It’s been a DAM stormy week, at least for some of us on the East Coast. Nevertheless, in digital asset management news: PublishingNOW updates, StrongBox gets together with eMAM, VYRE’s Brand goes 2.4, and open source systems and video assets attract some tips.
New Version of PublishingNOW!
There’s a new version of PublishingNOW!, the editorial management solution that was integrated a year ago with ADAM Software’s enterprise-level DAM system. ADAM CEO Pieter Casneuf said in a statement that the combination had “raised the bar by integrating DAM and editorial management software for the first time.”
Added features in the new release include tools to separate planning streams for digital publishing, video management integration and such core technical developments as semantic indexing.
StrongBox with eMAM
DAM is a necessity to the media and entertainment industry, but so is archiving those assets. Data archive solution provider Crossroads Systems has recently announced a partnership with Empress Media Asset Management to provide a joint solution. Under the partnership, Crossroads’ StrongBox archive solution, designed as shared storage for data archiving and preservation, is now integrated with Empress’ eMAM, a Web-based platform for media asset management (MAM).
The companies said that, by combining StrongBox with eMAM, organizations can achieve cost savings in their MAM systems by utilizing StrongBox’s Linear Tape File System technology, which functions as if it were more expensive disk-based storage.
How to Handle Video
Speaking of the media and entertainment industry, what are some key considerations for handling video within an enterprise DAM environment? CMSWire Contributor, Tom Padilla, offered some advice this past week.
VYRE’s Brand 2.4
VYRE is out with Brand 2.4, providing advanced reporting and enhanced support for tablets and mobile devices using HTML5 video. The newest version of the Software-as-a-Service brand asset management solution also features user interface enhancements, improvements to the help guide, and a streamlined Creative Workflow.
Open Source = Recipe
Open source DAM software is like a cake recipe, while a proprietary system is akin to a cake purchased from a bakery. That culinary analogy is found in an essay about the pros and cons of an open source DAM system, presented on CMSWire.com by Edward Smith.
Before radar, satellites, and 24-hour news, meteorologists faced impending hurricanes with swell measurements and a wet finger.
Instead of 24-hour updates on Sandy's movements, what if you had turned on the news last week and heard this:
"The usual signs which herald the approach of hurricanes was not present in this case. The brick-dust sky was not in evidence to the smallest degree...There were cirrus clouds moving from the southeast during the forenoon of the 7th, but by noon only alto-stratus from the northeast were observed."
In 1900, that's how Weather Bureau employee Isaac M. Cline described the forecast of the Galveston Hurricane, which is still known as the deadliest storm in American history. In addition to 130-mph winds and 20-foot storm surges, storms of this era often arrived with a disastrous element of surprise.
“They might have a barometer and some surf indications and a wet finger,” explains Jim Fleming, the editor of peer-reviewed journal History of Meteorology. “But they couldn’t have known where the cone of the hurricane was.”
Hurricane Sandy was devastating. But the accurateness of its forecasted path was, from a technological perspective, remarkable. It involved satellite data, computer models, and planes equipped with radar, sensors, and parachute-equipped measurement devices called dropwindsones.
Ten days before Sandy made landfall, the Weather Channel's senior hurricane specialist, Bryan Norcross, knew there was a chance that a big storm would be hitting the U.S. Then, with eight days before the storm hit, he began blogging about the unusual possibility that a tropical storm in the Caribbean could turn into a huge weather event in New England, specifically. Three days before Sandy devastated the coast, he had pinpointed “New York City, where Long Island and New Jersey make an "L” as the place where the storm was likely to cause the most trouble.
Had we been in a different era, we may not have been introduced to Sandy before she had arrived. Here's how we got from forecasting with a barometer and a wet finger to tracking potential hurricanes more than a week before they make landfall.
Without satellite technology, radar, or even knowing much about the structure of hurricane, there was no way to predict that the Galveston Hurricane would be the deadliest in American history.
Forecasting at the time relied on measurements such as barometer pressure, tide and swell changes, and wind direction. Though the U.S. Weather Bureau issued warnings about the storm, which had been sighted at sea and made landfall in Cuba, they had no way of pinpointing where it would hit.
