Get your Asset Management into gear!

Extensis Portfolio 11 has been released for over 5 months now.

With the latest version there is a plethora of new features that have been added that are designed to make the life of an asset much easier to deal with from a business perspective.

For those of you who are looking for a simple yet comprehensive Digital Asset Management (DAM) Extensis Portfolio 11 ticks a lot of the boxes.

Here’s my pick of the bunch...

DAM Virtually Anywhere

With the new version you are now able to install into the Cloud on a virtual server via Amazon Cloud services EC2 or VMware VSphere. This in addition to using server hardware locally for Mac or PC

File format support

With most "media focused" asset management systems, the primary focus is on a few types of content be it video, images or graphics files. Portfolio gives you all these as well as document management and metadata searchability.

This means Extensis Portfolio can be used right across the business not just in production, adding a greater ROI to the purchase of the DAM.

Portfolio can read the metadata that is saved in files from other applications or devices. Metadata can be searched on and edited within Portfolio clients. Portfolio Server has the ability to extract XMP, IPTC, EXIF, TIFF, Video, and Microsoft Office metadata. It can even index the text content of several document formats and allows searching for words included within documents.

For a full list of file formats supported you can download the pdf here.

This brings me to a killer new feature in Portfolio.

Portfolio Flow

Brand new out onto the market is their Flow component for Mobile file delivery.

Flow enables your team to be more efficient when away from the desk. As an add-on for Portfolio Server, using a mobile device, users can tag assets in the field and upload them directly to Portfolio Server.

With the historical nature of Extensis in image asset management, this tool is perfect for an event photographer to be able to tag assets prior to sending back to HQ. Notifications are managed via the server and these photos can be managed properly prior to being published. Saving time and resources to bring into the DAM.

Where I see this app most useful is in any services industry that has resources out in the field. It could be emergency services, utility services, technical services or even medical services. This tool is perfect for documenting cases that need to be sent back to HQ for record keeping or escalation advise etc.

The killer feature is that you can use the voice recognition services on the mobile platform, Google or IOS, to provide voice to text comments or tag phrases for future searchability.

Take a look at the video here.

There are many more great features and products that make Portfolio a DAM great(pardon the pun) business tool, such as the NetPublish – a fully customisable add-on for serving up your catalog on your own website for easy and secure access by people inside or outside of your business. These can be setup automatically for any platform be it mobile or desktop.

More details for NetPublish are available here.

Extensis offer free trials of their software which can be downloaded here.

Don’t forget they have some great resources here that will help guide you through the questions of whether you need a DAM or not.

If you are considering a DAM then take a look at the best practices guide along with their DAM Learning Centre.