Today, not only has the Xinet staff been embraced into the North Plains family, but Xinet is also an integral component of our portfolio of best-of-breed solutions to help our customers successfully leverage their rich media assets. Since the acquisition, we’ve had a chance to expand on the technology and develop interoperability between Xinet and our other products. As the next step in Xinet’s evolution, North Plains has expanded Xinet from a single product into a product line with the introduction of Xinet Digital and Xinet Central.

Xinet Central and Xinet Digital were developed to enable easier collaboration and improve the management of rich media assets across creative teams within the global digital agencies as well as with their clients.

• Xinet Digital is a hosted solution based on our Marketing Resource Management (MRM) and Brand Asset Management (BAM) product, On Brand, that lets agencies easily set up branded client portals to manage and evolve digital campaign assets.  It provides a bridge between agency creative work and clients so that they can access deliverables anytime and from anywhere.

• Xinet Central utilizes our new ConnectR technology to aggregate rich media assets from disparate Xinet servers to provide centralized access across the enterprise. It allows content-producing enterprises and large agencies using Xinet for creative production to easily collaborate with one another by enabling repository access, visibility and communication.

You can read more about the two products on our Xinet page. Needless to say, we’re proud of where we’ve taken Xinet thus far. However, we know there’s much more work to be done and we encourage you to watch this space for more interesting news and features about Xinet’s upcoming plans.

The post Happy Anniversary Xinet appeared first on .

The last week of February provided us the opportunity to get live feedback from prospects and customers about the direction of our products. We participated at the Createasphere event in California. There were some very informative speaking sessions and our esteemed Director of Customer Success, Tim Padilla, also moderated a discussion panel on “DAM is not Software”. We also had a great time exhibiting our product line at the exhibition hall and created some great buzz with our iPad Mini give away contest that we held with our partners IO Integration and GLOBALedit. Congratulations to our winners below:

We also participated at the Technology For Marketing & Advertising event in London, UK that same week. This year, to stand out from the rest of the crowd, we created a make-believe storefront that indicated North Plains is “open for business”, and showcased all of our products to prospects in the EMEA region.

We mixed a little fun with our distinctive messaging, and gave away sweets when anyone dropped by our booth to look at our suite of products. Many prospects commented it was a refreshing take on booth design, and rose above a sea of similar commercial looks.

Bon-bons aside, we did have a powerful message to deliver, and participated in two speaker sessions during the two-day conference. On Tuesday, February 26, Ruth Knight, International Sales & Marketing Director, and Mohan Taylor, Principal Consultant, Office of the CTO, jointly presented the topic: “The 4P’s you may not have heard of: Transforming Marketing into a Profit Centre Through Marketing Resource Management”. On Wednesday, February 27, Ruth teamed up with Stephen McKillop, Global Project Lead at Diageo, a leading global brand in the drinks and spirits industry, to walk through a case study: “Diageo Smartbrand: The Evolution of a Global Brand Asset Management. Learn how Smartbrand Increases Productivity and Reduce Risks, Delivering a 6X Payback.” Both sessions were fully attended, with attendees asking many thoughtful questions related to brand management.

How to leverage digital assets to manage the creative marketing lifecycle and ensure brand consistency world-wide is gaining increasing importance. Marketers around the globe are looking for the most effective way, most of them turning to SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions to achieve this efficiently.

Don’t take our word for it. Listen to what the conference attendees are saying:

http://www.youtube.com/northplains

The post Showcasing the North Plains Product “Sweets” appeared first on .

Key Features:

Core Xinet Server updates

• All Xinet Macintosh client plug-ins now work with Adobe InDesign CS6 applications; plug-ins for Macintosh clients running Mac OS X 10.8 are now fully supported
• Portal now supports Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8
• WebNative Server now runs on Mac OS X 10.7

Xinet Contextual Menu 3.0

• Works with Safari and Firefox on Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 clients
• URLs in emails, text documents, or file names will reveal or open files on mounted Xinet Volumes

Video version 4.4

• Provides faster, concurrent generation of previews of videos and low-res movies of videos
• Offers support for more video formats: rawvideo, 3GP, 3G2, WebM, DPX, EXR, TS, Red R3D, DGN CAD
• Ingests closed caption information and subtitles
• Bundled within 17.03 Installer tool for smooth updates/installation

Expanded functionality for Linked Files

• Allows assets placed within Adobe Photoshop Native files to be recognized as “linked files”

If you want more information on this release, please contact sales@northplains.com.

The post North Plains Releases Xinet 17.03 appeared first on .

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Let’s face it: Staying competitive these days is no piece of cake. The pressure is always on to get to market faster, build your brand (and its reach), and keep customers happy, smiling, and tweeting favorably about you. And oh yeah, you also need to grab as much market share as you can—while your competitors are all trying to do the same!

Yikes.

But if there were a way to get all that done—and reduce your operations costs—wouldn’t you want to jump on it? Of course you would. The silver bullet you’re looking for is marketing automation.

Centralized brand management and web-to-print solutions not only streamline your marketing processes, they’ll also keep branding consistent and available anytime, anywhere. With marketing automation, you can drive better efficiency, faster time-to-market, streamlined collaboration, and easier file creation. What more could you possibly want?

