Tips and Tricks for Successful Asset Management

When it comes to success asset management in Ingeniux CMS, it’s all about preparation, organization, and a solid understanding of key features in the CMS that can help users find and manage the right assets.

Here are six tips that will help you keep your site’s assets organized, relevant, and optimized.

Define an Organizational Structure Early – and Stick to It

Before you begin uploading new assets to the CMS, plan out the organization structure of the Asset Tree. Build out all of the folders you think you’ll need for assets and label them so that users in the CMS will understand where certain assets belong.

Leaving the organizational structure of the Asset Tree open to different groups working in the CMS without any guidelines for how things should be labelled or where certain types of assets belong can make it difficult to keep assets organized and turn standard maintenance tasks – like cleaning up unused assets – into a huge headache.

Watch the tutorial on best practices for defining an asset organization structure.

Set Security on Assets to Quickly Get Users to the Assets They Need

Set up security groups and use them to show folders to users who need to access them, while hiding folders from other departments that they won’t need to see them. When a user uses the select dialog on an asset field, or in the WYSIWYG field, they won’t see assets that are hidden in the Asset System.

For more information on this subject, see our documentation on setting asset security.
https://support.ingeniux.com/knowledge-base/documentation/cms-10/assets/setting-properties-on-assets/asset-security

Watch the tutorial on setting security on assets. 

Use Copy/Paste to Automatically Apply Existing Security and Settings to a New Folder

Once you’ve set the desired security and settings on a folder, you can copy/paste that folder to create a new folder with the same security and settings. This will save you from having to re-apply those security and settings on the new folder you wish to create.

Watch the tutorial on using copy/paste to auto-apply settings on asset folders.

Use Find and Replace to Root Out Unused Assets

The find and replace tool has a mode for searching for unused assets by asset folder. You can use this to clean up your asset system and make your site more efficient.

You also get an unused asset report when you upgrade the CMS, so if your site has too many assets in it to run the report folder by folder in find and replace, you can run the upgrade against a copy of your CMS to get the report without taking up resources from your CMS.

Watch the tutorial on using find and replace to find and remove unused assets. 

Avoid Overly Large Files Whenever Possible

By default, users can upload any size file to the CMS, which often results in images that are too large for fast presentation on your pages. You can limit the file size of each type of content by editing the Max File Size on the schema.

If there are some groups that are allowed to upload larger files, you can create new schemas based on the same type and use security to split the two groups.

Watch the tutorial on best practices for uploading files to the asset manager. 

Search by Schema Data

The internal CMS search tool can search through all of the fields in your schema data. On an asset’s schema, you can store many important searchable pieces of content in the fields there, such as a list of people who appear in an asset, where you licensed an asset from, or vendors that worked on a document. Then, if you were to need to find assets with certain metadata associated with it – for example, if you need to replace all images with a certain person in them – you can simply search for that schema data and bring up all assets with that data associated with it.

Watch the tutorial on how to search by schema data.