The Latest Media Shuttle Innovations: 10 New Capabilities
It’s been an exciting year for Media Shuttle. Passing several key milestones within its global reach, Media Shuttle now has more than 300,000 users from 25,000+ businesses in over 190 countries. At Signiant, we credit much of that success to our commitment to innovation in support of our customers’ evolving needs. After all, the media industry isn’t slowing down but only getting more global, more competitive and faster-paced every year.
One of the great benefits of a cloud-native SaaS solution like Media Shuttle is that we’re able to innovate constantly and roll out new capabilities to our customers without any interruption of service. Here are ten areas where we’ve recently advanced the Media Shuttle platform:
- Distribution Groups
- Embedded Portals
- System-to-Person Automation API
- Auto Delivery
- Management API
- App-less Transfers
- Share Portal Rename and Move
- Content Protection
- Enhanced Language Support
- Enhanced SAML Support
Collectively, these advancements provide enhanced automation, flexibility and security, further supporting the complex and global workflows of modern media companies. But before we dive into detail about the new capabilities, let’s quickly review Media Shuttle’s core strengths.
Media Shuttle: A Quick Overview
One Easy Solution
As the de facto standard for person-initiated file movement across the Media & Entertainment industry, Media Shuttle is the easiest and most reliable way to send any size file, anywhere, fast. Sending files with Media Shuttle is as simple as dragging and dropping them onto a web page. It’s so intuitive that your users will never need a tutorial, training session, or even an email explanation.
A key benefit of Media Shuttle is that it enables organizations to consolidate all their file transfers within a single solution; all transfer activity and users can be monitored, managed and controlled from a single place. And Media Shuttle has three portal types that can be created to support almost any use case:
- SEND portals allow for fast person to person file transfer.
- SHARE portals make it easy to upload and download files within designated folders.
- SUBMIT portals provide an onramp for users to submit files into automated workflows.
Speed
Media Shuttle’s proven file acceleration technology speeds up transfers over public and private networks up to 200 times faster than standard methods (such as FTP). Our patented technology practically eliminates latency, effectively utilizing available bandwidth.
Rock-solid Reliability and Security
Media Shuttle includes Checkpoint Restart, which automatically resumes any interrupted transfers from the point of failure. You’ll also receive email notifications when files have been downloaded, so you’ll never have to guess if your files went through.
Building on the core Transport Layer Security (TLS) built into the Signiant transfer protocol, Media Shuttle contains a variety of security features that adhere to the information assurance principle of “defense in depth”. A defense-in-depth design strategy incorporates several security controls within a system so that multiple security failures must occur before an attacker can gain access to critical resources.
For more information on Media Shuttle’s core capabilities, check out the data sheet. Now let’s take a look at the latest Media Shuttle Innovations.
10 New Capabilities
1. Distribution Groups
Organize portal members into “Groups,” making it easy to transfer content to a specific set of users. For example, you can create a distribution group and send or share the same content to all members of the group.
2. Embedded Portals
Media Shuttle customers can now access portals on any website. Embed portals via an iframe into any web page. This simple but powerful new feature comes in handy in many situations. For example, it allows you to embed a portal into an internal web application for easy access.
3. System-to-Person Automation API (sold separately)
The System-to-Person API allows for the automation of requesting content or sending content via other systems including Signiant Manager+Agents as well as DAM/MAM systems.
Via a REST API, technical staff can build content distribution and content acquisition workflows to automate tasks and reduce errors. For example, a MAM might produce a delivery-ready asset, place the content into a share portal and automatically send a download link to the intended recipients.
Signiant Manager+Agents customers can create simple workflows to send content to (and request content from) end users. This will allow replacement of the Media Gateway workflow in Media Exchange. End-users will experience simple, ‘one-click’ downloads and uploads to pre-specified locations.
4. Auto Delivery (sold separately)
Automate delivery of content to or from share portals. As Media Shuttle is rolled out across the enterprise, use cases often emerge for unattended delivery. Many organizations gain great efficiencies by eliminating the need to manually check for new content or by streamlining distribution of the same content to multiple partners.
Auto Delivery provides this capability via a native application running on the end user’s computer, along with a means of configuring specific folders for automatic upload or download. In short, you can create unattended publish or subscribe workflows, so content is “just there” when you get to your computer.
5. Management API
Automate IT and portal admin tasks to support day-to-day operations and migration from other products. Via a REST API, technical staff can automate repetitive tasks such as portal creation, storage assignment, user creation, and user rights assignment. Additionally, recent updates allow you to monitor content flow across all portals.
6. App-Less Transfers
Allow users who are unable to install the app to make Media Shuttle transfers. With App-Less Transfers, authorized users are able to access their files from anywhere, on any device, without any special software on the user’s computer. While most users engage with Signiant systems via installing the Signiant app to take advantage of accelerated transport, there are some situations where this is impractical.
By accommodating users who want to use a mobile device (including iOS and Android) or are unable to install software, Signiant enables adoption across the entire media ecosystem with completely client-less access, while eliminating the need for employees, clients or contractors to resort to unsanctioned tools. Like all Media Shuttle transfers, App-Less Transfers are fully trackable.
7. Share Portal Rename and Move
Cover your mistakes or make edits. Ever wish you could change the name of a file within a share portal rather than re-uploading it, or simply move files to the correct folder location when you accidentally put it in the wrong one? You can now rename and move files within share portals. This capability also allows you to fix uploads with poor default names (like iOS/Android videos) and to easily move files to the correct folder location.
Additionally, now that you have the ability to move content, you can create simple “review” and “approval” style workflows by moving files from “review” to “approved” folders. Please note that folder rename and move capability is not currently supported for portals using cloud object storage.
8. Content Protection
For increased security for highly confidential content, Media Shuttle now allows you to choose an optional password-protected ‘encryption at rest’ for send portal deliveries. This can be enabled at the user level for individual deliveries or set by administrators at the portal level for all transfers from that portal.
9. Enhanced Language Support
Individual portals can be configured for English, French, Italian, German, Spanish … and now Japanese! Default language preferences can be set by administrators at the portal level or users can set their own language preferences, which overrides the portal default language.
10. Enhanced SAML Support
Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), a standard for single sign-on, allows system administrators to engage a third-party Web identity provider to grant users access to multiple systems. Administrators can easily provision large user groups, allowing individual employees to log into Media Shuttle with their corporate account credentials. Media Shuttle’s SAML support can now be configured universally across all portals; it’s not necessary to configure SAML for each portal.
These are just some of the new improvements and enhancements Signiant has recently made to Media Shuttle. Stay tuned for more announcements as we continue to innovate and add new capabilities.
