DAM revolutionises the way files are handled in TYPO3. Files are tagged with metadata like copyright, description, author, date modified etc. All these fields can be used in frontend extensions. A good example is Juraj Sulek's css_filelinks in combination with dam_filelinks. Through TS you can choose the fields you want to show.

The concept of DAM is that for every file (Digital Asset) a record is created that holds metadata belonging to that file. Metadata can be extracted from the file with some of the extensions. Unfortunately the OpenOffice formats are not supported yet, but for pdf, doc and text files an abstract is created of the contents of the file that is searchable.

DAM uses absolute references to files. The latest beta05 also features a possibility to use the media tag to reference DAM files from within the RTE. This means that when you replace a file in DAM the file will also be replaced in the frontend. This was not possible before as TYPO3 creates copies of files by default in /typo3temp.

This is not my last DAM report ;-)