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Overview

We discussed our proposed POC and folder structures with both the Digital Merchandising and Digital Brand teams, in order to understand how moving, deleting and duplicating assets might bring about challenges in the way in which we implement workflows in Cloudinary. This is a summary from that meeting, detailing how each team may or may not need to carry out any of the 3 actions previously mentioned - moving, deleting or duplicating assets.

Moving assets​

  • Digital Merchandising are unlikely to move assets between folders, more likely to duplicate the asset and reuse it with another SKU if necessary.
  • Having the ability to reorder assets within a set is important. It seems that reordering will rely on renaming assets, but only the number on the end of a filename will change rather than the folder so this won't affect the asset path.
  • Assets within Gallery or Triptych folders are changed frequently. This can be reordering or fully replacing the set. In the meeting, we suggested that the team will be able to go into folders, update assets and approve it and then it will be synced with Hybris. The challenge here will be in which cases we replace the whole set with new assets, and in which cases we add new images to an existing set.
  • Digital Brand generally don’t move folders or assets "unless they are in the wrong place". In Amplience, this wouldn't break the image URL so we need to be clear about the fact that this will break the URL if done in Cloudinary, or we prevent them from moving assets since it isn't functionality that they need its just something that they do from time to time.

Deleting assets​

  • We need to remove assets from Cloudinary that are no longer in use, in order to keep our account as lean as possible.
  • For Digital Merch, products are unapproved in Hybris in cases where we do not want to show them on the website and we do not want them to be indexed. Currently when products are unapproved, the assets are not moved or deleted.
  • There are (roughly) three reasons that Digital Merch might unapprove a product - it is out of stock, we are awaiting stock for a new product that hasn't launched yet, or the product is no longer for sale. Sometimes products are only unapproved for a few days, e.g. whilst waiting for end of season sale to start.
  • If we want to delete unapproved assets or move them to cold storage, we may need 2 statuses in Hybris - one for when a product is no longer being sold and therefore is actually unapproved, and another for when a product might be only temporarily unapproved or on hold i.e. out of stock or awaiting stock. In the case where a product is no longer being sold and it is not going to be displayed on the site anymore, we can move that asset to cold storage.
  • Before sending an asset to cold storage we could implement a process such as the user unapproves the product in Hybris, then a notification is sent to Merch to say which assets associated with that product are going to be removed from Cloudinary and then we could say we will automatically delete them in 5 days or it could be a manual action to approve the removal
  • Digital Brand don’t have any unapproval or cleanup process currently. The same image can be used in multiple stories, so unless we have a notification system there is a risk that a page could be broken during cleanup if we choose to introduce a cleanup process.
  • Content pages aren’t even taken down currently, we have old content that is still live with no page views for years / months, or that hasn’t been checked for broken assets.
  • Currently Digital Brand are using mannequin images from the Merch folder in Amplience in content pages. If going forward Merch want to remove an image from Cloudinary because it is for an unapproved product, this could have a negative impact on our content pages with broken links.
  • Ideally, we should be replacing those images even if the content piece is still relevant and we want it live, the products shown should be live products not items that we no longer sell. However, another workflow or notification system would need to be put in place for this.

Duplicating assets​

  • Digital Brand will also sometimes duplicate merchandise images to use them
  • Digital Merch are going to start using a mix of brand images and mannequin images in a single component e.g. a triptych going forwards. This presents challenges because we will rely on images using the agreed naming convention in order for them to be correctly synced with Hybris. If the asset removal process mentioned above is put in place, these images can't be used by both teams and so duplication will be necessary
  • Digitial Merch duplicate some product images if the product SKU is different but the product still looks the same e.g. version 5 and version 6 of the same product. They will duplicate the image, rename to the correct SKU and re-upload it.
  • Duplication across the Digital Brand and Digital Merch parts of Cloudinary may be necessary, since brand keep stories live for much longer than Merch keep products live. We have a potential cleanup process for Merch that is clearer than for Brand. We don’t want that cleanup process to result in broken content on the Brand side of things, nor do we want that process to not happen because Brand and Merch are using the same assets. In that case, neither parts of Cloudinary would be being cleaned up.