Latest Publications

Our partners can now download the latest DC-X version, 1.7.4.0. It contains the usual bug fixes and minor improvements – for example, you can now find out who is editing a document directly from the search result view:

Thesaurus hierarchies are also better supported now when searching and displaying metadata.

The greatest improvement is the first iteration of a new browser-based upload tool, which is not production-ready yet but which you’re welcome to test! It supports HTML5 drag & drop into the web browser, with live feedback during upload and import. (Requires Firefox 4, Safari 5 or Google Chrome 7.) See it in action in this short screencast:

Thanks to Sebastian Tschan for the open source jQuery-File-Upload project on which we built this feature!

This is going to take a few months and several DC-X versions, but we have started replacing the existing Flash-based administration interface (built with Adobe Flex) with a new HTML interface. The new one is going to look much nicer, will be easier to understand, load and respond faster and can be accessed from your smartphone or iPad.

The nice looks are thanks to the Bootstrap toolkit open sourced by Twitter. The JavaScript code is powered by the open source jQuery library.

Here’s a before/after comparison of the list editor functionality for the DC-X topic map. The current Flash/Flex UI:

And the new HTML UI:

I hope you like it. Stay tuned for more good news!

Some of us are getting a little less sleep than usual, and not because of late-night coding sessions: Four babies in less than three weeks is not bad for a company with just over 20 people in our Hamburg office…

From left to right:

• Anna-Marie + Ben-Jannik (Sep 29th)
• Nic Hugo (Oct 8th)
• Emil Linus (Oct 14th)

Welcome to this world!

Today we released a version 1.7.3.0 of our media asset management system DC-X, which is available for download for our partners.

Like in version 1.7.2.0 not so many gui features are shipped with this version, as we are still working on the all new task/assignment module and its features. We also are working on enhancing the administration interface, trying to keep the administration tasks as short and compact as possible.

Still one neat functionality has been introduced, which was requested by several customers recently: By clicking on a tab on the right side, a refresh of the current tab is triggered. One use case for this feature is very relevant in the Content-X context. For example if an editor is waiting for images being linked to a story by an archivist. The editor does not have to leave the the story editor context and the new images are only one click away.

Also the rights capabilities of DC-X have been enhanced. It is now possible to add date limits to certain special agreement rights:

Adding special agreement right to image using time limits

Which can in turn be viewed by any other user who may view rights of assets:

Time limited special agreement rights

We’re currently in Vienna, at IFRA Expo 2011, booth A645. White is still our favorite color:

We are sure that some of you already have noticed that we upgraded our demo server to DC-X version 1.7.2.0 on September 23rd. Since we updated from version 1.6.3.0, a couple new features have been introduced or enhanced like the rights management or the alerts for stored searches (a.k.a. agents). We also worked a lot on features that deal with improvements to the task assignment functionality of the publishing suite module of DC-X, which are not visible to the user yet, so stay tuned.

Since DC-X 1.7.2.0 was missing one upgrade instruction, our partners can download the feature-equal DC-X 1.7.2.1 from our servers. Please let us now how it works for you!

Our partners can now download a new version of our media asset management system DC-X, 1.7.2.0.

It’s mostly a bugfix release – no new user-visible features. But it’s paving the way for the upcoming task/assignment functionality, stay tuned!

A nice enhancement for system administrators is support for the cron date/time format in the DC-X scheduler:

Repetitive background tasks, like the frequent purging of old and unused documents or nightly batch exports, are usually executed through cron on Unix servers. But cron is not well-suited for server clusters, and creating or modifying cron jobs is relatively complicated.

That’s why we have a simple cron replacement in DC-X, the scheduler. Scheduled job definitions are created in the DC-X administration interface. A background process checks which of them are due and creates jobs which are then asynchronously executed by the DC-X workflow engine.

Until now, the scheduler only allowed defining schedules to be executed each N minutes. The new cron syntax support means that you have the flexibility to, for example, run a job every 5 minutes on weekdays between 9 AM and 6 PM only. A small but nice feature!

Today we’re releasing the new version 1.7.1.0 of our Digital Asset Management software, DC-X. Our partners can download it from our support site, and read the full ChangeLog in our external Wiki.

Here’s a few interesting changes since DC-X 1.6.3.0:

Our e-mail importer has been improved. A nice feature is that, in addition to storing attachments in the appropriate places (e.g., attached image files go into the image pool), DC-X can now store a copy of the full e-mail as an .eml file. This allows you to click the e-mail in DC-X, and the original e-mail will be opened in your native e-mail client (like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail). You can reply to or forward the e-mail from your mail client.

Background: Our customers use the e-mail importer as a lightweight replacement for Microsoft Exchange public folders. All mail sent to a dedicated e-mail address (like “sports@example.com”) is automatically imported into a DC-X channel without wasting space in user’s mailboxes. They can monitor and search these mails in DC-X. But if needed, users now have full access to the original e-mail (the screenshot shows Apple Mail opened by DC-X):

Rights managing their content is becoming more and more important to our customers. DC-X 1.7.1.0 makes it possible to search for rights (i.e., “which documents am I allowed to use on my website”) and you can now edit rights profiles (see DC-X: Managing image rights) directly in the user interface:

And last but not least, users now have the option to receive a prominent alert when a stored search (called an “agent” in DC-X) has found new matching documents:

We will let you know in this space as soon as our demo server is updated to the new version!

Using DC-X as blog software is not exactly what we had in mind when we built it (since it’s an enterprise-grade DAM system). But it’s a nice experiment that helps me test new DC-X releases, and it works well enough: My personal link weblog has been powered by DC-X for a few weeks now.

Here’s a screenshot of the DC-X interface I’m using to create and edit blog posts, next to the custom blog design shown to the world:

The best thing about this is that I can use the DC-X Firefox add-on to archive (as HTML, extracted text, and a screenshot) the web pages I’m blogging about. They’re stored in DC-X, linked to the blog post, so when the web page is gone I still have a copy for reference.

Which posts are being published is determined through the standard DC-X “Usage” information, i.e. I can remove posts from the public site just by removing the “published” status in DC-X.

On Sunday, we updated our demo server dcx.digicol.de to the latest DC-X version, 1.6.3.0. Enjoy the new keyboard navigation and (finally) translated channel names.

Our partners can now download 1.6.3.0. Let us know how it works for you!