“The way that forecasts were made then is that the way things moved yesterday is probably the way they’ll move today,” says Norcross, who is also the author of Hurricane Almanac: The Essential Guide to Storms Past, Present, and Future.
Wrote Galveston-based U.S. Weather Bureau official Cline after the storm: “No one ever dreamed that the water would reach the height observed in the present case.”
Before satellite imagery, ships often provided the first reports of a storm.
A Brazilian freighter, for instance, spotted the storm that became the New England Hurricane of 1938 as it passed by Puerto Rico. It alerted the U.S. Weather Bureau, which in turn warned the citizens of Florida to stock supplies and board up their homes.
But while sailors passed on information about how the storm appeared to be moving, hurricanes often change course. Instead of hitting Florida, as predicted, the storm instead worked its way up the New England coast.
According to the NOAA, about 600 people died in the storm, and the coast suffered $308 million in damage--about $5 billion in today's money.
Though at least one daredevil had already flown a plane into a hurricane by the time The Great Atlantic Hurricane threatened the East Coast in 1944, Major Harry Wexler and Lloyd Woods became the first to take the trip for meteorological purposes. They flew directly into the hurricane, kicking off a data-collection method that remains an important component of hurricane forecasting today.
“Until we actually sent airplanes into a hurricane, we really didn’t have any indication of how large the circulation was or how it was distributed,” explains Norcross. “Once we started flying into hurricanes with airplanes, we could get a sense of how much coast would be affected.”
Hurricane Donna holds the distinction of being the only storm in U.S. history to sustain hurricane-force winds throughout Florida, the Mid-Atlantic, and New England. NOAA calls it “one of the great all-time hurricanes.”
It also narrowly missed becoming the first major East-Coast hurricane to arrive with NASA's first weather satellites in the air. The first experimental weather satellite, Tiros-1, went out of service about three months before Donna arrived. The second launched about two months later.
Images from satellites such as Tiros snap photos of the Earth as they orbit it. They don’t, however, show meteorologists how a storm system is moving.
A quickly shifting storm called Hurricane Betsy best demonstrated the significance of this limitation. First it appeared to be heading toward the Carolinas. Then it abruptly changed directions, plowed through the Bahamas, hit Florida and moved on to Louisiana and Mississippi.
A Tiros satellite helped track Betsy as a tropical cyclone.
“People knew the hurricane was there,” Norcross says. “They were flying hurricane hunters through it, but we didn’t have the moving pictures.”
It wouldn’t be until 10 years later that forecasters got their moving pictures with the first Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites. These satellites orbit at the same speed as the Earth, with the effect that they seem to hover over the same area continuously. They provide 24-hour constant storm surveillance to meteorologists and, eventually, their computer models.
Though computer simulations of weather systems had been used in forecasting as far back as the 1950s, Norcross says that they weren't used in a significant way in hurricane forecasting until Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
He remembers using a computer model for the first time as a guide to his own forecast of the storm (he had used models for other types of forecasts since the start of his career in the early '70s).
Computer models take all that that data being collected by weather balloons and augmented by satellite, radar, and aircraft data from hurricane hunter flights and turn it into a simulation of where a storm is likely to move in the future. “In the interim time, computer models have become better and better," Norcross says, "and more than anything, that is what is responsible for storm forecasts getting better and better.”
Zend, providers of PHP based tools for mobile and enterprise app developers, has introduced updates to three flagship products during its ZendCon event this week, and a PhoneGap integration for building cross-platform apps.
PHP is a popular web scripting language, and it powers the likes of Web powerhouses Facebook and Wikipedia. Zend has debuted new versions of its development environment and other tools that promise to leverage the power of PHP for cloud and mobile.
Zend Studio 10
Zend Studio 10 is an integrated development platform meant for building PHP that can add tons of capabilities to apps on the Web or mobile. One of its most powerful attributes is that it can build apps across systems with the added PhoneGap integration.
Companies can use this handy feature to build apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone among others, and do it using familiar drag and drop features. That kind of add on is always appreciated by those building apps without having been totally immersed in a computer science background.
Mobile apps can me built quickly with drag and drop tools and customized for a variety of operating systems.
As the image above shows, the built in emulator displays what mobile apps will look like on a particular device, and it's another nice visual tool app developers are likely feeling should be standard on any platform. Zend Studio 10 also supports the latest version of PHP known as v5.4, and that means new syntax like traits can be used as well.
