Last week, we detailed the digital asset management tool Phraseanet and showed off just a small sample of what it can do. This time, we’ll be diving deeper into another digital asset management tool mentioned in our previous article New Spotlight: Digital Asset Management. Pimcore is another digital asset management tool that aims to encompass all aspects of asset management and customer experience. The Pimcore platform aims to integrate digital asset management, product information management, customer data, and digital commerce into a single, highly customizable platform.
Pimcore boasts an impressive usage number of over 100k global customers using their platform. Pimcore offers multiple versions including Platform as a Service (PaaS), Enterprise, Professional, and Community editions. While the community edition is free to use, the other deployment options offer additional features including service-level agreements, continuous support, and intellectual property protection. Pimcore can be deployed on-premises, in a private cloud, or as a platform as a service.
In this article, I’ll be looking at Pimcore and its “demo” version available for installation.
Installation
Pimcore can be installed manually or through a Docker image. I personally found the manual installation quite complicated with various dependency issues and errors occurring during the installation process. As such, if you wish to try Pimcore for yourself, I would recommend picking the Docker method for deployment. A basic guide on how to install Pimcore via Docker can be found here: https://pimcore.com/docs/platform/Pimcore/Getting_Started/Installation/Docker_Based_Installation. One thing I will note is that I ran into issues when trying to install Pimcore through Docker using the root user on Ubuntu. If you attempt to install it using the root user and run into issues, I would suggest switching to another user account and install it.
Pimcore has two versions that you can choose from; the “demo” version and the “skeleton” version. The demo version is already set up to replicate a full Pimcore deployment and already has web pages, documents, and assets present within it. The skeleton version, by contrast, is a bare bones version of Pimcore with nothing pre-configured. Pimcore’s official documentation recommends using the demo version if you’re new to Pimcore as there can be a learning curve when it comes to learning how Pimcore works. Personally, I found it much easier to understand how to use Pimcore by experimenting with the demo version first.
Demo Webpage
The demo version of Pimcore is preconfigured to display an ecommerce site dedicated to classic cars. There’s pages for purchasing cars and spare parts as well as news articles, event pages, and image galleries of cars. Of course, this is just a demo; the site isn’t actually configured to process purchases. These pages exist to give you a demonstration of what Pimcore can do and its many features as Pimcore can be used for more than digital asset management as previously stated.
To start making changes in Pimcore, we’ll need to access the Admin Panel. We can do so by accessing the /admin directory and logging in using our admin login credentials that we configured during the installation process.
Admin Panel
From the admin panel, you have access to Pimcore’s settings on the left sidebar. Before diving into the sidebar, you’ll probably see three options on the main page titled Documents, Assets, and Data Objects. These are the three main categories for elements within Pimcore. Documents can include webpages, links, and emails maintained by Pimcore. Assets can include various file formats and is where you would put digital assets. Data objects are used for structured data and can include objects such as customer data or orders. They are very similar to objects in object-oriented programming languages in terms of structure.
To add something to these categories, such as uploading a new asset to the Asset section, click on their button so you can see their drop-down menu. Right click and you should see a list of options relating to that category.
Sidebar
The Pimcore sidebar offers several categories of options for viewing assets, customization, and editing assets among others. The top-most option (represented by an image of a document) has several options within it. The Perspectives option allows you to view the contents of categories within Pimcore. For example, the Commerce perspective contains info on customer orders and the DAM perspective contains info on assets. There’s also options here to open assets, documents, and data objects, view a preview of the main Pimcore site, and close all tabs within Pimcore.
Outside of the main Pimcore features listed below, there are additonal buttons on the side bar for notifications and to view your user profile.
The gear option contains customization options for Pimcore. You can customize metadata types within Pimcore, Pimcore’s appearance, thumbnails, and tags among other settings.
The magnifying glass icon allows you to search for documents, assets, and data objects within Pimcore.
The people icon is dedicated to customer data. You can search and filter for customers based on parameters like location, name, and email. You can also set automation rules for handling customer accounts. For example, there’s a preset rule that designates a customer as a VIP Customer within Pimcore if a customer makes five or more orders on the site.
The star-like icon is for the Pimcore Datahub. The Datahub is a system that uses a GraphQL API to facilitate data delivery. Its primary purpose is to connect Pimcore to external systems like e-commerce websites.
Overall, this was only a small look at Pimcore and what it can do. While I found it somewhat confusing to navigate and configure Pimcore initially, using the demo version for some time has made me more accustomed to how Pimcore works. If you’re interested in learning how to use Pimcore, as previously mentioned, I’d recommend starting with the demo version of Pimcore until you feel you’re ready to configure your own Pimcore instance using the skeleton version.
In terms of functionality, I was quite impressed with what Pimcore offers, especially considering that this was the free version. If an organization has the ability to configure Pimcore to their desired specifications, I feel that Pimcore can be a powerful solution to digital asset management in addition to its customer management and e-commerce capabilities.
