Acquia DAM Certification

This is a guide to learn how to become an Acquia DAM certified administrator.

Our sandbox Acquia DAM environment can be found here: https://tpximpact.widencollective.com/

Request a login on #dx_tech channel in Slack

Once you are in, head over to The Widen University and run through their training courses from top to bottom: https://university.widen.com/.

Take them at the pace you want and make notes as you head through. A couple of hours a week is probably enough.

There's also a Drupal site setup here that you can use to see how the Drupal integration works. Ask in #dx_tech for login details.

Apps

In the top left corner you can switch between different apps:

• Assets is the main Digital Asset Management function.

• Entries is a product management tool.

• Insights provides analytics information about the DAM usage

• Portals are mini websites (DAM as a CMS).

• Admin is the admin functions across the whole site. Not really an app, but that's where it is.

Links

• API Documentation

• Developer's API Blog

• API FAQs

• Widen Connect (Support site)

API token

To create an API token:

Goto Admin --> Global settings --> API Setup --> New integration

Give your token a name and description (and you can create as many tokens as you wish). You'll be prompted to associate the token with a user account, so select your own account for now. Tokens are architected so that the account's role permissions are associated with each token.

Roles and asset groups

There are three roles set up : Site Admin, Uploader and General User.

There are four asset groups: Public Assets, Restricted Assets, For Review Assets and Admin Only Assets.

Asset groups and roles each have their own permission structure, and it is the relationship between roles and asset groups that form the basis of the granular, scalable governance model of Acquia DAM (a major differentiator among all other DAMS) as to which user roles can interact with which asset groups, and at what permission level.

Metadata

There is a basic metadata type (Widen refers to the metadata schema as a "type") named Primary Metadata Type. When you upload files to the DAM you choose its type (and so the schema) which determines what field then need to be filled in. A type may be 'copyrighted image' for example which who have fields like attribution to say who owns the image.

You may add fields to this metadata type, and you may add more metadata types. Again, scalable and configurable.

From the Admin dashboard you may add more metadata fields to your metadata type (the more controlled vocabulary fields, the better), then later you can add additional metadata types (no limit to the number of types or fields within a type).

Upload profiles

There are four upload profiles: Public Assets, Restricted Assets, For Review Assets and Admin Only Assets. These upload profiles are also permission controlled, and assign uploaded assets into their corresponding asset groups.