Digital Asset Management and IMM

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My wife says I have the humor of a 13-year old at times.  Maybe she's right.

I was able to interview Mark Kashman, Product Manager for Interactive Media Manager, on IMM as a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. 

I can't help but picture Beavis and Butthead, "Huh huh huh... he said DAM."

Jokes aside, this was a great interview because IMM really shows off how to pull off working with large media content in SharePoint.  One of the things that I found interesting is how media is stored in this solution: they don't try to put media (MPG, WMV, etc) inside a SharePoint list... the media asset storage is completely separate.  This enables you to store in a SAN, leverage 3rd party storage solutions, and integrate with your existing storage solution.  IMM also provides a very extensive metadata layer using RDF, which enables, among other things, enables SharePoint with more enterprise social computing capabilities through the ability to tag and rate items.  This is much more than just tagging and rating textual blog entries, this is something that nobody else offers... Enterprise 2.0 capabilities for video content delivered through SharePoint. 

Think about how pervasive video content is becoming in the enterprise.  Training videos, customer case study videos, executive interviews, commercials, all types of content that an enterprise wouldn't want to post externally on YouTube or SoapBox.  This is stuff that is stored within the enterprise, content that is valuable within the enterprise community itself and should be shared widely. 

About halfway through the interview, we get to see how the IMM solution is being used by a well-known media company, Starz.  A little more than halfway through the interview, we see a sneak peek of the next version of IMM which includes a Silverlight-based rough cut editor that will be previewed at this year's NAB.  This was really cool, almost like the next version of the Top Banana demo, but in a real solution that enables server-side encoding and with many more features.

If you are going to NAB this year, make sure to visit the Microsoft booth where you will see IMM as well as folks from the Expression Encoder and Silverlight teams (among others). 

For more information on Interactive Media Manager: