Antra Silova | databasics DAM solutions and services

Top 10 Canto Features 2018

by Antra Silova | Mar 20, 2019 | Canto SaaS, Digital Asset Management

Approaching the end of the first quarter of 2019, we are looking back at what great features Canto introduced in 2018. Besides the ever popular – ease of use, modern interface, free updates throughout the year, ease of content sharing and collaboration, and other popular features, the latest features continue to establish Canto as a strong player in the DAM market place.

The following features introduced in 2018, have our top votes.

Style Guides

Creating your brand style guide is now easier than ever with the introduction of Style Guide feature at the end of 2018. You can create public or private style guides to be shared with your team, partners or public. All you need to do is showcase your colours, typography, imagery and copy. See more in our blog HOW TO create a Style Guide.

Asset-level reporting

Are you interested to see how a particular asset is used? Admin can set up Usage History and Activity sections of a single asset. This information will then be visible in the asset information window.

WCAG 2.0 compatibility

This is a big win for Canto User Experience. The WCAG 2.0 compatibility makes Canto more accessible to people with disabilities. You can find the Keyboard shortcuts to help navigation here.

Drupal integration

Pull content from your Canto library directly into Drupal.

Amazon Translate and Set Your Preferred Language

Besides the powerful Amazon Translate feature that would translate the extracted document text for you right there inside Canto, each user can also set their own preferred language in Profile Settings.

Free API keys

Canto has made it easy to build an integration with the DAM using self-generated API keys.

Inbuilt CloudFront – Content Delivery Network

Canto now uses AWS CloudFront, a highly secure global content delivery network from Amazon that delivers content to almost anywhere in the world with low latency and high transfer speeds.

Add a note to specific area of an image

@mention in annotations

In the preview view, you can add a note or a comment to a specific area of an image.

@mention users

Set up self-registration for multiple Portals

If you’d like to setup self-registration for multiple portals at once, it’s now easy to do through Users & Groups Settings.

Expanded S3 Regions for Optimal Performance

Store your files in Sydney with this new AWS S3 location. Being closer to your files means faster upload and download speeds.

We chose these features based on what our customers ask for most frequently. That being said, we feel we need to mention a few other features that are frequently requested and are now part of your Canto DAMS:

Asset Request – distribute low resolution and/ or watermarked content, or send request for original
Edit Existing Keywords – easily edit existing keywords in the Configuration Options in Settings
Superzoom in full screen
Folders and Albums show Portal information – see in which Portals you can find the particular Folder or Album
Terms & Conditions viewable from Portals
Follow Folders – you can now follow Folders along with Albums
Updated reports page – all analytics on the same page
Easy access to My Uploads, My Collections, Portals and Workspaces – select them from the left pane.

There are many more features we could talk about. You can find the Release Notes in Canto Help Center.

What are your favourite Canto features? Let us know and we might write a blog about it!

HOW TO create a Style Guide

by Antra Silova | Feb 27, 2019 | Canto SaaS, HOW TO

The key to a strong brand and increased brand awareness is consistency. Big companies invest a lot of money in building a brand that is instantly recognizable – think about Apple – their strict style guides make it very hard to imitate thus providing instant brand recognition and loyalty.

Creating a brand style guide is now easier and more straight forward since the introduction of Canto Style Guide feature, introduced in December 2018 Canto update, that is included with your purchase. That could translate to savings of more than $2,000 a year in agency fees, you get it for free!

What do you need to create your organisation’s brand Style Guide?

You will start with the colours of your logo, specific typography you want to use in your communication and other visual standards, like imagery, and a message copy that you would like to convey.

Let’s take a look at what you can do in Canto.

You can access the Style Guide feature in your settings. Go to New Style Guide. Next fill in the information fields about your style guide, such as Name and Description.

You can set the access of style guide to be Public or Private. If you would like to allow parties outside of your Canto instance to access the style guide, you can then set it as Public.

Next you need to add content to your style guide that you would like to showcase as example of your brand style. It could be albums or folders that are specifically created for display in the style guide.

Make sure to select Auto Sync to automatically include any new content to your style guide.

Now you’re ready to build your style guide in Style Setup.

To start, Canto provides 4 different building blocks to be included in the guide – colour, typography, imagery, and copy. More can be added if necessary.

Let’s start with colour. Add any colours you associate with your brand. You can give your colours a specific name. In the text field on the left you can add any instructions for the users of the style guide.

Next, a big part of your brand identity is font. Decide if you’d like to stick to one font or use several, provide detailed instructions in the text box.

Let’s move on to imagery. Use it to display your logos and any other images/ photography that showcase your brand and style. Here you can create several sections of imagery – for logos or different products, for example. Or to be used in different communications, such as advertising or social media.

Add any folders or albums you would like to include in your style guide, these can be then accessed by the style guide users to make sure they have the right brand imagery.

The description of the albums you see under the images, can be edited in the main library in the description field for the album.

Finally, in the Copy section include any message or text you would like to always appear consistent in your marketing communication.

After style sections are completed you can create a custom branding for your style guide landing page, by changing colours, font or logo.

Lastly, you can add any users or groups you would like to have access to style guide. They will now be able to access it in the left-side menu under the main library. This is what a final style guide could look like and be further shared with others.

dbApprove to solve your digital asset approval and distribution needs

by Antra Silova | Feb 18, 2019 | Canto Cumulus

Now that you have Cumulus to provide you a centralised storage to easily create, organise, find and repurpose your digital assets and content – life’s a piece of cake.

