Latest Digital Asset Management News & Articles

Some web publishing and content management vendors choose to develop their native DAM products, others acquire DAM companies, and some choose to integrate.

WoodWing Software (news, site) followed the latter path and partnered with celum to add some Digital Asset Management capabilities to its web publishing platform Content Station.

Many of us these days are Google lovers, including MediaBeacon (news, site), who just announced that the next release of their Digital Asset Management suite will utilize the latest version of the Google Web Toolkit.

The Google Web Toolkit aims to do handy things like make it easier for developers to build faster apps and to speed up the overall development cycle. For MediaBeacon, the incorporation aims at four specific areas:

• User Experience: This one is stock. With the kit customers to change their environments in a reported 30 minutes.
• Portability: Thanks to Google's popularity, the solution will be supported by all major operating systems and internet browers.
• Open and Easy: MediaBeacon customer can now plug-and-play into a widget environment. For example, a user can now add Google Docs as a widget into a MediaBeacon environment.
• Scalability: MediaBeacon reports better server scalability and network efficiencies because of how Google Web Toolkit serves up the widgets in a client's workspace.

"Google Web Tooklit radically improves the web experience for users by allowing developers to create exactly what MediaBeacon has done in the next release of their product," said Andrew Bowers, Product Manager for GWT for Google. "We are pleased about MediaBeacon using our web framework in an enterprise solution with such a rich user experience."

MediaBeacon DAM 3.0 is scheduled to ship at the end of this year, but if you're dying to get more information before then, hit up the webcast about the implementation on December 17th.

Open source Enterprise CMS provider Nuxeo (news, site) continues to grow its product suite by adding DAM (Digital Asset Management) to the existing ECM and DM (Document Management) capabilities.

This announcement came out at the just wrapped Gilbane Boston conference (see our coverage here, check Twitter activity).

Equilibrium (news, site), a digital asset and media manager, has introduced MediaRich for Extensis Portfolio NetMediaMAX. Through a strategic technology partnership with Extensis, Extensis will integrate Equilibrium’s MediaRich into the release of Extensis Portfolio Server and associated products.

The latest edition of ADAM Software's (news, site) digital asset management suite aims to remove the drudgery of managing assets and improve how it plays with other software.

Competition to provide document management in the cloud is always fairly stiff, but with the addition of CyanGate’s S-Dive to Salesforce.com’s (news, site) AppExchange, it’s likely to get even stiffer.

What this new partnership will do is to give companies that sign up for a single company account with AppExchange unlimited space in the Amazon cloud to store content of any kind and share it by simply downloading it from within the Salesforce.com platform.

Offering a white-label service to video content publishers, now any business can get on-board the online video train thanks to Reality Digital's (news, site) Spotlight.

Digital Asset Management expert ADAM Software (news, site), who has enjoyed major growth recently, adds further expertise to help into move into new markets and marketplaces.

Enterprise MediaBeacon does digital asset management and distribution in a big way but is looking to keep expanding with the addition of a new Vice President of Marketing and Business Development

MediaBeacon has been doing DAM for ages but that hasn't stopped the company from looking to keep innovating. To that end, it has hired Tom Rieger, ex-IBM, Informix and FileNet director with years of business development experience to take up the reins and move things along.

He says, “I look forward to shaping a dynamic and aggressive enterprise software marketing function to successfully build a brand and market presence to advance the company's revenue growth strategies and to expand market share throughout the world.”

With MediaBeacon Enterprise DAM already 15 years in the market and a SaaS version (hosted or on-site), it will be interesting to see what Rieger comes up with to push the company forward. 

Given the number of up and coming DAM outfits, such as Tradeclips and DAM solutions like Equilibrium for SharePoint, Rieger may have his work cut out for him.

 Windows 7 is now compatible with Soft Xpansion's (news, site) Print to Document SDK, the company's technology that allows the installation of virtual printers. "Virtual" because they don't exist and, because they don't exist, don't actually print anything.

The folks at Xinet have been busy. They have announced the simultaneous release of their WebNative Suite 16.0 and the 3.0 version of their Video support module. The developers behind the popular DAM products have been listening intently to their clients. The new releases address a laundry list of requested features and concerns raised on their forums, and in the technical press.

In this guest article Widen Enterprises CEO, Matthew Gonnering, argues that customers have a lot to learn from (and demand of) SaaS software vendors.

SaaS providers have access to metrics that validate current Digital Asset Management (DAM) strategies in addition to identifying areas for increasing the return on the investment in the technology. If you're not getting this data or if you've not being paying attention to it, it's time to sit up in your chair.

Canto, a digital asset management solutions provider that operates out of both San Francisco and Berlin, released the second scheduled update to their Cumulus 8 product line as promised.

Canto Cumulus is a cross-platform that enables users to organize and track their digital files. Arguably the coolest part of Canto 8.0.2, the newest version, is its compatibility with Mac OS X Snow Leopard and the forthcoming Microsoft Windows 7.

Content to syndication service StudioNow takes its video system to the cloud to offer companies a complete package for selling video online.

