februari 10, 2020
Here are our top 5 take aways from implementing Sitecore Content Hub. From Asset Migration to Taxonomies, we've got you covered.
You need an air-tight plan for asset migration
Asset migration is the most challenging part of most projects, and Content Hub is no exception. You have to move the existing assets and data to Content Hub somehow, so make sure that you can export metadata, properties, and taxonomies from your existing system. Moreover, make sure you have access to all of your assets (not just some of them!).
It’s crucial that you tell your client about your security concerns before you plan the asset migration, and it’s also essential to make sure that all of those assets are accessible and available to the agency you are working with so they can get the migration going.
Make sure your assets’ relations to products are exported (preferably to a spreadsheet). Without any parent (product) - child (asset) relationship specified, you won’t be able to search for assets related to a particular product. Other relevant relations should also be exported. Maybe the client has multiple sub-brands and has products under them. In this case, you must also migrate the brand-to-product relation.
Thankfully, we were able to confirm our access to the assets and meet the client’s security requirements thanks to planning and starting the conversation early on for asset migration. There were some minor delays during the migration process, and it would have been difficult to meet our deadline if we hadn’t started planning for the migration earlier. I strongly advise you do the same and plan early for asset migration for minimum delays!
Planning the Taxonomy / Metadata is vital
Make sure that you have a concrete understanding of how your client wants to set up their taxonomies and schema. This almost entirely relies on how your client’s users are going to facet and search for their assets. We were well exposed to our client’s use cases but not all from the beginning, so we had to make minor changes to the taxonomy model. A minor change is fine, but major changes to the taxonomy can impact the complexity of your implementation. Moreover, the introduction of unnecessary taxonomies will confuse users and make searching less elegant. Child/parent relations are different since even a minor change in child/parent relations may significantly affect the time required to refactor.
Make sure you're clear on the use-cases
This will ultimately shorten development time and reduce the time required to make changes and refactor while delivering a product which meets the user’s needs. This applies to more than just configuring taxonomies but to user group permissions. Make sure that you have a good hold on different types of user groups and what each user group is responsible for (and therefore which permissions they should have). Changing the permission rules is easy but keeping changes to a minimum is always ideal. Rather than merely working with an access level chart, we were able to give a more accurate access permission model after understanding each stakeholder’s use-case.
Understand your needs
It’s easy to work out connections to your existing apps using the Content Hub’s REST API and Web Client SDK. Consider which apps you need to connect to and why you need to connect them. Try to minimise external connections as they have a significant impact on the complexity and development time.
As with any implementation, it is important to get everyone on the same page. Getting everyone to understand the models and concepts is vital to ensuring that you completely understand how to best benefit fully from the product. Note, Content Hub supports features on top of DAM. Other popular models include Product Content Management (PCM), Project Management (MRM) and campaign/content management (CMP). Figure out which of these modules is beneficial to your organisation or your client before committing to them.
There are limitations
We learned to utilise some great features from Content Hub, including AI auto-tagging and auto-description. The AI auto-tagging function allows for consistency in tags and reduces time spent on content management. However, it is only limited to adding tags, dominant colours, and descriptions (it can’t set any other properties). Moreover, if the tags returned don’t meet the minimum confidence level (% configured in the rendition setting), it won’t tag anything to an asset, resulting in an asset without any tags unless tagged manually.
Get in touch
If you are considering a Content Hub project and need some support in getting it off the ground, why not get in touch with one of our experts here? We are always happy to discuss all things Sitecore, no matter what stage you’re at in your platform journey.
