The CMS Expert

Release notes for EnterMedia Media Asset Management
March 12, 2010 – EnterMedia 6.706
New Video Player
EnterMedia is now using FlowPlayer (flowplayer.org) to better support previewing of video assets. If you upload a video, EnterMedia will now ge…

We have received several requests from users who are interested in using EnterMedia through other applications. Below is one client’s question and our response how the integration might be done.

Question: We want to use EnterMedia for the followin…

Using Episode by Telestream, EnterMedia has created a custom video transcoding and publishing solution to support large amounts of video data that needed to be in the correct formats and in the correct places.  EnterMedia handles the ingestion of …

EnterMedia now has the beginnings of a REST API using JQuery. Here is the start to the API we will have: http://entermediasoftware.com/docs/rest/index.html This XML based API is modeled after the Flickr API. We use jQuery since it easy to manipulat…

OpenEdit Inc., is pleased to announce the latest release of open source EnterMedia digital asset management software. Version 6.536 was released December 17, 2009. Download EnterMedia v.6.536.

We try to release a new version of EnterMedia each month…

October 21, 2009 – EnterMedia v.6.378

Here are the release notes for the latest, tested release of EnterMedia Open Source Digital Asset Management:

Important Upgrade Info:
We have moved the catalog fallback directory up one level (outside of the "tools" directory).  Any preexisting catalogs will need to have their fallback reconfigured.  This is located in the _site.xconf in the root of the catalog.  For example: To update the photo catalog in the included sample webapp, you would need to edit /media/browse/photo/site.xconf and change
"<property name="fallbackdirectory">/WEB-INF/base/entermedia/tools/catalog</property>"
to
"<property name="fallbackdirectory">/WEB-INF/base/entermedia/catalog</property>"

Audio Support:
EM will now play audio types other than mp3s by generating an mp3 version that will work with the embedded audio player.  This is verified to work on wav files but should work for any type supported by LAME (lame.sourceforge.net).
   
Generated Image/Audio/Video Storage Changes:
All EM-generated versions of original files are now stored in the assets directory along with the _site.xconf containing the record’s metadata.  This includes image thumbnail, medium, and  preview sized versions, mp3 versions of audio files, and flash versions of video files.  This has elminated an entire unnecessary directory structure (assets/images/generated/…) and should also make it simpler to keep backups of your data.

Album Backend Changes:
Albums are now Lucene based, making it possible to search and sort within an album.

New Datepicker:
We have a new date picker tool that uses jQuery and generally works and looks better.

Importing Fixes:
We have separated the mounting and importing screens.  Both are accessible from the EnterMedia Admin (Settings) area.  Importing will now remove records for original files that are no longer there.  This will keep your records synchronized with your originals folder.

http://www.entermediasoftware.com
 

Albums is one of the newest features of the EnterMedia digital asset management software. Albums provide users with the ability to easily organize, edit, and share their digital files. It also allows viewers to easily comment on their friends and co-workers digital files, helping them feel more connected.

Users create albums by either uploading new assets or gathering one or more asset already stored in EnterMedia and grouping assets with a common theme or objective.

A screenshot of Albums display page using EnterMedia

Once your Album is created, the album viewer then provides an easy to user interface for the user to easily view and comment on items in an album. From this view the user can:

• Page through the items in the album using the previous and next links
• Return to the album homepage using the return link
• View a slideshow of the items in the album by using the slideshow link
• From the actions menu you can download the image(s), send a link to a friend, edit the metadata associated with the image(s), add items to another album, and remove the item from an album
• Comment on an item in the album

To learn more about Albums, please visit our Documentation web page.

Download EnterMedia Digital Asset Management for FREE!

For more information: http://entermediasoftware.com

The open source alternative for DAM. Flexible and powerful, manage all of your digital files with EnterMedia Digital Asset Management. No vendor lock-in, free to download.

EnterMedia 6.285 September release highlights.

- We have expanded the available options for viewing results sets with the addition of two new views:

• Audio View: This view is designed for use with audio catalogs and includes an mp3 player for each result on the page.
• Download View: This view is primarily designed for use with albums/galleries but can be used for any result set. It allows users to select all/none/some of the results set by clicking checkboxes, and then download those assets in bulk. It also allows for downloading type and size converted versions of assets directly from the results page.

- We have also added a new interface for adding/removing assets from albums. This can be accessed by the actions menu in the icon bar for each asset in a results set. This allows you to add or remove assets from albums without navigating away from the results page.

- Users can now also add an entire page of results to an album through the Results menu.

- On the back-end, we are changing from Prototype to jQuery and have begun changing all of our code to use this new library.

