Mark Finch, who is the Vice President EMEA at Open Text’s Digital Media Group, answered our questions.
IT Enquirer: Is you product a modular system, i.e. can it be expanded or extended with modules or is it a unified package?
Open Text: The next generation of Artesia DAM has just been released on 31st March 2010 and at the same time has been re-branded to Open Text Media Manager 7.0 (OTMM). This product provides core DAM capability. There are a number of extensible aspects provided as additional Modules including PowerPoint, Media Portal and specific video related options with Telestream FlipFactory, Video Shot List Editor and Front Porch DIVArchive.
IT Enquirer: How does it integrate w. 3d party systems?
Open Text: At a number of levels. The User Interface is a Flex based application that can be extended. External metadata can be accessed via our comprehensive metadata management framework. OTMM 7.0 adds a comprehensive and robust Open Text application, the Business Process Management (BPM) engine, which allows extensive integration – most importantly the integration can be achieved primarily through configuration rather than development.
IT Enquirer: Which SDKs and API’s are available?
Open Text: There are publically available Java APIs and full Web Services available. Artesia DAM/OTMM is typically integrated into the our customers core business and as such, there are many integrations that have been implemented.
IT Enquirer: Is there an upgrade path to ECM or a Publishing System?
Open Text: OTMM is part of Open Text’s core ECM suite. ECM 2010 will be released at the end of this year, and OTMM will be a core capability of the suite.
IT Enquirer: How would you evaluate its ease of use?
Open Text: OTMM 7.0 has just been released with a very easy to use Flex/Flash based User Interface, providing full drag and drop capability. User feedback so far has been very positive.
IT Enquirer: How would you say is its purchase cost in comparison to other products on the market?
Open Text: Pricing starts at 65,000 EUR for a 50 Named User installation. Importantly, there is significant out-of-the-box capability meaning that implementation effort is kept to a minimum. We have a very solid and proven methodology for implementing DAM, which ensures that phase one deliveries can be delivered in a matter of weeks.
IT Enquirer: Platform independence: which platforms are supported?
Open Text: OTMM supports the Windows and Solaris Operating Systems and Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases. Clients include Mac OS X as well.
IT Enquirer: Does the product come with full audio/video support, which includes the ability scrub through clips and set poset frames?
Open Text: Full video and Audio support is provided. This is a strong differentiator with other products in the DAM category. Our frame-accurate Video Shot List Editor provides the ability to create frame accurate clips and annotated shot lists, with the ability to export these as Edit Decision Lists to craft edit suites such as Final Cut Pro and Avid.
IT Enquirer: How fast & flexible is ingestion of assets?
Open Text: Assets can be ingested in a number of ways: Individually, in bulk, and via a “hot folder”. We also have very powerful ways of automatically ingesting metadata allowing bulk edits, metadata templates (with default metadata) and automatic extraction of metadata that might be stored with the asset (e.g. IPTC/XMP metadata).
IT Enquirer: How fast is your product when browsing & searching?
Open Text: This depends on the hardware and configuration. OTMM is service based architecture and these services can be configured to run across multiple instances of hardware. This capability allows OTMM to scale to meet the performance criteria that will be specified. At the simplest level, the database layer, application tier and web tier can all be run on different machines.
IT Enquirer: What does your product support in terms of Taxonomy, Thesaurus, Metadata, Synonyms & Controlled Vocabulary and Ontology? How does it support these?
Open Text: OTMM comes with full support of all of the above, with the ability to import existing taxonomy structures. We have integrated with pre-defined taxonomies that support hundreds of thousands of terms.
IT Enquirer: Can you handle multi tenanted environments?
Open Text: We also have a hosted offering of our DAM capability, called Artesia On Demand (AOD). AOD is multi-tenanted and we have a couple of hundred of customers on this offering.
IT Enquirer: Is your product capable of auto thesaurus building, and if so, how does it work?
Open Text: This will be provided with the integration of the NStein products, expected at the end of the year (to be confirmed).
IT Enquirer: Is there auto translation & multi-language search?
Open Text: Currently OTMM has language packs proved by Open Text for English, French and German. Our customers have also implemented language pack in Norwegian, Swedish and Italian. OTMM 7.0 is being delivered with full Unicode support, assuring support for double byte characters. This capability allows the individual users to select their language for the User Interface. We have customised a handful of systems to provide metadata in 2 languages. However, the business issues around dual metadata maintenance and multi-lingual search often determine that our customers decide upon a single language to handle metadata language. We have many implementation where the content/assets are multi-lingual.
IT Enquirer: Can your product detect relationships between assets, e.g. images in layouts and image treatments like crops associated with the images these are applied to?
Open Text: OTMM has the ability to create links between assets, both automatically and manually (e.g. for business reasons). For layout files, we maintain the links between all content, and include the capability for publishing work flows such as FPO (For Position Only), that allows the linking and swap out of low-resolution files for the original high resolution when preparing for print. We have full versioning that links originally to any derivative assets.
IT Enquirer: Does your product support multiple dates & date types (era, 4th Century BC, etc)?
Open Text: Yes.
IT Enquirer: Is faceted search possible?
Open Text: We recently announced the acquisition of NStein in early April. In addition to providing faceted search, this also provides semantic search and is a very capable engine to extract knowledge and value form textual content. As a priority on the roadmap is the integration of the NStein Text Mining Engine with OTMM.
IT Enquirer: What is the level of auditing your product supports? Does it audit files, user access, network usage, etc?
Open Text: Full audit support is provided. We have about 60 actions in the application that are logged.
IT Enquirer: Is any form of workflow available with your product?
Open Text: A significant part of the OTMM 7.0 release is integration with the Open Text Business Process Management engine. This provides a GUI-driven, visual based workflow capability, with the ability to visually monitor the progress of jobs. The addition of this BPM capability, is a very strong differentiator.
IT Enquirer: Does your product support versioning, permissions, etc?
Open Text: Full versioning is supported, including check-in / check-out capability. The security model provided is the most comprehensive of all DAM products.
IT Enquirer: How is support for brand management, DRM, etc implemented?
Open Text: OTMM has an easily extensible metadata model, which is typically used to store rights and licensing metadata. With the integration with the Business Process Management engine, business rules can now be applied to the metadata to ensure that assets can only be used when they are properly licensed. In addition OTMM has an Import/Export framework, so that if content needs to be “wrapped” by a separate DRM application, this is very easily achieved.
IT Enquirer: Does it offer full support for XMP?
Open Text: Yes, we have a specific option called the XMP/IPTC Adaptor.
IT Enquirer: Does it manage XML Content Types?
Open Text: Yes
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