• Maintain consistent messaging? Check!

• Enable local target marketing? Check!

• Simplify cross-media communication? Check!

• Easily track ROI? Check!

Find out more
Are your biggest competitors just lucky? Are they savvier than you? Well, consider this: The reality may be that they were simply ahead of you on marketing automation.

If you want to get up to speed on marketing automation, IOI has a couple of special events coming up that will do the trick! The free IOI Workshop series, Marketing Automation: Your New Secret Weapon, will show you how top brands, agencies, and publishers are using marketing automation technologies to cut costs, drive sales, and take control of their brands—both locally and globally. You’ll also find out how easy it is to harness the power of automation for your own organization, and start taking market share away from your competition!

IOI Marketing Automation Workshop NYC
Thursday, November 8
Soho House
REGISTER

IOI Marketing Automation Workshop London
Wednesday, November 14
Tower of London
REGISTER

The post Better, Faster, Easier. . . How? appeared first on .

Well, the same is true of your rich digital assets.  Over the years, different groups and different people simply stored their files in no particular way, with no particular information (metadata) somewhere on the file storage system just in case someone, someday, needs them.

When that day arrives and the creative group requires a specific image, video or other type of digital assets, they typically can’t find it and would need to buy new assets.

Aside from the unnecessary costs involved in buying these new assets, other questions that need to be asked include:

• Is the newly purchased file approved by my organization?

• Do I have the right to use, modify and distribute this new file?  And if so, for how long?

• Do I have the exclusive rights for this asset or does my competitor also have access to the same file?

• If branding is involved, does it follow the latest approved branded policy?

In today’s world where new rich digital assets and distribution channels increases exponentially everyday and where speed and agility of marketing campaigns become a key competitive advantage to any organization, selecting, implementing and using a proven, enterprise DAM system becomes critical.

But where to start?

Well, just like your accumulated “stuff” in your garage, basement and external storage unit, the first step is to assess what you do have, which one will you likely need to access in the future, who will have access to it, where the asset will be needed, how quickly will you need them and how do you want to deal with the new acquired/created asset moving forward.  This initial assessment will help you identify the type of DAM system you’ll need to implement.

There are as many DAM solutions out there as there are storage areas.  The key is to know which one is right for you.  Getting the assistance from experts in this industry is the key to ensuring the best possible outcome of your project.  Leveraging people who “have been there” for a while, who have implemented DAM and assisted several other organizations will prevent you from repeating past mistakes, while accelerating your project and reducing the costs involve.  Whether they are consultants, system integrators, professional services experts or analysts, the key is to clearly identify your needs and find the right DAM solution for you in order to reduce your cost and increase your agility and competitiveness.

North Plains has a rich network of experts worldwide to assist you, from a wide network of certified partners, to our own proven Professional Services group, to analysts who have researched the industry thoroughly.

Let North Plains assist you with your clean-up!

The post Time for a Clean-up … of Your Rich Digital Assets appeared first on .

There have been many changes at North Plains in the last few months. Since our last blog post in January, we have acquired Xinet, one of the oldest and most well-known work-in-progress DAM solutions in the market. With this acquisition, analyst firms such as Frost & Sullivan and Forrester classify North Plains as the largest pure-play DAM vendor in the industry. More importantly, with this acquisition, we will be able to provide our customers with the ability to manage the entire lifecycle of their rich media files, enabling significant additional business improvements in time-to-market, cross-channel collaboration, and cost-per-customer-touch-point. (You can view some of our recent Webinars addressing this issue here and here).

Additionally, we have brought on several technology and industry experts to round out our management team and created the Office of the CTO, comprised of DAM-veterans, Steve Sauder, Mohan Taylor and Scott Seebass.  The Office of the CTO will have the vital task of spearheading product development for the TeleScope and Xinet systems, as separate products and integrated together. You can read the press announcement for more details.

The team here at North Plains is very excited about all the changes and growth within our company. We will be restarting this blog with new posts from our team of technology and industry experts. If you have any specific topics you would like us to blog about, please let us know. Also, for the latest news you can follow us on Twitter or our company page on LinkedIn.

For now, all we want to say is “Watch this space!”

The post The Status of Us appeared first on .

That’s a great insight, and one that I think marketers have been avoiding. They are happy to talk about speed and measurement, but not so much about the intricacy and complexity that is become commonplace in marketing. That’s too much like engineering.

However, there is no denying it – marketing is becoming vastly more complicated and intricate. Companies are trying to reach more customers through more channels, and reach them in a personalized, conversational manner. They are trying to do this simultaneously across global markets. This is extremely complicated and intricate work, but worthwhile because marketers realize that any delay in reaching a customer, or any weakness in the quality of that touch point, means lost revenue.

More challenging marketing programs result in more effort, longer time-to-market, increased costs, and delayed or missed revenue. The solution? Do things faster, or do things in parallel.

Product development went through the concurrent engineering movement where companies realized that the massive advantages of being first too market required reinventing their product development processes to allow more processes to run concurrently.

