In No Particular Order

Sup yall,

Back in June, I attended the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Conference in New York and posted a little recap on this very blog. So, I thought I’d do the same for LA conference which took place November 9th and 10th, 2009. Believe it or not, this was my first time out to Hollywood and the weather was not much different than what we’ve been having in Chicago this week. I was a little disappointed.

Overall, the vendor presence was largely the same as the New York show and many of the industry mainstays had booths. OpenText, Autonomy Virage, MediaBeacon, Canto Cumulus, North Plains, PageFlex, and our beloved Xinet (that’s the system behind checkout) were all out in force.

As you might expect, the LA show is slightly geared towards the media and entertainment industry. This was great for me as I had a chance to meet attendees from the various studios and production houses.
Warner Bros’ Technical Ops Manager gave an interesting presentation on the challenges of delivering metadata in a “complex distribution work flow.” I really enjoyed this seminar. If nothing else, it helped me gain some perspective on what we’re trying to accomplish with metadata and checkout. I’m trying to get job info and descriptive metadata on our production files. These guys have to manage pages of metadata for thousands of movies that needs to be packaged digitally and delivered differently to iTunes, Amazon, Best Buy, etc. Life ain’t so bad for us.

The Ad Agency world was well represented by my boy Evan Shore from Arnold Worldwide in Boston who is a fellow Xinet user. His preso focused on using DAM to automate work flow process and improve efficiency. Many of the tactics he presented, I’m happy to say, are already being used here at TMS and Boxer with checkout. Nice job, Evan. Folks from Arbonne International and Campbell-Ewald also gave presos on their DAM operations. SIDE NOTE: I found out that Campbell-Ewald and Chevrolet have one of the longest client /agency relationship in the world. It’s been standing since the late 1800’s!!!

One of my goals going into the conference was to see how we could better use SharePoint (myStore) and checkout together in a seamless work flow. The good news is: it can be done! I had some indepth conversations with our integrator and the Xinet reps to see how that could work. Speaking of SharePoint, Karuana Gatimu from Sketchers USA talked about their VERY robust SharePoint implementation at Sketchers. I’m working on obtaining a copy of that deck because anyone who is currently using myStore for projects or with clients will find it very useful. More to come on that.

Well that about does it. Sorry for the lack of pics this time…The only one I have is this crappy shot of Grauman’s Chineese Theatre. Uhhh…enjoy!

Till next time..
Rob