Latest Digital Asset Management News & Articles

KickApps and Akamai are teaming up to take on video publishing. KickApps brings the ability to create and manage custom video players with excellent social features. Akamai comes in with the ability to easily automate digital distribution systems while providing enterprise-level video distribution. Put them both together, and what results is an app-kicking combination!

Just like that certain city that never sleeps, Bitrix hardly takes a break. Shortly after the recent release of a new version of its Site Manager, Bitrix is in the news again. This time, the CMS vendor announces the addition of Media Player to its WCM platform, which will enable customers to embed video and audio streams into their web sites.

At the EMC World conference in Vegas, EMC unveiled their latest plans and roadmap for content management and collaboration including tighter integration of new products with the Documentum platform and a new SaaS model designed for SMBs. It sounds like a very busy year ahead for these folks, almost too busy.

Busy group of analysts over at CMS Watch these days, releasing reports like crazy. They must be getting ready for a hot summer hiatus.

The latest report to come out is called The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. It reviews 10 of the leading DAM vendors in the market today as well as 8 specialty and up-and-coming vendors.

Ahh, our insatiable need to spend hours viewing online video, whether it be our favorite episode of The Family Guy, or that hilarious commercial on YouTube. Yes we definitely are a world of watchers. And organizations are getting smarter everyday figuring how to use this vice to their advantage.

Online video search engine provider, blinkx, aims to help those organizations by providing the blinkx Advanced Media Platform, a video content management solution that will “unlock the potential of video assets and maximize their monetization”.

Kodak — yes, the camera and film company — took home the 2008 ECM Connection ACE Award at AIIM On Demand in this year's go around for their work helping customers achieve impressive levels of productivity and time management with their selection of production capture scanners and solutions.

Let's conclude 2007 with a pleasant tale: Nirvanix gleans investment capital from Intel! Hurrah!

With the monies from its new Tier 1 investor, Nirvanix plans to further the conquests of its storage delivery network, which recently took on the chimerical challenges of college funding and rich media (talk about pressure!).

But onto the new. Fresh financing “enables us to build-out the world-wide network to meet growing demand,” said CEO Patrick Harr.

(Let's hope some of that funding is used to help pump up the benefits for existing clients, too.)

Nirvanix currently purveys hosted storage services, focusing specifically on the storage issues incurred by digital media and user-generated content.

Its storage delivery network is powered by the Internet Media File System (patent pending).

Document management and workflow purveyor SpringCM is partnering with EchoSign, which provides electronic signature automation.

EchoSign is availing its signature system to SpringCM clientele, as well as the Contract Accelerator for Salesforce.com, with which SpringCM fully integrates.

One nifty thing about EchoSign is it lets users “sign” documents electronically from any browser. This means you don't have to run to FedEx Kinko's to use that oldfangled fax machine-a-majig.

Gotta love conference season. Catch Content Convergence and Integration 2008 this March 12-14 in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

The three-day event covers mobile, digital asset management, forward-looking XML, and plen'y of social media stuff. Days are segmented as follows: Day one for content, day two for technology, and day three for user relationships.

Content delivery network Internap has integrated BuyDRM's KeyOS Pay Media Platform into its proprietary offering.

The benefits of this integration will be most evident to users of MediaConsole, a component of the Internap Content Delivery Network. The MediaConsole is a workflow management toolset that supports streaming formats like Flash and Windows Media.

Programming and software development is a thankless task, and you need all the help you can get, right?

Rubbish. You get paid a fortune and can stroll in at midday in a ZZ Top beard and pyjamas, and nobody in a suit ever talks to you because they have no idea what you actually do.

What the suits should do, of course, is ship you all off to a military barber for a #1, and then off to Qatar for six weeks of basic military training. That'd take the wind out of your sails. And while you're at it, stop off in Hong Kong on the way back for some tailored suits. It wouldn't kill you to look respectable once in a while.

Life is far too easy for you developers. Unfortunately, if you are in the business of coding for the Vignette suite of Enterprise CMS (and other) products, it's just gotten even easier.

…and they're darn deserving of their own online management tools.

Coming December 1st, Widen Enterprises will debut Media Collective 5.0 and Backdrop, a photography approval tool.

Widen provides digital asset management solutions in a manner most SaaSy. (Work remotely! Awesoooome.)

The v5 release of Media Collective sports:

• Advanced asset versioning tools
• Conflict resolution for duplicate assets (YES!)
• Shared multi-page reviews in Adobe
• Ad and brochure-building options
• Backdrop, a tool that routs and approves photos

With Backdrop, photographers can upload images directly onto the platform for comments and approval — you know, like a document. Admins can also build automated actions for typical events in the approval process, making image publishing, review and storage less time-consuming.

Visit the Widen website for more info. (Turn down your volume unless you dig the idea of a Widen testimonial deluge.)

Global CMS and infrastructure purveyor Day Software has announced plans to air its suite of Web 2.0 offerings at Gilbane Boston from 27-29 November.

You can catch it all at the Westin Copley, where the Gilbane Boston conference has oft been held.

Back in the bad old days, when you sent an email somewhere containing some vital, time sensitive information, you just assumed that it got there, and that it would not 'conveniently' get lost or delayed somewhere along the line.

Yes, you laugh, but it's true.

When you sent a registered or notarized letter through either the mail or a courier service, you only certified the damn envelope, and not what was in it. Back in the day, you could send someone a contract to sign, and they could send it back to you with a crucial page missing, and claim that that page in question was not included in the original document. And then you might find yourself in a good old-fashioned mess.

For you, that day might have been today. But, at the risk of sounding like a corny advert, maybe tomorrow will be different.

Postini is enhancing its on-demand Email Security Services through the addition of new content analysis and policy administration tools to enable better email compliance policies.

Postini was purchased by Google last July.

Nirvanix, a storage delivery purveyor that last tackled rich media, has been chosen by ElasticDrive as a partner in fighting high-cost mirrored remote data.

ElasticDrive is a hosted storage solution. It enables users to access data remotely while protecting sensitive enterprise data.

Paired with this technology, Nirvanix can behave like a local hard drive, which enables clients to mirror or back data up to multiple repositories all at once.

Perhaps to celebrate a full year since its acquisition of Stellent, Oracle has updated its suite of content management offerings, including its hard-earned Stellent products.

There's something to put in the family scrap book.

The delivery of content is becoming almost as important as the content itself. That’s why Clickability, a software as a service content management provider and Akamai, a global service provider for accelerating content and applications online, have announced a spiffy new partnership which aims to provide an integrated solution that will improve the speed, reliability and performance of the web sites of their shared customers in the media industry.

Accordent Technologies has released an expanded version of its Accordent Media Management System to include support for TANDBERG video conferencing systems and Flash presentations.

Media Management System is a centralized CMS framework for managing multimedia assets like streaming video and audio, video presentations, lectures, and webcasts.

Features are roughly what you would expect from traditional Enterprise CMS products - content management portal, user authentication and tracking, workflow functionality and so forth, except for two key differences.

The first is, obviously enough, that this CMS is specifically designed for managing multimedia.

Open source firm Editopia has just announced the release of NCode.

This is a server-side video encoding offering. Web developers can add video, in any format, to Flash. Under the General Public License, it costs zip zero.

NCode is cross-platform friendly and supports multiple codecs, including H.264, and PHP and Java programming environments.

Editopia may soon release an enterprise edition with support, as well as indemnification and rights for fee-based codecs.