Canto releases Cumulus 7

Canto today announced a new version of its Digital Asset Management tool, Cumulus 7. The scaleable solution offers both small businesses and enterprise customers the ability to easily track, organize, and share digital assets such as photos, files, videos, etc. Cumulus 7 offers significant performance gains and enhancements for security, Web-based DAM, automation and usability, including increased asset control, faster production, and more efficient collaboration. In addition, the release is a Universal Binary, offering native support for Intel-based Macs as a Universal Binary. (System requirements and pricing were not available.)

Version 7 adds the ability to tie image assets to their reference, making the task of finding alliterative or variant products easier. The update also gives users the ability to share their collections, which can allow managers to share only the specifics of what a co-worker needs to see for a given task. With the addition of a new "Actions" system, users can automate workflow processes such as image conversion, PDF proof sheet creation, etc.

Another new feature is Web Services integration into the Cumulus system. This integration enables Cumulus 7 to become a standards-compliant participant, with minimal development efforts, in complex, Web-based application infrastructures. Web collaboration has been optimized with the Cumulus 7 Web Clients now working just like Native Client applications. Record and Category View Sets can now be used with the Cumulus 7 Web Clients, and context menu support has also been added. The company also said that overall performance has been improved and that the time to connect to catalogs has been reduced.

Cumulus 7 also reduces search times and eliminates the risk of co-workers and clients using the wrong assets, as the solution displays asset records related to their current projects, without any searching. In addition, users can now label and rate asset records with visual tags that make it easy to see which assets have been approved, rejected, put on hold and which are new.

The back-end of Cumulus 7 has also seen some updates with database engine and server enhancements, such as the introduction of mirroring and transforming Cumulus 7's database engine into a "high-performance permanent" cache. Users can now label and rate asset records with visual tags that make it easy to see which assets have been approved, rejected, put on hold and which are new. The application boasts its security as a main feature.

by MacNN Staff