Industry
LGA – City Council
Employees
500+
Specs
125,000
Residents
Location
VIC
The Challenge:
An acceleration in the commission and capture of image and video assets had followed a rapidly rise in need across the business for rich media assets. However the business had neither infrastructure, knowledge nor systems to store, manage and distribute the rapidly compounding asset pool.
The Solution:
Collaboro deployed our proprietary cloud DAM platform and our proprietary services layer. We deployed processes and knowledge, trained users, deployed a tailored platform/ schema/ taxonomy.
Microsoft’s AI toolkit adds contextual and object tags to all assets to enhance search beyond manual tagging.
The Result:
Manningham now have a scalable, independent resource that empowers the comms and marketing teams to be efficient and agile when working for both internal and external clients – i.e: do what they do best without being bogged down in managing assets.
Collaboro took us on the journey of solving digital asset management, rather than simply selling us software. The high-touch deployment phase, and deep ongoing support, provide Council the underlying confidence that as we evolve, so will Collaboro.
Alessandra | Communications Officer @Manningham
The Challenge:
Like any large LGA Council, Manningham is a significant business as both an operational service provider and a centralised hub for information and communication. Manningham was faced with three key areas of challenge, that were intertwined and centred on image and video asset management:
- A communications team that was rapidly being overwhelmed by requests from across the business for image and video assets.
- Accelerating capture of new image and video assets, presenting a storage and access challenge
- A rich history and existing asset pool that required ingest, tagging, management and long term preservation.
Central to the challenge is that Manningham City Council, and the people that work there, are not digital asset managers, and nor do they want to be. The need was more than software alone – the need was for a solution that made them all more efficient and more agile, while not adding yet another product administration role. Lastly, as an Australian entity, Manningham were clear in the intent to keep their assets on-shore.
All assets and associated metadata needed to be held, managed and made redundant in Australia.
The Solution:
Collabor Collaboro deployed our proprietary cloud DAM platform and our offline archival services. We wrapped these in our proprietary services layer. The Collaboro Cloud Platform was tailored as we do for all customers: a bespoke schema was created that reflected the language, business units and terms that Manningham use every day. A bespoke role and permission setup was deployed. We connected directly into the user accounts via SSO so that Council IT admins had control of onboarding and offboarding users.
We worked with Manningham’s key players to define which assets were migrated into the platform, how they were tagged, and how the library was structured. Then the Collaboro Operations team swung into action –
ingesting, converting as appropriate, placing and tagging the assets into the Collaboro Cloud.
All originals were additionally archived into the Collaboro geo-redundant, secure offline archival system. This secures assets in an independent secure environment, safeguarding the visual history of Manningham City for the future. The Collaboro technology stack lives in Microsoft’s local Australian data centres, reducing risk and addressing the need to retain certainty over data domicility.
The Result:
Manningham is experiencing an array of benefits since onboarding Collaboro in 2017. There’s been a drastic reduction in content management, search and share time, which has resulted in much happier and empowered media and comms team that are now proactive rather than reactive. They are focused on doing what they do best, rather than being default digital librarians!
In 2020 Manningham were migrated at zero cost to the new generation Collaboro Cloud Platform. On top of generational user interface and security benefits, this new platform brings the best of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services (AI powered) tagging technology to bear on the entire Manningham library of content, old and new.
As a result, object and contextual tags are auto-populated against all assets, creating another layer of metadata – and in turn a richer search experience for users. Collaboro enables the Manningham communications team to be agile in responding to internal team needs, and to serve assets internally, using an entirely on-platform workflow. For external distribution, Collaboro’s secure share links can be published at an individual asset level or can turn a working lightbox into a published external distribution centre.
Cost and waste reductions are an added benefit – with assets on hand the business has eliminated duplicated production and is able to drive greater use of existing assets, in turn gaining greater value from visual content, over a longer lifecycle.
Finally, due to the centralised and tagged nature of the asset library, Manningham’s ability to surface, share and use image and video assets is now immune to the knowledge loss that is inevitable as people, roles and suppliers change. Collaboro represents a bedrock visual resource that Councilcan count on long into the future.
