Kumar Mayank Urmila Kashyap Noah Liebman Daniel Weckstein Executive Summary Competitive Analysis refers to comparing our product with other competitors in the market based on certain stated criteria. For us the competitors where other Digital Asset Management (DAM) market leaders (Figure 1), such as: a) North Plains b) EMC c) Canto Figure 1: Visualization showing market leaders in the Digital Asset Management Market (Source: Frost & Sullivan) We evaluated the products based on the following criteria: usability, functionality, and aesthetic. This gave us key insights into features and design decisions that competitors have made to make their products successful. This study also helped us to find the strengths, competencies, and weaknesses of BlueStream when compared to these products. Areas of improvement for BlueStream were quite evident from the comparison that is discussed herein.
Introduction As part of our analysis of BlueStream, we have conducted a comparative analysis. The purpose of this analysis was to look at what other products perform similar tasks to BlueStream. BlueStream is powered by a product called Ancept Media Server, so we looked for other products that work similarly to the Ancept Media server. We found three products that were commonly mentioned: Documentum Digital Asset Manager and Media WorkSpace, which is made by EMC, Cumulus by Canto, and Telescope made by North Plains. Methodology Our first step was to search for general information on Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Media Asset Management (MAM) systems to find out more about the marketplace. We also searched for information on the Ancept Media Server and found that their competitors often appeared as advertisers. We went through these and decided on the Documentum, Cumulus, and Telescope systems, which seemed to be the main competitors. We also came across the Quark Digital Media Server, but there was not very much information available on it, nor did the website work properly. We also searched for papers on the topic and found an extensive analysis of the entire DAM marketspace, but it would have cost us $895, which was not feasible given the meager budget provided by SI. For the four products listed above, we tried to get trial access by providing our e-mail addresses to the companies who make the systems, but this proved to be a problem for us since none of them would respond. Our approach then became to look at the websites and gather as much information as we could. We read all the information, downloaded all of the available documentation on the product, and watched any tutorials or other promotional videos on the site talking about the software. From this we were able to get an idea of what the product has to offer compared to our product, as well as a few screenshots. We also searched for reviews of the products that we wanted to compare. Documentum Digital Asset Manager and Media WorkSpace The EMC Documentum asset management system is actually a package of two closely related products: Documentum Digital Asset Manager and Documentum Media WorkSpace. Together, these two products make up a powerful web-based digital asset management system with many of these features. Functionality BlueStream relies on several key features to allow users to accomplish basic tasks with their video. These include access control, collections, file transcoding, metadata, time-specific metadata, keyframe thumbnails, and audio-to-text capabilities for searching. In addition, playback, uploading, and downloading from within the web environment are important.
The main feature missing from the Documentum application is the granular access control possible in the Ancept Media Server, the software that powers BlueStream. This type of access control is vital to the higher education environment where media from research or courses containing sensitive or private information may be stored. Unlike BlueStream, Documentum has built-in support for intellectual property rights management, which is specialized metadata that specifies for what purpose and in what geographical region an asset may be used. Although Documentum has a number of features that Ancept lacks, those features are not important for BlueStream s role as a repository rather than a production environment, and lack of granular access control takes the former out of contention for use in BlueStream. Usability It is nearly impossible to make an assessment of the usability of the Documentum products because there is no public access to a demo version of the software. That said, screenshots captured from promotional material suggest that much of Documentum seems quite similar to Ancept, right down to the way the pages are laid out. As shown in Figure 2, both systems have a hierarchical tree browser in the left column and a grid of asset thumbnails with action buttons in the main content area. They also both have a simple search box toward the top. The Media WorkSpace portion of the Documentum system wins the aesthetic race hands down. Shown in Figure 3, it resembles an Apple transparent panel, and features a customizable interface with drag-and-droppable toolbars to help increase usability in specific environments. The Digital Asset Manager portion of the system looks quite similar to BlueStream. Visuals Figure 2: BlueStream (left) and Documentum (right) asset browsing interfaces
