In April 2016, I wrote in Distributed DAM: From silo to search engine:

“I wonder whether a modern DAM system should let us “manage” decentralized or distributed assets: We should to be able to not just find them within the DAM, but also add/edit metadata and rights information. […] Wouldn’t it be great to sign up to a fresh cloud DAM system and have it automatically index and link my Dropbox files, Google documents and Facebook photos – then letting me search and organize them?”

It’s great to see that Nuxeo and Picturepark (in my book, the two most innovative DAM vendors), are actually implementing this feature! (Can I make another wish now? 😎)

Picturepark product manager Olivia Schütt talks about this in Rethinking Digital Asset Management (the feature is planned for the upcoming Picturepark Content Platform):

“Social media posts, Google Docs, corporate messaging—these are all examples of content that you don’t want to have to save into a file just so it can be uploaded to a DAM. But companies need to manage this virtual content too, of which many are borne and live in web apps. […] If you can keep track of all these contents, and add the metadata you need, you make them findable and valuable to your internal teams. […] So this was our first thought—that we need to stop caring where content lives, where it needs to go, or what format it is in. Picturepark needed to become a content routing hub.”

Nuxeo has had a similar feature called Live Connect for a while:

“Nuxeo Live Connect links to the live version of your cloud-based files and freely integrates them with other content in the Nuxeo Platform’s workflow system. […] No matter whether your content is stored on file sharing platforms or within the Nuxeo Platform itself, users will benefit from a unified and powerful search. […] For example, files stored in Google Drive can be opened with a native Google Drive editor, such as Google Docs, or you can launch a third-party SaaS application, such as Lucidchart for editing flow chart/diagram files.”

Any other DAM systems which can do this?