Nikonians, an online community of passionate amateur and professional photographers that started back in the year 2000, use entrilion as their backend for all things around their content production. Authors, editors and publishing staff are using the cloud-based content management and collaboration solution, often working out of their home offices.

As an online community, Nikonians produce a lot of content and are dependent on efficient workflows to optimally utilize scarce resources. We have been sitting down discussing with the Nikonians team how they are using entrilion and share what we have learned here. 

Head-up display show main EXIF and workflow status attributes, while notifications of current activities are shown in a stream

Digital assets

Assets, such as raw text copy, reusable snippets, high resolution and smaller scaled images, icons and videos are stored in the system, tagged according to projects or campaigns they are working on. The team is using a combination of manually created collections and automatically generated “smart” ones to organize their content.

Image assets can be viewed as thumbnails or in detail form, sorted and filtered according to various criteria

Publishing workflow

Their main workflow is publishing-driven, where blogs, articles and other output is queued in lists.  Each such list has its own status, like “Blogs in progress” or “Articles for final review” and each view is adapted to suite the user and role.

The tasks lists are configurable per user, showing what is required to work on including priorities and deadlines

Teams & roles

The team members are all given regular “User” or “Admin” access, whereas partners who are maybe working on touch-up of images, content translations or providing voice-over for videos, are connected with restricted access, e.g. “Client” or a specific “Project User” access.

Team meetings are held online with the secure group-chat functionality, while the members are discussing and annotating the items directly in the system.

Nikonians have given their different teams, e.g. marketing, publishing and IT/development separate groups in entrilion, making the access restrictions easy to manage, while using cross-group functionality like “notifications” and “chats” without the need to switch between the groups. They use “copy to group” when more than one group should have access to certain content.

One of the Nikonians members creating wonderful photographs while at the Nikonians ANPAT photo trip 2016.
Photograph copyright (c) by J Ramon Palacios, co-founder of Nikonians

Brainstorming and collecting ideas

Brainstorming and collecting ideas for e.g. new photography workshops is done with the live document functionality (online note taking with formatting and image inclusion) together with the link sharing. When sharing links to websites, the websites are automatically visited and the content is stored as a PDF document, which can be discussed and annotated, a feature often used to organize content.

What has improved compared to before?

The main differences for the Nikonians team compared to their older workflows:

• No longer need to use email

• No need for insecure file sharing

• One place for all content together with all discussions, not spread around on different systems, servers and drives

• Up-to-date, correct versions of assets

• Easy to see where what assets are being used

• Overview of current status for each team member

• No need for separate calendars and Excel sheets to organize daily work

• Easier to brainstorm and discuss ideas together

   

What's next?

If you want to learn more about how your team can improve your content collaboration and digital workflow, just send us a note and we will help!