Figure 3: Documentum Media WorkSpace BlueStream vs. Canto Cumulus Functionality Both BlueStream and Cumulus have most of the features necessary for the success of any DAM, although Cumulus is somewhat more capable; BlueStream has a number of features, but most of them are present in other DAM systems as well. A feature comparison chart is available in the Appendix A. Comparing BlueStream with Canto Cumulus over the functionality present makes Canto the obvious winner. But considering the educational scenario in which BlueStream is used there is not much of a difference. The most important advantage of BlueStream is that it is available online and does not require a native client. Also, it has time-coded metadata which helps find relevant clips of video within longer clips, which Canto does not offer. Other advantages include building other blogs and systems on top of BlueStream, which Canto does not have. This feature is vitally important to the future of BlueStream, as many web services are currently being built on top of BlueStream s repository of media. Some disadvantages of BlueStream are that it has no drag-and-drop facility for uploading or downloading assets, and no online editing capabilities. A major distinguishing factor is that Canto Cumulus is Section 508 compliant, which makes it accessible to people with disabilities. Usability All of the important functions for Canto Cumulus are available on the main page itself, as shown in Figure 5. There are very few secondary pages or pop-ups that will lead the user away from the page; hence, the number of clicks required is fewer. All of the resources that are available can be accessed from the category pane, which is like the browse function in BlueStream (Figure 4). These panes can slide and therefore can be hidden if not needed leaving more place for the
available resources. While both of them use the same structure, accessing menu items is much easier for Canto Cumulus. The main navigation menus are quite different for both the products. BlueStream s navigation is divided into three discreet parts (as shown by areas demarcated by red rectangles) while Canto Cumulus s navigation is a compact top and left menu like many other applications. These two comparisons surely give the Canto Cumulus an advantage over BlueStream when it comes to navigation and ease of access of functions. Adding assets can be done in a traditional way in Cumulus using a dropdown menu (Figure 6). Selecting New and entering the information for a particular asset and category is required. Since there is confusion with the nomenclature used during this step in Cumulus, this way of adding assets is far more difficult than in BlueStream. The other way to add assets is drag and drop, which is much easier, and most of the users seem to do it this way. BlueStream does not have the drag and drop feature, and therefore adding has to be done in the traditional way as shown in Figure 7. This step is much faster than the Cumulus method of adding a new asset. Finding information is easy in Cumulus and does not suffer from the same learning curve that BlueStream does. The search dialog, shown in Figure 8, is comprehensive and returns all available resources in the form of a tree structure, as shown in Figure 9. The final asset can then be accessed easily. Changing Information about an asset is equally easy. One can just click on the asset information field and change the value. This way it is much faster than editing on a new page as in Adding metadata to an asset is similar to BlueStream. Both the systems automatically take metadata from the file description of the file being uploaded. This metadata can then be edited in the normal way of editing information about the assets. An important advantage of BlueStream over Canto Cumulus is that it can time-code metadata in a video and therefore relevant clips of video can be found without much effort. Aesthetics Aesthetics is the measure of beauty of a system which can be assessed using a number of important characteristics. It is said that the constructs of aesthetics and usability is very closely connected. Higher aesthetic levels have been proved to make the system more usable 1. 1 Noam Tractinsky (1997), Aesthetics and Apparent Usability: Empirically Assessing Cultural and Methodological Issues. ACM-CHI, 1997
The measure of aesthetics is very difficult for graphic displays because of the level of complexity involved 2. The comparison of aesthetic measures shows that BlueStream fairs better than Canto Cumulus on certain aspects and bad at others. The strong points of BlueStream are equilibrium, simplicity, homogeniality and rhythm. The points where BlueStream can improve are balance, cohesiveness, unity and sequentiality. balance equilibrium BlueStream Fairly balanced, menu and description have equal weight Good Canto Perfectly balanced space between assets and menu. Good symmetry Highly symmetrical sequence cohesion Not sequential at all. Menu are all over the place Less cohesive due to bad layout Highly sequential, with menu and item description well arranged Very cohesive unity simplicity density economy Poor unity with menu scattered all over the page. Simple layout Less dense and adequate whitespace. Fairly economical by displaying relevant features at a time. Good unity with compact units. Very simple layout but complicated menus Highly dense menu and operations. Might lead to mistakes. Less economic but space can be increased by closing the panes. Very homogenous Less homogenous, 2 David Chek Ling Ngo, Lian Seng Teo, John G. Byrne, Modelling interface aesthetics, Information Sciences, Volume 152, June 2003, Pages 25-46, ISSN 0020-0255, DOI: 10.1016/S0020-0255(02)00404-8. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/b6v0c- 475JVGT- /2/e99fc07cd985d1e0dbe1e8a692b547e1)
homogeneity rhythm order and complexity More rhythmic due to whitespace Less complex different style icons used. Less Rhythmic More complex Visuals Figure 4: Main page for BlueStream Figure 5: Canto Cumulus main page. (List of toolbar items in Appendix B.)