Day's customer? Evaluating Day CQ5 CMS? CMS geek generally curious about the present and the future of web content management? Check out Day’s (news, site) Ignite 2009 customer summit scheduled to take place in Zürich (October 14-15, 2009) and Chicago (October 28-29, 2009).

Day’s plan for this event is, mainly, to share strategies and customer stories around CQ5 Web CMS that was released in November 2008. CQ5.2 that came out earlier this year included new DAM and Social Collaboration features.

There are several tracks planned at the summit, including business and technical. The business track is focused on CMS project objectives, CQ5 selection and criteria, and CQ5 business results. In the technical track, attendees will look into CMS project objectives and implementation plan, CQ5 deployment details, and lessons learned in best leveraging Day’s CQ5.

Very often, it’s best to get right into the vendor’s camp if you want to get more insight into what’s going on with the company and where it is going. While, as we reported, Day has had many good days lately, nothing beats a chance of being able to talk to the actual customer who had already put a check mark next to that line that says “CMS implementation.” Getting direct access to Day’s management and technical teams wouldn’t hurt either.

A bit of gazing into the crystal ball is also on the menu with one of Gartner’s analysts leading a discussion on where Day and the content management industry are headed in 2010.

Don't miss:

• Unveiling of CRX 2.0: the JCR 2.0 (JSR-283) content repository

• Day's 2010 roadmap

Cherry on top: Day’s CTO David Nüscheler will give a sneak peek of the upcoming CQ5.3. Now, that should be interesting.

California-based Psigen Software (news, site) has just announced that it has added an Advanced Data Extraction module to its document management system DMS PSI: Capture as part of v3.5.2.

This new addition will give Capture the ability to parse, scan and extract information from all kinds of documents without any end-user intervention.

While Psigen says that this will be part of v3.5.2 of their DMS, it doesn’t say whether it is this feature that bumps it up a point from v3.5.1, or whether there are other elements combined that will do that.

While the question may be academic, it is of some interest as the rate with which Psigen is developing this product is noteworthy in a market that is bursting with new solutions and new releases.

Psigen itself has been flirting outrageously with SharePoint and has made no secret of its designs on the Microsoft beauty.

In June, for example, it underwent a SharePoint makeover by thoughtfully offering a SharePoint Lookup Provider (SLP) which provides integration with the SharePoint Database and seemingly allows for a jazzed up automation process when scanning and capturing documents destined for Document Libraries.

However, it is also playing the field like any other 14-year-old (company) would be expected to and in July offered FileBound, a similar solution and services.

It's hard to know where all of this is going to end up, but in an industry sector where only the fittest will survive, its practically certain Psigen is already checking out the talent for its next conquest.

With all the talk of new solutions, new technologies and new versions of technologies, it would be hard to imagine that a considerable number of companies are still having problems with the basics of digital asset management (DAM).

That would appear to be one of the primary conclusions of a new report released by the Aberdeen Group (news, site) for Widen, a provider of web-based digital asset management applications. The report says that only half of Best-in-Class organizations (53%) indicated they currently have searchable access to content.

Despite going through turbulent times, Vignette announced upcoming availability of an update to its Vignette Media product. We covered Vignette Media last year, when it just came out. And yes, we expressed a bit of skepticism then.

The new Vignette Media 7.1 is still positioned as a digital media publishing platform aimed at TMEs (telecommunications, media and entertainment) and CMEs (communications, media and entertainment).

Using this platform, organizations can upload, publish and manage rich media, video, editorial and marketing content across multiple websites. The goal is still to be able to manage, promote and sell digital assets; as well as capture advertising revenue.

There doesn’t seem to be much detail yet on what new and/or improved functionality will be available in the upcoming release, but there’s a microsite here if you want to poke around.

Some of the known Vignette Media 7.1 features seem to include improved DAM and ingestion of large volumes of media assets. Plus — some visual mechanisms to better manage data.

Vignette Video Services module remains to be part of this offering. So we, probably, should expect some improvements related to management of video assets.

Vignette Media 7.1 should be available in the second half of 2009. By then, all logistics of the Vignette acquisition by Open Text should be sorted out, but we don’t expect Open Text to have much influence on the upcoming release.

Earlier this year in an interview, George Grippo, VP Media Asset Management at North Plains, indicated that many Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors are struggling to cope with the special requirements of video asset management.

While he didn’t explicitly say in the interview that North Plains (news, site), a rich media and DAM solution vendor, was working on a solution to do just this, this week’s release of their latest version of Telescope Video Manager shows that they were.

Available as an on-site or SaaS solution, the Telescope Video Manager provides a relatively inexpensive solution that even novices can use in the creation, editing and distribution of short and long form video across multiple platforms like YouTube and other social networks.

It's been a busy few months for Autonomy Interwoven (news, site).Last week, it unveiled a new solution that provides analytics for social media.

This week, it's turn for MediaBin — their Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution — to get a once-over, which comes in the form of meaning-based Virage MediaBin 7, a solution that automatically retrieves, analyzes and processes audio, video and graphic content.