If you’re shopping for a DAM product, be ready for some very pretty-looking new interfaces. But also remember, you can’t live on eye-candy alone. Slick does not mean more business-useful.

One of the most striking trends underway in theDAMspace right now (indications of which were abundantly present in the exhibitor booths at this year’sHenry Stewart DAM Symposiumin New York) is the rush toward Adobe Flex-based client interfaces. The obligatory charcoal-and-pewter look and feel is everywhere, it seems.

Of course, the significance of Adobe Flex isn’t the color scheme but the underlying technology. We’vewrittenabout some of the technical issues with Flex before. The significance to buyers right now (as my colleague Theresa Regli made clear in her Monday morning presentation at the Henry Stewart show) is merely that the rush to a new technology — however sound (or problematic) that technology might be — entails risk, and early adopters of the new Flex-based DAM systems will need to have the patience and willingness to deal with the unexpected quirks and annoyances that inevitably surface whenever Version 1.0 of something goes into production. And like it or not, the first-generation Flex UIs are tantamount to Version 1.0 software. There will be kinks to work out.

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