor a certain level of permissions, but everyone with access to the DAM.

Why? A few reasons…unless you enjoy seeing your IP sold on an online auction

Security

When some one leaves an organization (for any reason), they should not walk away with any access to any intellectual property (IP), applications nor digital assets which are owned and/or licensed by the organization. This can reduce the potential risk of having your competitors having direct access to your DAM. This also  limits the risk of IP spreading wildly out of control. This goes hand in hand with the use of a permission and role structure.

Accountability

Unique logins allow a certain level of accountability for every user. Everyone should be kept accountable for what they do (or don’t do), regardless of their role, title and/or seniority. True accountability does not play favorites. It should be clear as black on white.

Reporting

Once you establish individual logins, it should be easy to report who has:

• Uploaded an asset
• Downloaded an asset
• Metatagged an asset
• And many other measurable results on an individual basis, group basis and even throughout organization

Reporting capabilities are common in many DAM systems. Reporting also allows you measure the performance of system, user adoption as well as user results from the DAM. Unique logins per individual allow at least administrators to pin point exactly who did what with which assets and when this occurred.

As a best practice, passwords should be changed on regular intervals (such as every few months) for additional integrity. There are some regulations which mandate passwords to change often. Can your DAM users change their own passwords?

What does a strong password look like?

• 8 or more characters
• Includes letter(s), at least one upper and one lower case letter and number(s)
• At least one special character
• Avoid using words found in the dictionary

If possible, explore the option of having a single sign-on (SSO) feature for time savings so users only need to remember one unique username and password for all the systems they access instead of different logins for different systems.

Do you have unique logins for each DAM user?