Introduction
So, you've signed up for Dash? Congratulations! 🎉
You are one step closer to the nirvana of effortless digital asset management. This guide shows you the key next steps to get you up and running, organised as follows:
How to get help, and applying your theme
Preparing your asset organisation structure
Importing your assets
Considering your upload workflows
Deploying your assets
Further Dash customisation
Inviting your users
If at any point you need any help, just use the in-app chat and we'll be very happy to help and/or book in a call.
1. Before you get started
How to get support
First things first, if you or your users ever need help, we have plenty of resources for you, from this help centre through to our live in-app chat.
Theme your Dash
Before you go any further, the first thing you should definitely do is theme your Dash. This makes your Dash more recognisable to your users and gives it a familiar feel.
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2. Preparing your Dash organisation structure
Now you've got your head around the basics of Dash, it is time to start getting it set up.
Folders & Fields
One of the core methods of organising your assets is by using folders and fields. Folders are your typical hierarchical organisational structure, and fields are additional information you can store about your assets. Used together, you can make your assets incredibly easy to find by your users.
Folders are special in that they are tied to:
Permissions. So if you want to control which users can see or edit which assets, you want to group those different assets into different folders
Portals. If you want to create public views of your Dash, this is also tied to folders.
Think about:
What search terms your users will use to try and find assets
What real-world information you could store about your assets
Make sure that information is available either as a folder or a field.
3. Importing your assets
You can bulk import assets into Dash easily, using a few methods:
Migrate assets in existing cloud storage (we can do this for you!)
Upload smaller batches of assets directly into Dash by dragging them onto your Dash in your browser.
We generally recommend importing your assets as a priority. Don't worry about organising them first - it is usually easier to import them into an "Import" folder in Dash, and the re-organise them once there. This gets your assets into Dash faster, and allows them to be instantly more searchable than before as our auto-tags will have been applied to them.
4. Consider your workflows for ongoing uploads
Now you've imported your assets, you want to set things up so that ongoing contributors are submitting assets to your Dash in a way that works for you.
Think about all the ways that colleagues and partners create assets for you, and how they currently submit them to you, and how that would look using Dash.
Some features that are worth checking out are:
Upload approvals - requiring specific users to submit assets for approval by an admin before they become searchable by the wider user base.
Recommended fields - ask contributors to complete specific fields to help keep your data up to date and useful
Permissions - control what folders your contributors can see and upload to
5. Deploying your assets
There are many ways you can put your assets to work:
Downloading
Consider setting up preset sizes for commonly-used crops and resizes, to save your users time having to do this manually after downloading.
Sharing
Learn about the various sharing methods available to you in Dash, from temporary one-off expiring links, to ongoing collaborative collections, to public portals.
Customise what information about your assets is made visible to visitors of public share pages.
Integrations
We have a wide variety of integrations that you can view from the Admin > Integrations page, including:
6. Customise Dash
Just before you start inviting users, take note of a few features that let you customise the appearance of Dash.
Choose what fields are shown on the Filters panel and what order they appear in. Control this from Admin > Filters.
Customise what information is shown underneath asset thumbnails on the "All assets" screen, to make the most useful information immediately available to your users. Customise this from Admin > Fields > Thumbnail display.
7. Giving others access
By now you will have:
Understood the basics of Dash
Set up some folders and fields
Imported some assets
Configured your uploading preferences
Learnt about downloading and sharing
Customised how filters and thumbnails are shown
Now you're ready to invite your users!
As before, think about what permissions you'd like your users to have. Should they have full view and edit access to everything, or would you like to restrict access to certain users can only view but not edit certain folders, or not see some folders at all. All of this can be configured using Permissions.
Once you've set up the desired Permission Groups, you can start inviting your users!
You're all set!
Congratulations - you are now well on your way to unlocking the value of your assets 😀 .
If you have any other questions or aren't quite sure how to make the most of Dash, just get in touch using the in-app chat and we'll be very glad to help you.