Frequently Asked Questions

A CMS typically stores and drives content to a website affording the user the ability to edit the textual content within it. A DAM, on the other hand, focuses on the storing, cataloguing and often process managing of media assets across an entire business and may even feed some to a CMS for publication. A DAM will typically include extensive metadata indexing and search capabilities along with services to derive additional digital formats from the source. 

In our integrated digital world, ‘spoolers’ are often utilised to queue and trigger automated tasks. These have evolved over time from simple 'Hot folders' (find a file and do something with it) to 'digital 'to-do' lists for the system to work through. These automation ' kick-offs' are key to streamlining production processes and Papermule’s feature-rich implementation enables a broad variety of pick-up and trigger points

A directory (local, file server or remote) that’s monitored for the arrival and or presence of one or more files by a ‘spooler’ process.

You’ve commissioned a project and that team now need the content – it could be: the words, images and logos for an advert; the script, the backing track for a radio ad, images for a product release, the PDF for a newspaper ad. Copy chasing helps identify and manage this process by maintaining a production group's CRM and centrally tracking who’s asked for what and what’s been delivered so far. Features such as automatic templated emails, tracking and deadline management all come together to best identify and manage the communication process driven by a variety of configurable business rules and working practices.

Email has evolved greatly over the years and attachment sizes have scaled to keep pace with modern file formats and sizes yet for all its flexibility it brings as many issues to the table as it solves!

When you receive content you have an opportunity to engage with the sender – email simply doesn’t afford you this luxury, the mail’s written and the sent button is clicked and the message is thrown over the wall for you to catch. The opportunity for checks, balances and sender questions/approvals to be resolved are lost in the blink of an eye and the only way to re-engage becomes another disjointed email or phone call.

As a creative team, have content submitted via a web portal – where it can be checked, cropped, scaled and verified; here you can engage in real-time with the sender and reject non-compliant content; here you can capture and catalogue the content with often vital extra metadata while also providing and gaining acceptance on any necessary T&C’s (such as copy write information!)

When the volume of content and team size outgrow a simple local file server and searching for, versioning, replacing or finding where a digital asset has been used becomes difficult you need a DAM. File servers are great but are hugely restrictive in the folder structures they can portray and the additional metadata they can store. More importantly, there are difficulties in making a file server searchable or giving it the ability to maintain the relationships between the assets themselves. Think about how you might track the use of a picture or logo over the last 3 years using just a file server. A DAM solution typically hides the storage structures and presents an asset-based view of projects, collections or related assets and opens up an array of ways to search for and investigate its previous usage along with managing extensive metadata attributes. Where did it come from, when, who approved it, where it's been used etc should all be easily answered questioned from a reputable DAM system. 

Time and Money! DAM’s save users huge amounts of time trying to find, share, process and reuse often expensive digital assets. Being able to see an asset's history, ownership (rights management) and previous usage without having to trawl through many folders or other tracking docs saves not only money but staff frustrations and time! Financially, being able easily to identify and reuse previously purchased digital assets rather than constantly re-purchasing is also very savvy!

Digital Workflow is a sequence of software actions that replaces roughly equivalent manual or paper-based processes. Think simply about how one or more computer actions when strung together can replace the manual actions needed by a human. Often these digital workflows queue specific individual actions for human users, such as approval reviews – these queues ensure nothing is missed and the human interactions remain focused on the task at hand.

Absolutely! Whilst Papermule’s DAM can store any digital file it works particularly well with a variety of creative applications but especially Adobe’s suite and InDesign. InDesign extensions help automate many human processes and provide integrations with other Adobe applications like InCopy. Papermule’s InDesign extension will ensure layouts are created to spec and content exported correctly without human intervention or input. 

Simply put an Ad planning System helps publishers decide where to place advertisements in a product and ensure that all sold ads reach a page. Ad planning at the national level with regional variants, with editorial/ad ratios and revenue targets to achieve, adds a whole next level of complexity. Separating planning and production also means editorial can be working on pages while commercial concentrate on where the ads go without treading on each other's toes!

Display and Classified are very different beasts when it comes to planning and Papermule’s solutions allow you to work these sections independently or as a combined presentation. Working these individually becomes more commonplace with larger classified sections.

Yes, you can reserve space for, and create editorial containers within the Papermule solutions.

Yes, MediaPlanner will ensure option or flex bookings appear once on one of the optional days sold.

Papermule’s MediaPlanner solution produces a variety of data output formats. These formats can drive a variety of editorial platforms, Papermule’s InDesign extension or indeed output finished PDF pages paginated within Papermule’s ADDESK.

Yes, Papermule’s ADDESK supports a pagination engine able to ingest plan data and output finished PDF pages to a destination or workflow of your choice.