Why La Poste Group migrated its media to Ephoto Dam

In 2016, La Poste Group undertook a revamp of its media library used internally to supply media to intranet files, magazines, and mobile apps. Since the solution that they had in place was no longer satisfactory, the Group’s image team decided to explore other options.

“Until recently, the media library was the only place where staff could find visuals”, explains David Drujon, La Poste Group’s Director of Internal Media.

The problem was that the software that they had installed hadn’t been updated in several years, wasn’t especially stable, and, above all, no longer met the Group’s needs. “That solution had degraded over the years”, he adds.“What’s more, there was no thesaurus and few features. It was really more of a management tool”.

In spite of the fact that the image team had added keywords when uploading files, the media were poorly indexed and there was no management of user rights. Additionally, there were no specific rules. This gave rise to many risks and an aging media database. “Clearly, the solution wasn’t working for us anymore and staff weren’t using it” David says. “That’s not to mention the fact that media were scattered and not at all shared. Additionally, when we would search for visuals, they were very hard to find”.

The Group first conducted an internal audit to identify the various people within the Group who might use the media library (communications staff, computer graphics designers, media liaisons, etc.) and to find out what those people expected from a tool. The goal was for the new platform to get buy-in and have all users contribute to it. “We first surveyed the land before launching our request for proposals,” explains David Drujon. “We then met with several software publishers, but it was Einden’s offering that blew us away. Since they’re a smaller company than the other candidates, we weren’t expecting their solution to be as strong as it is in terms of intuitiveness, performance, the user experience, and features”.

Once the choice was made, the Group’s various entities (La Banque Postale, the network of post offices, the services-mail-packages branch, etc.) began working together on creating a thesaurus that would take into account the special needs of each entity. “We absolutely had to change our way of thinking in order to harmonize our indexing,” says David Drujon. “It was important to use the right words to describe the various photos. The way that indexing works in Ephoto Dam turned out to be very useful because it’s simple, fast, and encourages contributions and collaboration.” All of the media present in the previous solution were transferred and the Einden team handled their integration into the new tool after a massive selection operation. “We started with 65,000 media, but we ended up only keeping 1,500,” Mr. Drujon adds.

However, those 1,500 media are treated differently compared to before: now, all media over three years old are sent to the archives. Indeed, in Ephoto Dam, you can assign an expiration date for each file on which it will be automatically sent to the archives.

“The logos and communications media of our various brands (La Banque Postale, Geopost, Chronopost, etc.) change regularly, as does our colleagues’ fashion, for example. So, we eliminated numerous photos while keeping a legacy database” explains David Drujon.

Today, Ephoto Dam is home to a little over 4,000 media and more will soon be added. However, contributions from external users are limited because the Group has rigorous management of user rights. The library also has few videos because they’re considered too perishable. “They’re typically for one-off events,” says David. Because they’re focused on the here and now, they’re naturally short-lived.

The platform’s interface (the front office) was also customized in collaboration with the software publisher. “We wanted something simple with full-text access, an option to search by organization (five branches), and access via a directory of keywords,” explains Mr. Drujon. “We did our own segmentation with access also by ‘collections’ (each collection corresponds to a business branch). So, according to the employee’s position, they’re given appropriate user rights”.

This next-generation media library is a full-fledged platform within the Group and sits alongside other systems. “Because our systems are multifaceted and our directories are complex, we wanted the DAM system to be autonomous,” explains David Drujon. “Ephoto Dam does have plugins, but he hasn’t used them yet.” As for the hosting of media, it was outsourced and entrusted to Einden.

One thing is for sure: the platform offered by Einden was able to win over a big corporation like La Poste Group. In addition to the software’s many features, its ergonomics, its intuitiveness, and its price, La Poste Group was also attracted by the publisher’s flexibility and responsiveness. “I also think the dashboard dedicated to statistics is very useful,” David concludes. “It allows us to track traffic on the platform and the number of visits per person, but it also gives us a search history, allows us to identify unsuccessful searches (so that indexing problems can be resolved and media can be added to the database to meet users’ expectations), and gives us a history of selected files (so that we can track the usage rate of a photo over time)”.