<p>Trying to locate a specific video or image from among more than 100,000 digital assets spreadacross 17,000 electronic folders can easily become an exercise in frustration. That was a commonoccurrence at Messer Construction Co. before it implemented a digital asset management strategy in2010.</p><p>Although digital content such as photographs, drawings and videoswere playing an increasingly key role in Messer's marketing efforts, the Cincinnati companyretained a very basic approach to storing that material: Divide it up into folders stored on asingle network drive.</p><p>Marketers and designers uploaded content to that shared drive, and other users could then digaround to find what they wanted and download it to their own computers. But as richmedia files proliferated on the drive, it became difficult to find the right content. As aresult, users often grabbed old versions of content by mistake or ended up reusing items they hadearlier copied to their hard drives.</p><p>"Using a search function to look within 100,000 files for text on a network drive takes a long,long time," said Sean Davis, a marketing specialist at Messer. "Searching only the file name mightbe more efficient, but that means you're relying on 100,000 assets being named as you would havenamed them."</p><p><a href="http://searchcontentmanagement.techtarget.com/feature/Rich-media-flood-pushes-digital-asset-management-strategy-to-forefront">Keep reading...</a></p>