For organizations growing their content operations, managing digital assets at scale can become challenging. As the number of assets in a project grows, staying organized becomes critical to help people find the right asset exactly when they need it. 

Kontent by Kentico solves these difficulties. By giving users of its headless CMS a way to keep assets organized, teams can be more productive and collaborate more easily directly in their CMS. And with the help of some unique Kontent features, companies are empowered to do more with their assets, like transforming assets directly and building secure employee portals. In the end, this lets companies get more value out of the assets they use.

Let’s take a deep dive and see how advanced asset management capabilities help organizations find the right assets, customize them, and ensure assets are only used where they are intended to be used.

All assets in one place

All Kontent subscriptions include the ability to work with assets. Assets here mean any type of file: images, video, audio, and so on. Kontent gives users a built-in library for storing and managing these assets. Images or other files can be uploaded to Kontent and then used across various channels. In fact, all the images in this blog post come from this Kontent project's asset library.

A built-in asset library makes it easy to add appropriate images or other files to content in the same platform where that content is created. Assets are searchable and can be organized into folders, which helps teams build one single hub for all their content needs.

Some organizations have more demanding needs for their assets. Advanced Asset Management is additional bundle of enterprise functionality that helps large organization improve the way they work with assets by adding asset taxonomies, image customization, secure asset delivery, and custom asset domains. With these capabilities, it's easier to find the right assets, customize them, and ensure assets are used in the right way.

Find the right assets

Whether it’s a blog post, a company profile, an employee intranet article, or something else entirely, it’s normal for a piece of content to include one or more assets. If an organization has mature content operations, they most likely have a pool of acceptable assets: images which meet their brand guidelines, can be legally used, have been approved, and so on.

This pool of assets can rapidly grow in size, to the point where finding the appropriate asset for the task at hand is no small matter. Some organizations try to solve this by relying on naming conventions, but doing so presents new challenges. How can you be sure employees will follow conventions, and how difficult will it be to onboard new employees to the existing system?

With asset management in Kontent, organizations have a new tool to help them find the right assets, quickly. Assigning taxonomies to assets categorizes and organizes them, making the search and discovery process significantly simpler. A single asset can be tagged with multiple taxonomies, allowing organizations to group their assets by:

• Intended use (e.g. blog, landing page, intranet)
• Audience (e.g. internal, external, existing customers, prospects)
• Region (e.g. global, North America, Australia)
• Content (e.g. people, product, screenshot)
• Any other relevant grouping

Encouraging people to tag images with appropriate taxonomies is easy, since Kontent prompts users to add taxonomies when a new asset is added. Kontent also notifies users when an asset has no taxonomies assigned. This reduces the room for user error that’s present when relying on naming conventions. 

When an asset is required for a new piece of content, Kontent users can use taxonomies to narrow down their search, speeding up the time it takes to find the right asset. 

Once the correct asset has been chosen, users can take advantage of another asset management feature: image customization.

Customize assets as needed

Different channels, formats, and devices call for specific asset dimensions and proportions. A company might want to use the same image for a hero image in a blog post, and for that blog post’s thumbnail on the company’s blog overview page. Typically, the company would need to prepare two separate images and make sure to use the correct image in the right place. This leads to two “identical” images in an asset library with two different sizes. For a company with hundreds of blog posts, that means lots of image duplication, and a messy asset library.

Kontent solves the messy library issue with image customization. Organizations can upload a single image, then adjust size and proportion as needed directly in each particular content item. 

This allows for easy content reuse, without the need to reach out to a designer for small image changes. By reusing content, the number of duplicate assets is reduced, leading to an asset library that’s easier to search. Content creators then have an easier time using the right image for the right purpose.

Protect sensitive assets

Some assets shouldn’t be accessible to the general public. Organizations might build an internal employee portal or intranet using Kontent, where there might be sensitive or confidential assets. Those assets are fetched from Kontent using an API call. With Advanced Asset Management activated in Kontent, it’s possible to require an API key to retrieve project assets.

This protects sensitive assets from being exposed and ensures authorized access to all the assets in a project. With secure delivery, it’s possible to build portals, intranets, or any other project that might have private information, using Kontent.

Picture-perfect asset management

A messy asset library can slow teams down, lead to poor customer experiences, and require periodic overhauls. Conversely, a well-organized asset library empowers teams to work faster and with more confidence. Advanced Asset Management helps teams find their assets, customize them, and use them for all types of content-based applications. To learn more about how Kontent and Advanced Asset Management can empower your organization, get in touch with us today.