ViewCast VMp Asset Management Platform Powers UPS to DAMMY Award

UPS’s Communications Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, powered by ViewCast Media Platform (VMp) Digital Asset Management software, was the recent recipient of a 2010 DAMMY Award in the category of Best Storage, Archive and/or Preservation Solution. Winners of the inaugural event were announced at Createasphere on September 24, 2010.

“This DAMMY Award is well-deserved recognition of a truly innovative storage, archive and media management solution,” says Suzan Sherburn, Director of Brand Management for UPS. “By combining the ViewCast Media Platform with the UPS DAM team’s commitment to preservation and access, we’ve created a highly customized DAM system that improves global communications and ensures consistency of the UPS brand, while preserving our assets and enabling the creation of new assets that will have lasting importance to the company.”

For seven years, ViewCast has played a key role in the design and implementation of the UPS Communications DAM system, which leverages the capabilities of VMp Production to manage the UPS Brand Exchange website. UPS Brand Exchange, which launched in 2003, is the official online resource for the tools that UPS employees and brand communicators need to effectively communicate the UPS brand. It also enables customers, sponsored organizations, and other third parties to obtain branded materials.

“As a Fortune 50 corporation, UPS manages a complex array of global operations and facilities,” says Dave Stoner, ViewCast President and CEO. “VMp is able to address UPS’ diverse operations and cross-functional objectives, while providing the flexibility to support the company’s unique DAM requirements as their business needs, objectives and applications continue to evolve.”

With the help of ViewCast, Brand Exchange was developed into three distinct DAM portals representing three levels of access to DAM assets. The DAM team also insisted on core preservation principals in metadata modeling to repurpose existing assets in order to save the company money. VMp’s ingest process was able to collect metadata from the company’s varied systems and integrate the UPS library with the DAM system, porting SQL data into the XML DAM. Today the UPS system has six metadata models – one each for photos, documents, graphics/logos, video, web, and reports. These models are continually refined to meet the needs of users, and training for both portal use and metadata creation is frequently scheduled.