But there might come a time when you need an easier way to manage the lifecycle of your digital assets and content – which might require more control over content approval, publishing, expiration and distribution. Luckily, as an answer to frequent customer requests, databasics have created a solution for you – dbApprove! dbApprove was built as an approval workflow and channel distribution solution. It uses standard Cumulus technology that can be easily supported, expanded and repurposed.

The following real-life scenarios can provide you with some examples of how dbApprove can help organisations achieve some of these objectives.

Real-life scenario 1

An organisation wants to control their content approval for publication and would like to automatically archive older content.

With dbApprove, approval and expiration criteria are automatically applied when assets move from ingestion to production, and finally – into the archive.

Real-life scenario 2

A marcom team in a government/ private sector wants to make a limited range of watermarked content available for general access in a format only suitable for limited usage.

dbApprove makes asset conversions, watermarking and transfers between catalogs automatic. A simple press of a button and the solution does all the hard work for you.

Real-life scenario 3

An organisation wants to release content to multiple marketing channels. Each channel has different requirements.

Do you need something more complex? For example, some teams receive content from multiple user groups and need to publish content to multiple channels. If this fits the needs of your organisation, dbApprove allows us to provide a set of tailored enterprise level workflows to fulfil the exact publishing specifications of your organisation.

If you would like to learn more about dbApprove contact databasics at info@databasics.com.au or give us a call 1300 886 238.

Image Recognition and DAM

by Antra Silova | Feb 8, 2019 | AI, Canto Cumulus, Digital Asset Management, Image Recognition

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on top of everyone’s mind for the last couple of years – will it improve our lives, or will robots be soon taking over? However, for DAM users it is hard to ignore the benefits of the image recognition (or more accurately – object recognition) and automatic image tagging technology in digital asset management. The most time-consuming (and – important) process in managing your digital assets is tagging your images with accurate metadata so they can be easily searched for and found.

What is Image Recognition?

According to Clarifai, one of the providers of this technology, Image Recognition “refers to a computer vision’s ability to identify the dominant subject in an image and apply the relevant “concept” or “tag”. This could be objects, places, people, words, and even actions.”

Simply said, image recognition picks out the central object in an image that the camera was focusing on.

What are the benefits?

Improved search results – with improved metadata quantity and quality by automatic object recognition and tagging, your search will be a breeze
Increased efficiency – the content is automatically uploaded with metadata, saving thousands of hours of manual work and frustration
Focus on core strengths – with the labour-intensive manual tagging out of the way, you team can now focus on their core strengths.

How does it work?

Select one or more assets from your collection, hit Run Auto-Tagging in your tool box.

auto-tagging

The tags are generated. Review, edit or delete tags.

Why Upgrade to Cumulus 11

by Antra Silova | Aug 5, 2018 | Canto Cumulus, Digital Asset Management

Have you jumped on the Cumulus 11 bandwagon? Not yet? Here is a summary of what you’re missing out on. For more detailed descriptions of features and enhancements please refer to the resources at the end.

Improved InDesign Client – now supports Adobe InDesign Creative Cloud 2018:

Select multiple assets from Cumulus at once using the common keystrokes
Selected multiple assets can be placed together in documents
Right-click on the file and view, modify, etc. that asset in the Cumulus Web Client with the new entry “Open in Cumulus”
New “Relink” function – replace any link or resource with an asset from Cumulus Catalog

Portals:

Customisation: a new lighter theme available out of the box
Transparency support
Playback for audio files
Static URLs for all main pages
Deep link functionality – to facilitate the integration of 3^rdparty applications
Field labels in overview, search result pages, and the basket overlay
Controls for page navigation display on top of search results
Show asset relationships if desired, browse related assets
Configure the number of assets per page
Static URL for Upload Collections

Web Client:

Similarity search – detect visually similar files and potential duplicates
Define asset actions in toolbox for better workflows – send a sample workflow that supports the similarity search and handling of similar assets, add selected asset functions to workflow states
Asset navigation – navigate through list of files in details view, edit or preview modes with controls and keyboard shortcuts
Improved container browsing – Vertical Container Tree on the left side of the window
Audio playback
Support for native language environments: define a default language, auto-tagging in multiple languages, email notifications in multiple languages
Easily change your download collections
Select All – Deselect All function
New Crop Editor Tool to deliver proper renditions of the asset
Focus Area Cropping – a “region of interest” can be defined for images and PDFs. This region of interest is saved along with the asset’s metadata

Roboflow:

Better overview of workflows – toggle switch
New folder filter: combine “including” and “excluding” in a fresh folder filter
New action: call-external-script

Cumulus Office Connector (Please note this feature requires additional purchase):

Browse in and insert images directly from Cumulus into your Microsoft Word documents or PowerPoint presentations
Pull and insert PSD Photoshop files, when placing a PSD file into document a PNG file is generated by Office Connector

Image recognition (AI) and Auto-Tagging – this optional feature allows for all your images to be scanned and auto-tagged by Cumulus. These tags can be added to the metadata of the assets. Please note this feature requires additional purchase.

SharePoint Search Connector – search for Cumulus assets within the SharePoint search, view assets along with metadata and preview, save to SP Document library. Please note this feature requires additional purchase.

Useful resources

If you’ve fallen behind a couple of major releases here is what you’re missing from Cumulus 10and Cumulus 10.2

Wondering what does Cumulus Office Connector do? More here.

From Canto:

Cumulus 11 update

Cumulus 11.0.2 update

Cumulus 11.0.4

Cumulus 11.1

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