- Previously we used both lightbox and thickbox for pop-up dialog areas. We are now using only Fancybox for displaying preview images and other screens that needed to be in their own pop-up windows.

- Our logging system has been improved to log more types of events including multi-record edits. These improved log reports are now searchable from the Reports tab if you are using the "darktabs" layout in Themes.

- The Themes concept has been expanded to allow custom themes to apply to areas outside of the EnterMedia webapp, and we have added more example themes based from old OpenEdit layouts.

- We have improved and expanded CSS use for many of the pages in EnterMedia. This should make it easier for users designing custom themes to find and alter style properties for their site.

- For those wishing to use a database back-end instead of XML, SQL support has been updated and reimplemented to work with the newest version of our code.

- We found that we needed to include more testing as part of our EM500 certification of our releases, that has already begun and will be implemented in the October 15 release. Thanks to a few EnterMedia community users for helping us with this new and improved test.

Open source and Java Developers, Join the EnterMedia Community for FREE!

Open source EnterMedia software, is a 100% web-based, digital asset management system, used by Fortune 500 corporations and organizations. EnterMedia is used primarily by marketing departments and firms needing a centralized repository to share, collaborate, track, manage and reuse creative media content.

• Centralized repository to search, share, track, manage and reuse creative media content

• 100% web interface only. No client license’s required ever.

• Open source, FREE to download and use. Licensed under a royalty free, perpetual and transferable GNU LGPL license

• Reporting functionality to track trends such as usage, searches

• Improve productivity and workflow

• Collaborate with others using Albums and Saved Search queries

Visit the EnterMedia website for more information!

http://entermediasoftware.com

Henrik de Gyor’s blog ‘Another DAM blog’ is by far one of the most informative ‘How To’ blogs for users of Digital Asset Management. Below is his latest blog posting, I highly recommend that you bookmark his link http://anotherdamblog.wordpress.com/  and read it monthly.

Why do I need permissions and roles in DAM?

Any Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution worth implementing across an organization should have the following:

• The ability to assign permissions or access to various tasks in the DAM. This includes permission to:
  • access assets and/or collections in the DAM
  • preview assets in the DAM
  • add/append/edit metadata to the assets in the DAM
  • upload assets to the DAM
  • download assets with transformations from the DAM
  • order assets (such as licensed assets in the DAM)
  • delete assets in the DAM
  • version assets in the DAM
  • report on assets in the DAM
  • do specific tasks with these assets from the DAM

• The ability to assign roles or groups of people who share the same permissions to do things in the DAM. At the very least, there should be at least a few roles  available to assign any user of the DAM:
  • Administrator role often has full control of the DAM and is empowered with full permissions to do anything necessary including configurations.
  • Regular user role usually has limited permissions to do specific things such as preview assets and maybe download assets directly from the DAM.
  • If you wanted to expand to a third role, there is often a power user role. Typically, power users can do more than the average user, but less than the administrator. Often, a power user can upload assets to the DAM.

Depending on who in your organization is supposed to access what collections of assets and be able to do specific tasks with these assets, you may want to create a role which meets each criteria. Why use roles/groups rather than grant each individual user specific permissions one at a time? Well, how many DAM users do you have? Roles are a simple way to bunch groups of users together who need the same permissions. This way, permissions are granted in a uniform manner to users who fall in a specific user role.  This can speed up the process of adding a new user or editing their permissions, instead of visiting each collection and permission for each individual user throughout the DAM.

• You could have user roles which can preview (read-only) specific collections of assets, but not other collections.
• You may have roles which can preview, edit, upload and download assets but not delete assets (such as your power user role).
• You may want a role which can preview and download from only one collection of assets relative to their job function because they often need to use or refer to just these assets.

I would not recommend allowing all users to have all permissions to do everything in the DAM (aka free for all) because that often leads to a lot of inconsistencies, accidents and chaos, particularly deletion.You probably had that before you had a DAM. So, why go back to those times? Do you miss the chaos and headaches for some reason? The idea here is to empower users within each user role to be able to access/do/see what they need in the DAM for their job function. Unless assets are restricted for specific uses or for specific eyes only, there is little reason to limit the access to previewing assets in the DAM, but it is up to the administrator and their management to decide what level of access should be granted to whom. If a user needs to access/do/see more (and is permitted to), permissions and roles can be changed by an administrator to allow more access and usability to users of the DAM.

How do you use permissions and roles within your organization’s DAM?

EnterMedia open source Digital Asset Management

EnterMedia digital asset management keeps track of data items such as User, Asset, Group, Download, etc. Each type of data is configured to use either a database or XML text files (1 file for each User). With EnterMedia, you can mix and match how you want to store your data. For example: User being in a database table and Group being an XML file.