Marketing now has to do the same. Companies have to think in terms of concurrent marketing and find ways to remove inefficiencies from their marketing processes. They need to put time-to-market high on their priorities, and find ways to make their marketing processes run in parallel.

This can’t be done without getting control of your digital assets. Why do you need a DAM? The old answer was to find and reuse your high value digital assets. The new answer: to gain competitive advantage through concurrent global marketing.

The post Why Concurrent Marketing is Becoming a Competitive Necessity appeared first on .

One of the interesting aspects of discussing mobile digital asset management is how it highlights the importance of the digital asset management value chain- who interacts when and where with your digital assets.

Looking at the value chain, it becomes clear that mobile DAM is valuable because it strongly connects your digital asset management processes to critical points of the value chain that are otherwise hard to serve. It fills some of the gaps called out in last weeks blog post, Mind the DAM Gap.

Companies that use DAM to manage large numbers of digital assets across non-trivial value chains- photographers, executives, agencies, marketing partners, field representatives- have been feeling these gaps in their digital asset management systems and are eager for a solution. Many of them even created iPhone solutions before the advent of the iPad- with surprisingly good adoption and success for that small screen.

Some specific areas where mobile makes DAM more successful is improving metadata capture, timely review and approval, and, most significantly, improving the availability of digital assets to those who need them, where they need them.

A photographer can stand on the set and tag just ingested images.

Talent in a shoot can be given a tablet, and with no training do a select of their preferred images.

A sales representative can be asked a question, and immediately bring up the relevant information for his client.

Reviewers, rather than sitting back and commenting on a slide show, can be handed a tablet and asked “can you score these?”. No sending a hyperlink, setting up training, writing training manuals, dealing with lost passwords, and dealing with the high cost of getting a new user on a system for occasional use.

You hand over the tablet, and say “please look these photos over” while in a meeting.

In short, you can think of mobile DAM as impacting the DAM value chain in two ways:

1) By location, extending your DAM processes to places and times where computers aren’t practical.

2) By user, bring informal but important DAM users into the value chain.

For a large number of our customers, both of these increase the value of their DAM system, and ensure that important gaps are minded and overcome. In fact, once the limitations of location and informal users are removed through mobile DAM, there are very few gaps left.

The post Mobile Digital Asset Management Completes the DAM Value Chain appeared first on .

However, just as big an issue are the “unadopted” enterprise solutions that tried to impress and engage their users with a solution that didn’t really solve their issues.

This is what we call the DAM gap- the space between a simple photo library and a system that manages true digital assets across their lifecycle, improving time-to-market, reducing effort, and scaling your content across multiple channels.

Some roadblocks encountered in the gap: security, effective metadata, integration to other systems, business rules, usability, effective search, long-term metadata management (librarian services), workflow automation, format support, and creative tool integration.

We do a lot of system replacements at North Plains, and we can see the walls that these companies have hit. That drives our innovation and our passion for our product. It also drives our customer solution philosophy.

Step 1 for a success DAM selection and implementation? Have overarching business and technical visions built with the help of people who have tackled your style of solution.

Then create a meaningful plan that delivers tangible value to users (the people who use and benefit from the system) and stakeholders (the groups and people who aren’t immediate users but who benefit from the solution- e.g. the CIO and his security goals and the CFO and his asset monetization goals).

We recently did a webinar called The Five Value Areas of DAM. Have a look and see if some of the ideas can help you bridge the gap between the simple DAM and the complete DAM that delivers resounding value.

The post Mind the DAM Gap appeared first on .

This is reflected in how DAM has evolved over the last decade from a simple repository to a critical component of day-to-day marketing and publishing processes with six core capabilities:

The Six Core DAM Capabilities

• Digital Media Management
• Video Management
• Partner Collaboration
• Creative Workflow
• Multi-Channel Publishing
• Distribution

These capabilities make sense for in-house DAM, but if you don’t include your partners you will ultimately have a broken DAM process. Your DAM will be a like a road that ends every mile with an off-road trek to get back on another road.

It’s important to consider what you need for a digital asset ecosystem, and to evaluate each of the core DAM capabilities against their support for one.

Here is a short list of features to consider- features that heavily influenced our recent major TeleScope 9 release.

Essential Features for Creating Digital Asset Ecosystems:

1. Support solutions for companies of all sizes (often with SaaS).
2. Support the complete digital asset management lifecycle.
3. Provide a user interface designed for creative users and users with no training.
4. Manage workflow across the value chain.
5. Support Multi-lingual metadata and user interfaces.
6. Excel at multi-channel publishing and distribution.

Together, these enable a platform for companies of all sizes that will rapidly allow them to connect with partners, clients, service providers, and other participants in their digital asset creative and distribution ecosystems.

Large companies can easily partner with many small companies to get the best value, talent, and time-to-market possible. Smaller companies can easily build partnerships that provide a full-service offering to their clients. Large or small, working with digital asset ecosystems is a critical competency of creative organizations today.

This is what we’ve focused TeleScope Version 9 on- the ability to close the gaps in the value chain inclusive of partners and create a true digital asset management ecosystem.

The post A Digital Asset Ecosystem Outlook is Critical to DAM Success appeared first on .