Figure 6: Adding assets the traditional way in Canto Cumulus Figure 7: Adding new assets in BlueStream Figure 8: Find window in Cumulus
Figure 9: Search results shown in Cumulus BlueStream vs. Telescope Telescope is a Digital Asset Management system that is used in many different industries, such as media and broadcasting, print and publishing, advertising and marketing, and education and government. Some of their customers include Warner Brothers, AOL, Bowling Green State University, Chevron, and Boeing. This product is created by North Plains Systems. This system allows users to upload digital content and share it with other people for collaboration purposes. It also allows users put their content into web pages and manage their uploaded content. Functionality Telescope has many features that are included with BlueStream, but it also has a lot more features than BlueStream. BlueStream also has some features that are not included in Telescope. One of these is basic image processing such as cropping. BlueStream also has the ability to save and share search queries; Telescope does not. We felt that this feature is important to have so you do not need to re-search in the future. Features such as drag-and-drop uploading and downloading or file repurposing are importing thing to have that BlueStream lacks but Telescope has. Overall, each has some nice features that the other does not have. Usability Navigation seems simple and straightforward. It seems overly simple, as if they are trying to cater to users who have not used this type of system before. This can be a positive attribute, but it may also not allow for as much flexibility in the creating, adding, and managing content. Adding assets is very easy with this product. Once you are logged in you can add assets by dragging and dropping them from any folder. There is also the method of uploading one file at a
time or doing a mass import of the files. This gives users the flexibility of how they want to add assets and in how much they can add at one time. If a large number of files are to be added, a user can perform a mass import and walk away while the files upload. Updating content is relatively easy because you can search and find the content by keyword metadata, icons, or tags, which allows you to find it more easily. Once the file is found you can edit the metadata, use it, preview it, or replace it with a new file. Meta data creation happens when a new asset is added. When a file is uploaded to the server it asks the user to enter information about the asset that is being add and also takes in information from the asset being added, shown in Figure 10. Since the system is compatible with many of the software products that people in business use every day it makes it easier for people to create and manage their metadata. The metadata model is flexible, which allows users to customize their metadata fields. It is not clear whether there are templates for metadata standards that exist or whether users have to create them. If they have to create them that would be a negative but it is a pro that you can customize the metadata. The system allows users to select security permissions upon upload of the data to the system. Users can select who has access to the content, but it is unclear how flexible the permissions system is. Aesthetically, Telescope is pretty good. It is certainly more attractive than BlueStream. It looks more modern, as well, because of the rounded corners and widget-looking design (Figure 11). Visuals Figure 10: Metadata and Security
Figure 11: Search Conclusion Our task was to evaluate the BlueStream interface with other market leaders in the Digital Asset Management (DAM) market based on criteria designed to identify potential areas of strength and weakness of BlueStream. We did a comparative study with three other DAM systems. These are Documentum Digital Asset Manager and Media WorkSpace, which is made by EMC, Cumulus by Canto, and Telescope made by North Plains. After trying a number of unsuccessful different options to arrange for a working trial to be used for evaluation, we settled on evaluating demo videos and other documentation about our competitors. These documents, mostly promotional video and user manuals, were used to gain insights about the usage of these systems. The comparison was done on three main criteria: functionality, usability, and aesthetics. To easily evaluate the usability criteria it was further broken down into small task based evaluations. The major findings of this stage are as follows: 1) Functionality : BlueStream lacks many features of its competitors, but considering the domain in which it is operated, they are not required. It fairs pretty well with its rivals when it comes to functionality. Most important strengths include a web interface, time-coded metadata, and audio-to-text capabilities. The features which BlueStream lacks are drag-and-drop to add assets, and Section 508 accessibility compliance. 2) Usability: On first accounts, the BlueStream system looks less usable than the other competitors. Most other systems allow for easy uploading of new assets and encoding of metadata by using existing features like drag and drop and clicking the metadata fields to change the information.
3) Aesthetic: Most other systems seem to be designed professionally and have a modern look, unlike BlueStream which looks crude. Some strengths of BlueStream are equilibrium, simplicity and homogeniality. The points where BlueStream can improve are balance, cohesiveness, unity, rhythm and sequentiality. Therefore competitive analysis with other systems helped identify the main areas of improvement for BlueStream.
Appendix A: Feature Matrix
Appendix B: List of Cumulus Toolbar Items 1. Connect To Server 2. Catalog assets 3. Update selected asset(s) 4. Delete selected record(s) and if required also the original asset(s) 5. Show Thumbnail View 6. Show Details View 7. Show Info View 8. Show Preview View 9. Show small thumbnails/previews when in 10. Show medium thumbnails/previews when Thumbnail / Preview View in Thumbnail / Preview View 11. Show large thumbnails/previews when in 12. Open Asset Information window Thumbnail View / Preview View 13. Open Preview window 14. Show assets as fullscreen previews and as slide show 15. Create slide show movie 16. Mail the assets represented by the selected record to an e-mail recipient 17. Open the Record Find window 18. Open a list from which you can select opening the Record Find window, the Find All option or performing saved search 19. Entry field for Quicksearch (Default: a queries contains search in the record fields Record Name, Notes, Keywords, and it is contained in one of the fields.) Categories. A search item will be found if 20. Perform a Quicksearch 21. Open a list of previous Quicksearch items 22. Show the first record from the collection 23. Show the previous record from the window s current selection 24. Show the next record from the collection window s current selection collection window s current selection 25. Show the last record from the collection window s current selection