Zend Server 6 + Zend Server Gateway
Zend Server 6 is an application server that runs business critical apps in PHP, and the v6 update includes tools for automating app development and monitoring multiple apps at a more granular level. Zend Server Gateway then is the tool that allows apps to talk to other connected systems in the cloud for things like validation and authentication.
All of the new versions are now downloadable from the Zend website. Zend Server for Windows or Linux starts at about US $1,700 to nearly US $15,000, and there is also a Zend Server Production Solution. This is a full package offering complete with two available levels of support, starting at around US $7,000 with an annual subscription. There is also a free 30 day trial available for Zend Studio 10.
WoodWing's Enterprise 8 multi-channel publishing system has been released. It includes new collaboration features, performance updates, and support for Adobe's digital publishing system.
Because WoodWing is popular among newspaper and magazine publishers, support for Adobe Creative Suite 6 — particularly its two key components, InDesign and InCopy — should be welcome.
New Features + Future Release Teased
One of the main highlights of Enterprise 8 is an annotation feature that will look very familiar to long-time users. Commenting on in-progress documents is now possible, notes can be approved or rejected, and comments can be answered.
New collaboration features like commenting on in-progress documents had been requested by WoodWing customers.
Under the hood, performance updates have made uploading large files into Content Station up to three times faster. That's because WoodWing has added the JSON and AMF protocols in Enterprise 8. AMF is the format used by Adobe Flash, and that means Enterprise 8 can build Flash movies across all devices.
Additionally, Enterprise 8 has made some internal changes to accommodate any future upgrades or support for publishing industry requirements. Woodwing has hinted that those future updates could include better reporting and digital asset management tools.
Also inside Content Station, the Planning Tab has been extended to allow issues to be created across channels. This should speed up starting tasks and creating dossiers (what WoodWing calls articles or stories). The final new feature is a tool for setting up a specific workflow for archive files (such as zip files) or presentations that may have an alternate route in the workflow.
Adobe-WoodWing Partnership
For the past year, WoodWing has been an Adobe partner on its Digital Publishing Suite, and that is one reason for the tighter integration of Flash and InDesign. However, with the addition of the JSON protocol, Enterprise 8 is also more extensible with other third-party software. That means any of WoodWing's authorized partners can integrate Enterprise 8 and Content Station with their preferred add-ons.
Following the vacation season, DAM news is beginning to bloom again: updates for WebDAM, FocusOpen and Razuna, MediaBeacon and Aspera join forces, experts look at digital asset management trends.
WebDAM, FocusOPEN, Razuna
WebDAM Solutions has launched new features for its digital asset management solution. Designed to increase efficiency and streamline productivity, the new features include the ability to present and control PowerPoint presentations inside WebDAM, and to have WebDAM handle format conversion for downloads. The new capabilities come on top of collaboration functions added in July.
Open-source DAM vendor FocusOPEN has updated version 3.4.3.1 of their system. New features include preview rollers, API extensions and security improvements, plus a variety of bug fixes.
And another open-source DAM solution, Razuna, has announced user interface changes designed to make the system “more intuitive and easier to navigate.” The files detail page now combines info in one place, for instance, an entry page has been added, and folder navigation has been cleaned up.
MediaBeacon, Aspera Get Together
DAM solutions provider MediaBeacon and high-speed data transport vendor Aspera have announced a global partnership and technology integration. “MediaBeacon’s robust search tools let users find what they’re looking for,” Aspera’s vice president of marketing Richard Heitmann said in a statement, “and Aspera delivers the digital assets at line-speed.”
DAM Trends, Need to Know
Extensis’ DAM expert Edward Smith took a look at digital asset management trends last week here at CMSWire.com — including larger collections, integration with other systems and increased server-side/cloud processing.
And DAM pro Henrik de Gyor surveyed What a Digital Asset Manager Needs to Know on Tuesday. One of our favs: “Love information and data. Really. It may not love you back, but it is a give and take relationship. You get what you put into it….”
Oracle has been hard at work on the commerce portion of its customer experience portfolio. Today it releases updates to two of its Commerce products and offers a chance to dig into the details at Oracle OpenWorld in San Fransisco the end of this month.
