September 15, 2016 •Antra Silova
Features of the latest Cumulus
Canto has made improvements on a number of fronts in Cumulus 10.2. Probably the most exciting is their new Media Delivery Cloud for Cumulus based on Amazon’s Cloudfront. MDC centrally stores your visual content and delivers assets in the right format and quality directly to the user when accessing the asset in a third party system.
How it works: Media Delivery Cloud caches images from the DAM into Amazon’s S3 Content Delivery Network (CDN). This means that media URLs will come from Cumulus and assets can be rendered on-the-fly when requested by the user.
The benefits are many:
• a ‘single source of truth’ ensures all imagery is sourced from the DAM
• originals and variants are centrally managed
• in-house Internet bandwidth and storage costs reduced
• fast page loading times from anywhere in the world
• reduce manual steps from creation to display/distribution.
For more technical details see Canto’s blog.
Improved Portals collections management
For those using Portals, the Cumulus X web interface for unlimited read-only/download access, you will now be able to create a collection, add and delete assets from a collection, and send collection links out.
This is an important feature as it gives Portals to the same functionality as the popular older Sites, now being replaced by Portals with its new mobile-responsive, HTML5 design. A large, intuitive browser makes it easy to navigate and preview content.
Collection links make sharing incredibly easy PLUS they allow you to keep full control of what, how and with whom you share the content to ensure your valuable brand assets are protected.
Adding metadata in InDesign
Adding metadata is always a chore – especially for graphic designers and creatives generally. Cumulus 10.2 now makes it simpler than ever for InDesign users to apply consistent, useful metadata to assets during the creative process.
The InDesign Client released earlier with Cumulus 10.1, is a powerful Adobe plugin with multi-catalog search, sort, read/write, drag n’ drop, preview and check/in check out capabilities – all from within InDesign. Now with the use of metadata templates, you can add metadata directly from the Records or Information panel making it easier, faster and more consistent.
More collaboration with print templates
Cumulus Portals now give you the ability to create print templates such that you can gather all your photos and graphics into a collection, design and prepare a PDF or presentation with those assets, and use a template for printing or sharing with collaborators.
Set up your preferences choosing from different template layouts to simplify project production. Metadata and thumbnails are included to ensure all those involved are up to speed.
Find out more about Cumulus 10 and why you should upgrade!
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