Become a 4ALLPORTAL
Partner

There were situations where truly excellent photos never made it to the printers because only a small percentage of the staff knew of their existence. For all of the above reasons, glaskoch began their quest for an appropriate digital asset management software. Their search led them to 4ALLPORTAL working out of Gütersloh.

With a so-called ‘e-ticket’, we can make selected assets available to customers in multiple formats and for a limited period of time. For us, it is important that our customers don’t have direct access to our media database

At the end of the day I was most impressed by the software’s flexible customization options. They really helped me to optimize my workflows.

We’re already done with the most important thing – the product photos – so that the employees can continue to carry out their core competencies. The company was founded in 1984. Since then, every event, exhibition or celebration has been documented with photos. There are several gigabytes of material from that. I think we significantly underestimated what was still lying around and needed to be added.

Our marketing operates very differently now. If I need an image collection, I no longer need someone from Marketing to upload it to OneDrive for it to be shareable. They can easily put it together for me and I can download it myself, directly from 4ALLPORTAL. In our company, we usually take the pictures ourselves, and with our colleagues instead of models. With the traffic light system, there’s no risk of beautiful visuals suddenly ending up in a magazine, where the person in the photo might then discover themselves without warning.

In the past, people stored a RAW format on their PC, developed a TIFF or PSD from that, then stored that on the server. But people also sometimes kept the RAW file, made a JPEG out of it, and then stored the RAW, the JPEG and the TIFF. Now there is only one original, which can be downloaded in various formats using download profiles.

In the past, if you made a product presentation, you had to go to marketing and say, ‘I’d like the images for that.’ Today, you type that into the search and download it yourself.

Photo, product photo, and then other fields are populated, up to and including keywords. For recurring image types, there are folders with automatic keywording and metadata assignment. That already saves a lot of time

After the installation, the 4ALLPORTAL consultant familiarized us with the system and we got a half-day admin training. at course, I don’t show all the features if it’s a person from the event area, for example, because the extensive features are not needed by everyone. But with mixed groups from User Experience, Internal Communications, and Marketing, I do the larger tour with all the features.

In the end, there was a huge mind map that no one knew their way around because our requirements were so complex. Only René from 4ALLPORTAL had a pretty good overview. And now everything is just the way we wanted it. It was all very positive.

It was all there already and we had the opportunity to customize some more also in terms of role configuration, which was important because of the different stakeholders.

What shouldn’t happen is that several individual adjustments have been implemented and then an update doesn’t work because you have to go back to the configurations afterwards. After all, before the changeover, our international colleagues always had to contend with long loading times for the preview images. And for our creatives, it was significant that they could drag the photos from the software directly into Adobe InDesign and link them.

Marketing and sales is a pretty big area for us, staff-wise and file-wise. We have many product images or screenshots from our software. We also plan to add product brochures in the future, which can be stored and previewed directly in 4ALLPORTAL.

The complexity had to be reduced. We found it to be highly adaptable and the standard version was already very good,” she said, listing some of the advantages. However, a few practical features could still be added through minor adaptations.”

It was simply no longer workable, with thousands of folders in which everything was contained in a kind of organized chaos but could not really be located,” Jeannine Walser said. That’s when we decided: We need a searchable tool where the versioning is clear and the assets can be linked. For example, if there is a consent form stating that certain photos can be used for external purposes like product brochures, then you can easily link those to the images.

In the past, we didn’t have a tool to manage our product photos and other digital assets. We had everything on a file server – in a folder with thousands of subfolders. Namely, in the subfolder of the subfolder of the subfolder. Also, managing access permissions was quite complicated, as due to various activities some subfolders that were not relevant to their activities were hidden. This made not only searching and saving difficult, but also administration.

We install smaller updates ourselves once a month, so the system is always updated. And if a problem does crop up, we can submit a ticket to 4ALLPORTAL Support and they will take care of it.

We have already received a great deal of positive feedback on the 4ALLPORTAL DAM: Our in-house colleagues praise the system thanks to the great user experience and seeing their actual workload reduce. Our marketing and graphics department alone saves about 20% time since data can now be found quickly by colleagues thanks to the excellent search function. As a result, the phone rings less and fewer support queries are landing in inboxes. And local dealers and window manufacturers are also just as enthusiastic: Finally, there’s no need to constantly send e-mails back and forth, and they can find their assets in a modern system.

For us, this is tantamount to a quantum leap in our workflows: Inefficiently handling assets and metadata cost us a great deal of time and caused no end of stress. That is now a thing of the past since combining 4ALLPORTAL and the programming software. When you consider how central the topic of image data management has become for TV broadcasters and that we are now able to cut our working time by around 30% in this regard, we have taken a huge step forward in digitization.