Oracle's Commerce strategy focuses not only on helping deliver great customer experiences, but also ensuring that the business user can easily create and manage these experiences across channels without needing to hold IT's hand. It has also ensured that the commerce platform is the best it can be to support a wide range of scalability and performance requirements.
Visual Merchandising: Merchants can now edit content with visual tools that show the shopper's perspective. Tools such as Layout View, Light Table (drag and drop ordering of products) and a contextual menu are new and are meant to reduce the amount of work required to design the shopping experience.
Editing Multiple Items: Get things done faster by changing a number of items at once.
Time Based Preview: Want to see what your site looks like at a time in the future? Now you can.
Mobile and Cross Channel Selling: You can build mobile web sites or iOS web apps using the Commerce Reference Store (a customizable pre-built storefront). Also included are starter applications, best practices examples, and more.
Global Scalability: There are new business model, performance and international commerce features including a merged B2B and B2C set of capabilities and localized UIs for the business tools. Web Commerce is now integrated with Oracle Coherence (an in-memory data grid solution), and it is certified run on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine.
Oracle Commerce Reference Store
According to Oracle, recent benchmarking tests showed ATG Web Commerce improved response times by 50% and delivered 3x more page views per second when it was run on Oracle Exalogic compared to a traditional blade system of similar size and configuration.
Oracle Endeca Commerce
Oracle acquired Endeca back in October of 2011. It has worked hard to integrate Endeca Commerce into the overall Oracle platform. The Endeca product line has been combined into two offerings: Oracle Endeca Guided Search and Oracle Endeca Experience Manager, both elements of Oracle Endeca Commerce.
OmniUpdate, a popular Web CMS in higher education, has released version 9.16, and it includes tidy updates to the site cloning tool and a few add ons to the built in source editor.
Any faculty, staff or student intern who might be using the OU Campus software in their day to day activities might be happy to know there aren't any major changes to the system.
Auto-tag Completion for HTML, XSL; Theme Options
Small though the changes to version 9.16 may be, there's a little something here for everyone. For HTML editing, there's improved auto-tag completion for quickly inserting the closing tags on a command. Additionally, whether the text editor or HTML editor is being used, it's now easier to save content quickly. OmniUpdate calls this a save-in-place feature and it's meant to make for rapid updates.
There's also new theme options for using a pre-made design in a website layout. Think of these additions as a tune up rather than a full scale Web CMS rebuild for OmniUpdate.
Site Cloning, Syntax Highlighting
Reusing content is one of the best time savers in IT, and it's with this in mind OmniUpdate has simplified the site cloning tool. It should now be easier to use over again the files and folders on a staging server.
That way, new websites can be set up quickly and efficiently. Additionally, syntax highlighting has updated so changes in HTML text can be more easily understood, and mistakes easier to identify.
Earlier this year, OmniUpdate released v9.15, and it included filtering and tagging updates, and new schedulded publishing options. These granular updates may not be sexy, but for the people using the tools everyday, they are the kinds of changes that simply make things easier to use.
Just looking at how frequently OmniUpdate makes these changes shows it is likely working closely with its customers and listening.
Blog posts became Facebook updates and Tumblr posts, which shrunk to Tweets and finally to Instagram or Pinterest. Here's how smart brands are navigating the new visual social-media era.
Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have ushered in visual marketing as the breakout trend for 2012. When it comes to their products, businesses are learning to show, not tell, and visual content sites are fueling our desire for beautiful photography and sensational design. Two years ago, marketers were spreading the maxim that "content is king," but now, it seems, "a picture really is worth a thousand words."
"Blogs were one of the earliest forms of social networking where people were writing 1,000 words," says Dr. William J. Ward, Social Media professor at Syracuse University. "When we moved to status updates on Facebook, our posts became shorter. Then micro-blogs like Twitter came along and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Now we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication with social-sharing sites like Pinterest."
This trend toward the visual is also influenced by the shifting habits of technology users. As more people engage with social media via smartphones, they're discovering that taking a picture "on the go" using a high-resolution phone is much less tedious than typing out a status update on a two-inch keyboard.
A 2012 study by ROI Research found that when users engage with friends on social media sites, it's the pictures they took that are enjoyed the most. Forty-four percent of respondents are more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures than any other media. Pictures have become one of our default modes of sorting and understanding the vast amounts of information we're exposed to every day.
