Control Your Digital Assets with Cumulus 8

fact sheet Vendor: Canto, Inc. (www.canto.com) Vendor's Information: About Canto Cumulus About Canto, Inc.

If your organization is like most, it's doing more business online and creating more digital files every year. And it's not just text files; today's businesses are creating images, presentations, and audio files to share with customers and partners and to use in marketing and advertising campaigns.

For all too many organizations, these digital assets are stored on file servers or on PCs, where there is little or no control over permissions and updates and there isn't an effective mechanism to search for files. Software designed for digital asset management can help organize these files and end the digital chaos that rules at many businesses.

Digital asset management (DAM) software is used by the print and publishing industry, ad agencies, educational institutions, manufacturers, and government agencies for archiving, marketing and corporate communications, file distribution, and workflow assistance. It makes finding a file, sending it out, and getting it approved and stored a more efficient and organized process.

Canto, with offices in Berlin and San Francisco, has been making digital asset management software since 1990, released Cumulus 8, the latest edition of its Cumulus DAM product, this spring.

Cumulus 8 provides a common user experience across the Windows, Linux, Mac, and Solaris platforms, and the improvements and new features in the latest version make it faster and easier to use than ever before.

When trying to get control of a huge archive of digital assets, the first thing many users will want is speed. Canto increased the efficiency of the communication between the Cumulus Client and Server, so existing Cumulus users will notice many functions of the software work faster. The native Cumulus Client is now fully multi-threaded in version 8.0 so users with multi-core machines will notice even greater performance gains. Cataloging, which is the Cumulus term for importing new files to the database, and updating data are now much faster.

A fully functional, fast search is also an important part of reigning in digital assets. A new feature called User Live Filtering enables users to define search criteria constants so they can better focus on the details of what they need. User Live Filtering is like adding a layer of search criteria on top of whatever other search criteria are used. If a certain task requires searching for a specific file type, User Live Filtering will make the file format a constant.

The Cumulus Quicksearch tool has been updated in Cumulus 8. Users can now broaden or reduce the Quicksearch results. They can save the collection itself, which would be a shortcut to saving the search parameters. Users can also create and share a record query that is based on your Quicksearch steps that could be used by others.

In response to user requests, Cumulus 8 offers users a way to compare assets side by side. Also new is a full-screen preview that enables the user to preview up to six assets at a time.

Once users find an asset that piques interest, they can add a sticky note with comments. Users can also draw rectangles around specific areas and comment on those. Cumulus then saves the comments inside the asset record itself, making them part of its metadata.

Metadata is key to finding digital assets like images and audio files that don't feature text. Cumulus 8 features a new metadata field type that enables customers to define their own complex data types. Allowing users to define specific data fields can help keep track of licenses for use, expirations, and contact or customer information.

Once users find the asset they want, a built-in image editor new to Cumulus 8 lets them perform edits to images such as crop, sharpen, and blur. The image editor even works from the Cumulus Web Client and it edits a preview of the asset, not the asset itself.

Cumulus 8 also offers asset tracking and statistics. Users can use these statistics to see what their customers are searching for, what assets are downloaded the most, and which queries failed to yield results. These reports can also be automated and delivered on a regular basis.

Assets can now be added to the Cumulus 8 catalog without access to a Cumulus client thanks to a new feature that allows assets to be added via e-mail and drop folders on file servers. Rather than giving the client to remote or occasional users, administrators can give them an e-mail address and have them attach the files. This opens new possibilities for camera phone users, as well as remote asset users like real estate agents photographing a house or insurance adjusters photographing a claim.

Developers & Partners
Canto offers a number of opportunities for developers and partners who want to work on custom DAM applications. Cumulus 8 features a new API that's based on Java technology. Canto makes the same API available to developers that the company uses in-house, meaning outside developers have unlimited potential to develop for the largest installed base of DAM users in the world.

Membership in the Canto Developer Program (CDP) gives developers and customers access to the APIs they need to develop Cumulus enhancements for sale or internal use, as well resources like documentation, access to other developers, and training through Canto Professional Services.

The Canto Web site marketplace, introduced last year, offers Cumulus products and add-ons published by the company's developer partners. It features everything from e-commerce modules that plug into the Cumulus Web clients, to entirely new Web clients not based on Canto's Web clients.

Canto believes that digital assets should be treated like financial assets. They should not be accessed or sold without permission, and their status and whereabouts should be known at all times. With the release of Cumulus 8, Canto provides the features to make this level of control a reality, as well as the tools that make Cumulus easy to use. That's why more than 13,000 Cumulus servers have been sold and more than 1 million licenses for Cumulus have been issued.