In addition, data can be stored in EnterMedia using several methods, such as: XML, Hibernate, Lucene, Cumulus, CSV,  JDBC, and DB4O.

EnterMedia has an optional database connector compatible with all major database vendors and we do work on large database applications for Fortune 500 companies. However, we recommend XML for everything unless you have business requirements that require a database for your data.

XML File advantages:

1. Upgrade protection. XML is backward and forward compatible. With a database you will have problems using the same database across newer or older versions of the software.
2. Data can be copied from one server to another. Great for moving things from test to production.
3. Data can be backed up along with your assets. To backup a repository you can just copy or zip up the folder structure.
4. Is not proprietary. Easy to work with and compatible with lots of tools. Can be edited with a text editor if needed.
5. Faster. Our full text search system caches the XML and is very fast.
6. Modular. Using files within folders to store the data allows many separate applications to be running together. Think of InDesign. It would be annoying to create a new database each time you wanted to create an InDesign file.

Hey, Google uses a file based search system as well!

Here are some highlights from the EnterMedia newsletter:

Around the middle of each month we release a tested version of open source EnterMedia Digital Asset Management, consisting of new features, bug fixes, and back-end functionality. All of these changes are the result of input from corporations, organizations and developers. In order to support our development costs, we release the tested versions to members of the EnterMedia Developer Community.

This past month we have received requests from developers interested in evaluating our tested release for a month or two, before deciding to move forward with a one year commitment. We listened to what you had to say and agree that it’s something we should offer. Now you can join the EnterMedia Developer Community monthly or annually, whichever best suites your needs.

EnterMedia can always be downloaded for FREE!

 Download and Use EnterMedia Digital Asset Management

We have made EnterMedia Digital Asset Management software easier than ever to download and begin using. Now developers and users have four ways to access EnterMedia digital asset management software and its open source code!

1) Download the EnterMedia Daily Builds for FREE. EnterMedia is under constant development, and these daily builds are NOT guaranteed to be stable. No technical support or warranty is offered for the daily builds.

2) Download source code for OpenEdit Framework and EnterMedia application directly from our CVS repository at NO COST. Source can be checked out from our anonymous CVS server. No technical support or warranty is offered.

3) Download EnterMedia to Join the EnterMedia Developer Community. To cover the cost of developing EnterMedia, we only release our tested versions to our members. We offer support to developers who choose this option. $90.00 per month or $800.00 per year.

4) Contact EnterMedia to hire our developers as your software consultants. If you need consulting services for your EnterMedia solution, where better to go than directly to the people who know EnterMedia best? Get a Quote
 

July 2009 Release Notes for EnterMedia 6.0 Digital Asset Management software
Tested Release, open source EnterMedia version 6.0

Month to Month option to Join the EnterMedia Developer Community – Members are now able to choose between our monthly or annual membership plans.

WEBDAV support for EnterMedia – Users can drag and drop files from other applications directly into EnterMedia and have records created for them.

Support for InDesign – EnterMedia now creates thumbnail/preview images for InDesign files.

More Metadata Support – EnterMedia now writes keywords (tags) back to an original asset as XMP data.  This is done by clicking an action from the details page.

Albums – We have made improvements to our Album system:

· Users can now share Albums with other users, or even invite guest users to view their private albums.

· Albums can be configured to use a customized album theme. This is configurable on an album-by-album basis, which means one of your albums can have a different layout than another album.

Improvements to Thesaurus (search suggestion) Functionality – EnterMedia now displays recommended, related search terms at the bottom of the results page after a search.  When typing in search terms, EnterMedia will now try to auto-complete your search query. This auto-completion is based on a saved history of successful (meaning that results were found for the search) searches on your system.

Themes – Many more customizable files have been moved into the Themes area, allowing users more flexibility when designing  their own custom themes.

Back-end Changes – We have removed EnterMedia’s dependencies on the old Cart and Archive projects. This involved major refactoring of all of our EnterMedia code, followed by weeks of bug fixing.  This will allow us to maintain the old projects independently of our new product, to better support legacy users.

Replaced View Toggle Button – Added a view drop-down.  This allows users to select from five different view types for search and browse result pages. (Series Viewer, Gallery Hover, Gallery Larger, Table Data, Lightbox

Search Reporting Data – Users with permissions to view reports are now able to search for specific reporting data.

Visit our online demo to see our newest features. We deploy our demo twice daily.

http://www.entermediasoftware.com
 

Month to Month option to Join the EnterMedia Developer Community – Members are now able to choose between our monthly or annual membership plans.

You can demo EnterMedia online here!

You can download EnterMedia here!

http://www.entermediasoftware.com