Detavio Samuals is the EVP and Director of Client Services at GlobalHue, one of the nation's top market advertising agencies. He explains that pictures are a bit like movie trailers for written content--they provide a snippet of what an article, brand, site or other piece of content is about, so that you can quickly decide if it's what you wanted or not.
"Pictures have also become a short form way of communicating lots of information quickly and succinctly," says Samuals. "The need for publishers to get to the point quicker than ever came about as humans became more pressed for time and content became more infinite. For publishers, it was evolve or risk losing their audience, and the only thing shorter than a tweet or post is a picture."
So what does all this visual stimulation mean for brands?
Fashion designer Kahri-Anne Kerr uses visual social media sites like Pinterest and Facebook to market her Kahri collection. In the fashion world, visual fantasy sells product, as customers need to see the cut of a garment on a model and feel as though they could make that item work in their own wardrobe. "When I post pictures on Facebook, they get the most feedback of all my posts," says Kahri. Visual media is a great way to share more about what inspires the designs, as well as linking to your online store and straight product shots."
"I am just getting into Instagram, which I use to give a personal look at the person behind the label by taking shots around my studio and in my everyday life."
Designer paper/analog brand Moleskine has harnessed the power of visual media to create one of the world's most active, prolific, and creative online communities. Their visual content strategy focuses on user-generated content: They create large-scale projects that users participate in by posting their own images and videos.
A popular campaign called What's In Your Bag? had users update pictures of the contents of their bags into a Facebook album. The project generated thousands of likes and comments as readers looked at the contents of other bags (which included Moleskine notebooks, naturally), and shared photos with their friends.
Inspiring fans to create and spread images, customize their notebooks, organize online competitions, and otherwise engage with the brand on a creative level has set Moleskine apart in its highly specialized market.
Search engines now rank content based on social conversations and sharing, not just websites alone. Brands can use visual content on their social media to increase engagement and inspire sharing and viral marketing. The rise of platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, and Facebook's multimillion-dollar acquisition of the latter, shows how visual content is becoming an increasingly important force for communication online.
Brands that can rock visual media will find themselves market leaders.
--Ekaterina Walter is Intel's social media strategist. Follow her @ekaterina.
If you never thought you'd see MS Office running properly on an iPad, you were wrong. Microsoft has announced updates to its Web Office apps, bringing bigger buttons and full touch functionality to Apple's iPad and upcoming Windows 8 tablets.
Touch Typing is the Future
While some of us will always want a trusty keyboard for our fingers to play over, the huge take-up of tablets means developers have to cater for this growing new user base. Enter Microsoft who's latest Office blog post highlights, in quite some detail, the amount of effort it has put in to creating an easy-to-work-with and positive environment for doing office work on a tablet.
With Windows 8 launching soon, across a range of tablets and computers, Microsoft has aimed to get users up and running with touch-enabled Office Web Apps right away, without the need master a new user interface. We should also be able to move easily between touch and mouse/keyboard experiences, with all features available on all devices.
Pointing the Finger
Compatibility with the iPad, through Safari on iOS, has to be a must, given that Apple's tablet currently dominates the market, and the Mini iPad likely to increase that share. There is no word on Android compatibility, but that is likely in the works. Of course, Microsoft will hope that huge Windows 8 tablet sales will see it grab a hold of this market.
Office on tablets is now so real you can touch it
Some interesting features of the tablet-enabled apps include the usual range of touch motions to perform commands, tapping on a selection takes the place of a Windows PC right-click, to get access to cut and paste, and other functions. Tapping elsewhere will get rid of a menu, and it all looks pretty intuitive, with the overall aim to replicate the standard user experience in a way that would create no fear or confusion among users.
We still wait to see if there will be a full native iOS MS Office app, but that's likely only a matter of time given the amount of attention Microsoft is putting on the tablet space. But with this upgrade for the Web version, perhaps time is now on Microsoft's side to push its own Windows 8 and Windows RT versions.
WoodWing's
If you never thought you'd see MS Office running properly on an iPad, you were wrong. Microsoft has announced updates to its Web Office apps, bringing bigger buttons and full touch functionality to Apple's iPad and upcoming Windows 8 tablets. 