Customer Challenge
Enterprise customers continue to make the shift to a file-based approach in support of their rich media initiatives. However, these business initiatives do not come without challenges. The content could be centrally located or geographically dispersed and more often than not, in a variety of file formats. The number of rich media files, package sizes, formats and users has increased, making the environment even more challenging. Customers are requiring an integrated solution to support business processes in pre-production, post-production and distribution to different media outlets in support of their digital media business.
B2B Digital Media Solution from Production through Distribution
A collection of industry leading companies including Microsoft, Artesia, Rhozet and Signiant have come together to offer an integrated and comprehensive solution for media management and distribution. The integration includes content management, collaboration, portal, workflow support, business intelligence and search capabilities combined with rich media (image, audio and video) content management capabilities. Using APIs available from all of the vendors, the technologies have been tightly integrated, providing a user-friendly and powerful solution for managing rich media assets.
Primary Solution Components
- Signiant CDM software including the Central Media Manager, Media Agents and Web Services (SOAP) APIs for job creation, initiation, monitoring and status. The applications call the Signiant APIs to initiate the movement of content between the Signiant Agents located on all the application servers in the solution. The API provides the policies for the content movement and provides status back to the other applications in the solution.
- OpenText's Artesia's DAM tool is used for ingest, media management and browse editing.
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) with Silverlight components is used as the portal application through which the functionality of the Artesia DAM and the 3rd party media processing tools are accessed.
- Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 is used to orchestrate automated bulk system processes, workflow and analytics.
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 is responsible for notifying task owners and enabling communications between user roles.
- Rhozet CarbonCoder provides automated file transcoding supporting all the major formats required in today's media environment
- Additional rich Internet applications, enabled by Silverlight, are also included to provide functionality such as edit decisions lists (EDLs), shopping carts, search, video playback and metadata handling.
Use Case
There are a number of uses for this integrated solution. The first is in pre-production where the Sharepoint portal can be used to share project-related information, allocate resources, notify task owners, track progress and manage pre-production documents such as budgets, scripts, and schedules. Sharepoint also can be used in a Post Production scenario where content can be injected and converted to a number of formats; metadata can be added or modified; and review and approval can be tightly integrated into the workflow. Finally, the packages can be distributed to various media outlets and B2B partners.
For more information, please download the Digital Asset Management Best Practices data sheet.