The main goal was to purchase a system that offered an image database with really good search capabilities and supported digital workflows. A quick and clear preview of the files you are looking for should also be included.

If the appointment works for us, we make the update and can quickly get back to work with the system. The things that were completely new were explained to me then in a brief training session.

It might take me fifteen minutes if I’m demonstrating the functions to someone. Otherwise, the only thing that helps is trying things out and asking questions. If we ever have questions, we get straightforward help. They’re very nice and quite patient.

When you reach a certain number of files, you simply need a new, modern and powerful system. The main goal was to purchase a system that offered an image database with a really good search function and supported digital workflows. A quick and clear preview of the files you are looking for should also be included. There’s so much you can do with 4ALLPORTAL and it’s absolutely self-explanatory.

Rights sharing has also become much more efficient with 4ALLPORTAL. The same is true for agency access. Now we can quickly exchange assets with people outside the system. And we now have much closer collaboration with agencies and external retouchers.”

I have a feeling that there is a willingness to work together long term on both sides. 4ALLPORTAL is not a provider that tells you to submit a ticket when you have a problem, and then takes three days to handle it because nobody cares.

The big chunk is almost finished now, of course, but new requirements are always being added. But we keep ordering new adaptations and features, and we are also working together on the configuration.”

Overall, we can say those synergies can be put to use very well with 4ALLPORTAL,” Dominic Brezinski added. All CEWE locations use the new DAM system. We also plan to grant all third-party systems that process images access to 4ALLPORTAL for these images via interfaces, so that images will only have one home. Namely, the 4ALLPORTAL.”

We have much better availability of assets. Everything is in one data port , and assets can be shared, which has become extremely efficient. Interaction between departments has become easier – making files available, the workflows. And when using it, it’s immediately clear what I’m allowed to use an asset for.”

We have a lot of stock photos, as well as our own creations. This means that rights management is important. We also have business partners who provide us with photos we can only use for their photo services.”

We asked all possible locations beforehand what the use cases were so we could select a system that came closest to our needs. Then we looked around the market, shortlisted possible providers and carried out a complex bidding process. In the end, 4ALLPORTAL prevailed over the other competitors.”

4ALLPORTAL help us structure our media data and manage it from a central location. The software is well-designed and very user-friendly, and the service was always professional. 4ALLPORTAL always had expert answers to our trickiest questions and problems. If we had to do it all again, we would still choose 4ALLPORTAL!”

We were looking for a product that’s fast, can be connected directly to InDesign and isn’t licensed per user. That’s exactly what we found in 4ALLPORTAL and the DAM module from 4ALLPORTAL. It was also important for us to establish good contact with the provider, so that our product feedback would be taken on board and we’d be treated as more than a number. We found this and more in 4ALLPORTAL.

For us the 4ALLPORTAL was the first and right choice from the beginning. The team of developers can get a lot done in a short time and without complications.

Working with 4ALLPORTAL was extremely straightforward and the system was installed amazingly quickly. With the help of training courses, video tutorials and manuals, and thanks to its highly intuitive user interface, the 4ALLPORTAL DAM was very quickly and positively received by our employees. For us, the investment has paid off enormously: our company employees spend about 50 percent less time searching for the right assets. We will achieve our return on investment – calculated very conservatively – after no more than two years.

With 4ALLPORTAL and the digital asset management module, we finally have a central system that can be accessed by different departments as a data source. This allows us to maintain consistency in our use of image materials—guaranteed. As a result, 4ALLPORTAL is an essential part of our workflow today. In 4ALLPORTAL, we’ve also found a partner with an in-depth understanding of our processes and a partner who offers dependable support.”

We have found with the 4ALLPORTAL DAM much more than just a system to structure our flood of data: in addition to data administration and file management, we now also handle the majority of our work processes and the associated communication via one central system. In addition, we have integrated a great feature with the full text search, which literally lets us find the needle in the text haystack!”

At the end of the day I was most impressed by the software’s flexible customization options. They really helped me to optimize my workflows.

4ALLPORTAL help us structure our media data and manage it from a central location. The software is well-designed and very user-friendly, and the service was always professional. 4ALLPORTAL always had expert answers to our trickiest questions and problems. If we had to do it all again, we would still choose 4ALLPORTAL!”

For us the 4ALLPORTAL was the first and right choice from the beginning. The team of developers can get a lot done in a short time and without complications.

Working with 4ALLPORTAL was extremely straightforward and the system was installed amazingly quickly. With the help of training courses, video tutorials and manuals, and thanks to its highly intuitive user interface, the 4ALLPORTAL DAM was very quickly and positively received by our employees. For us, the investment has paid off enormously: our company employees spend about 50 percent less time searching for the right assets. We will achieve our return on investment – calculated very conservatively – after no more than two years.