Users of Brand Portal

[FabianaBa]

Hello community of Brand Portal customers,

I am interested to have a chat with anyone interested in sharing your experience in using Brand Portal in your organisations. I am in the initial phase of implementing BP and really interested to hear your experiences as a digital asset management side of things (and not a developer). If you are available for a chat give me a shout here or contact me via my email: fabiana.barticioti@ba.com and we can take from there.

Thank you,

Fabi

[Adilos-Cantuerk]

Hi Fabi, 

i am interested to join this chat.
We are currently implementing BP and my experiences are not that old and i do not have a lot of time with the system yet.
I have currently a few struggles to get this up and running.
So i might tell you a bit about the challenges we currently have and some good news how we fixed a few of the challenges we had along the way.
First - it was a struggle to find a method to make it visible within AEM if an Asset is already published to Brandportal. The Publish search filter doesn't differenciate between published to AEM and published to BP.
Now we added a pulldown in the metadata schemata, that refers to "./jcr:content/dam:portalReplicationAction" and has the two pulldown options Published (which refers to "Activate") and "Not published (which refers to "Deactivate").
Second struggle was that the connection between AEM and BP has this bug that moving a file within the AEM disconnects the file from its Brand Portal counter. The file stays in Brand Portal, but can't be unpublished any more. Deleting is the only option. 
This is a bit connected with a workflow that we are currently working on. How to make it so, that as soon as a file is updated in any way (changed title, updated version, new metadata entry...) this file then gets also updated within brandportal. Step1 The Launcher checks if the file has an update Step 2 The launcher checks if the file has"./jcr:content/dam:portalReplicationAction" set to activate - then publishes the file again.
Similar workflow had to be build for assets that reached their expiry date.
Biggest Problem so far - still work in progress is - Digital Rights Management.
This works as described within AEM but since the BP is its own repository - and does not have a pipeline connected to it - every license setting we have in /apps/settings/dam/drm/licenses/example.html" or "/conf/company-name/settings/dam/drm/licenses" will not transfer to BP and therefore will not work in BP since the path of the license has to be valid. How to make a valid licence path within BP? Nobody could tell me so far.
I do not want to hijack this conversation - in case somebody wants to see any update on this - here ...
Other than that - everyone was very disappointed when it was said that the smart-crops do not transfer as a setting over to BP. Very sad. That leaves only the static renditions, which nobody really needs except the system itself and the Image Presets.
Since it is not possible to create User Groups within B P, there is no real way to make a user group that is able to see Folder A but not Folder B - so it became unusable for "secret" projects, except if the user group is very small and you do not have many secret projects. 
This shrinked the scope and usablilty in a way.
Other than that - most of my struggles with this system come from the fact that i can not deploy settings from my PROD enviroment. I can publish settings, but as soon as i want to edit search rail mimetype predicates, i can either choose to have all 100 filetypes or none. No way to make it slimmer or give it the wording our users would understand. I have created multiple tickets and talked to our consulting agency about these problems.
One thing i have heard is, that Adobe is trying to get a fix for the - moving a file disconnects it - thingy and with a bit of luck will deploy it this year.
I hope i did not spoil to much. I will try to keep this tread updated on any progress.

[sogden]

Hello Adilos,  were you able to set up Asset Contribution folders to users on Brand Portals?  If so can you please tell me how you made that happen.  I try to add members to the asset contribution folder upon creation however a user o brand portals is not autopopulating, therefore unable to add a user to the shared folder.  That user is not an author user but only brand portals and we would like to keep it that way.

suzanne

[Adilos-Cantuerk · Accepted solution]

I have set up an Asset Contribution folder in the BP. 
Created it within the PROD enviroment and published this over to BP.
Now here comes the thing i suspect to be the problem here.
Do you have CUGs?
https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-65/administering/security/cug.html?lang=e....

[sogden]

yes, i believe our integrator created CUGS, however I am not able to edit or change them as it is not accessible to me.  If you have a suggestion I can take to my superiors please provide.

[Adilos-Cantuerk]

Without having a look into the settings, i can only guess what could cause the issue.
You will need the user you want to enable to upload assets to the dedicated brandportal folder to have the right permissions, but in the BP you can only add a ClosedUserGroup to the folder and not a user directly. 
So you need a CUG that contains the user in question.
Then you can add this GUG to the folder.
My actual advice would be this:
Get in touch with the person who is able to create User Groups and talk to him about the situation. It is hard to fix something when you do not have the right permissions.
Most likely it is not even a task for you to fix.
So get the right people on board and have a look on the situation together. I cross my fingers to you that this gets a quick fix as soon as the right people are on the problem! Good luck!!