Canto's Cumulus 7 to support Intel Macs

Canto today announced that Cumulus 7, the next version of its digital asset management software, will run natively on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs.. The upgrade will combine powerful workflow capabilities along with enhanced security features to facilitate collaboration for creative and production teams and their customers. Cumulus 7 will be built on the Cocoa interfaces of Mac OS X. This will allow to leverage the Java 1.4/1.5 interfaces, which it says are superior in performance, features and stability to the Java 1.3 interfaces to which the Cumulus 6.x versions, running on the Carbon interfaces, are limited. It will also feature a new Web Services interface that will allow solutions to integrate Cumulus functionality within portals or other business process solutions.

"Our focus is on providing the very best solutions possible to our customers who require fast and efficient workflows," said Jennifer Neumann, CEO of Canto. "Beta tests of the Universal version of Cumulus 7 on the new Intel based Macs have already delivered significant performance boosts that every creative or production user will appreciate."

Extending the existing trigger functionality in Cumulus 6 that was mostly used to notify subscribers to changes of assets will now be available in Cumulus 7 to build an entire chain of automated actions as a result of any change to the system's data.

In addition, Cumulus 7 will further extend the security features for assets and metadata. On a catalog-by-catalog basis permissions can be set efficiently, but protection can also be easily applied on an asset-by-asset or even metadata level.

The complete list of new features in Cumulus 7 will be announced when the product ships in early summer 2006. Cumulus 7 Servers will be available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris, and native/rich Client versions for Mac OS X and Windows are offered.

The company said that customers who buy a Cumulus 6 Workgroup or Enterprise solution between now and the release of Cumulus 7 will receive a free upgrade.

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