Bejo's Innovative Media database

Visit Website
Tools & Apps
Winner

Summary

The mediaplatform of vegetable seed breeder BEJO was ten years old and due for an update. The mediabank functioned and was used regularly but was not extensive enough for the intended purposes, the collection of data and the sharing of media could also be improved. With a new platform and new features BEJO employees would have a far better user experience with more possibilities within the tool.

Case description

BEJO approached Synetic to develop a new Media database. A digital platform on which BEJO employees worldwide (over thirty countries) could simply locate all media and branding options which they would need for their marketing- and communication-outings.

Case goals and results

The aim of this project was to develop a media database that offers BEJO employees both nationally and internationally the opportunity to easily develop communications through one platform, share media and communicate according to the latest house style guidelines.

The media database is accessible and easy to maintain. In the Bejo Brand Portal, thanks to our open source module Media Bulk Upload for Drupal 8, administrators can upload images much faster than was the case with the old media database. The module automatically determines the correct media type for all uploaded files. This way, a user does not have to create each item individually but can upload hundreds of files at once via drag and drop.

The result is a satisfied customer, with the ability to upload images 16x faster.
“Thanks to the simple layout and automatic tagging, we can now put 500 images in the media database in under one hour. That first took us two days!”
- Petra Tesselaar, Bejo -

Challenges

The main challenge was improving the productivity of the employees by automation of their responsibilities. Which we accomplished by implementing a DAM-system (Digital asset management system).

For all challenges we encountered we developed a contrib modules which we made available for the community. Hereby an overview of the contribs we developed;

1. Automated tagging and enrichment of information for media items.
By creating an API integration with Google Cloud Vision we can automatically enrich images with tags, in a later stadium we could also add colours and other features.

2. Automated creation of thumbnails for media which are not images
For media types such as video, documents and RAW images we integrated Cloud Convert. Cloud Convert creates thumbnails based on the type of file and imports the created files in Drupal.

3. Migration a closed source DAM system to Drupal
A DAM system contains complex data structures which had to be migrated to Drupal standards. To be able to do this we had to thoroughly look at the data and migrate it to Drupal Media Entities.

4. Integrating a closed source PIM system with Drupal for enrichment of the product information of the media items.
For an easy use of the DAM system an integrated search option based on the race of the product was to be implemented. For this we had to enrich the media items with the product information. For example; If you search on ‘carrot’ you would receive all images containing a carrot.

5. Improve productivity with uploading and adding images.
We created a bulk upload option which would automatically match the media type to the correct contenttype. So in a batch we could upload video and images and the system would match them accordingly.

6. Collection of packets of media items and sharing them with colleagues within the DAM system.
Marketing teams could collaborate to create collections of media items. We developed a module called the Entity collector to support this. The module enables the user to collect all types of Drupal entities and create a collection of it.

7. Enable a download of a wide variety of variations of the existing file, in this case, different file sizes.
We created a ‘File downloader’ plugin which facilitates a widget which could create a download link per content type. In the admin interface it is possible to determine per content type if a download link should be available and what the download options are. In this case we created the options ‘original’ and ‘low resolution’. It can be expanded to support Word documents in combination with Cloud Convert so that we are able to provide the option ‘PDF’ as well.

Community contributions

During the project we created 8 Drupal contrib modules, these are all listed on Drupal.org;

https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_collector
https://www.drupal.org/project/cloudconvert
https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_collector_downloader
https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_collector_notify
https://www.drupal.org/project/file_downloader
https://www.drupal.org/project/navigation_blocks
https://www.drupal.org/project/media_bulk_upload
https://www.drupal.org/project/google_cloud_vision

Why should this case win the splash awards?

We have created a new and impressive DAM system based on Drupal 8. We simultaneously helped out our customer BEJO, for which we made a system which saves them a lot of time and costs, and contributed to the Drupal community by releasing these modules as separate contribs which are easy and flexible to use.