Signiant’s Digital Media Galaxy

Signiant recently released version 8.2 of its Content Distribution Management software which was developed for B2B collaboration. Rick Clarkson, Senior Director of Product Management, delivered a webcast outlining the new functionality, if you missed it, you can view the recording, go to:  http://www.signiant.com/82-webcast-0. At the end, Rick answered questions from the audience. Here’s a sampling of what our customers asked…

Q: With the new Media Exchange and Media Publish Point [in this release], are you saying that I can send any size files to anyone similar to e-mail?

A: Correct, that’s what I am saying. Media Exchange is a great alternative to e-mail or FTP. Most people are familiar with the pros and cons of FTP, and certainly with e-mail you are going to be limited in the file sizes that you can move. For the folks on the webcast today, I am pretty sure no one is going to tell me that they are not moving large files – and it just can’t be supported with e-mail. So the answer to your question is yes.

Q: With the new Media Exchange integration and with the Central Management function, unlike FTP, do I have a complete log of all files being sent and received by users?

A: Yes, this is really important because recently had a lot of customer meetings at IBC and this is what they asked for. What’s great is you have all these neat features with Media Exchange and Media Publish Point and there is a lot of great work that has been done there for the user interface, but the real key thing that we’ve done here, is now you can upload Media Exchange into a workflow. So you could preset a workflow. For example, if I want to send a file to a location, but before I send it I wanted to transcode it, QC it, watermark it, and then send it. With Media Exchange, used in conjunction with our central manager, we can actually put this all together. So a non-technical user in the field can upload content to this “workflow special,” and when it uploads into the workflow, the manager would grab it, run it through the various processes, and then deliver it to the end user. The end user does not need to know all the details of how this process works, they just need to know to select the file off their desktop and move it up.

Q: Can Signiant send a file to multiple recipients, but with different meta data for each location?

A: Yes, and this is all part of the power of integrating our interface from Media Exchange with our Media Manager. Prior to 8.2, you had a pretty locked down Media Exchange start component. Now you can actually customize that start component and it will prompt you for a lot more information, it’s a much more powerful thing. This is a big takeaway that sometimes people miss. They see the big fancy end user interface functions within Media Exchange, but one thing, if you are using the Central Managers and Media Exchange, there’s a lot of power in connecting those things together.

Situation: Tony Lapolito takes the Logipi community behind the scenes of Signiant in this audio clip.

The Details: When most people think of supply chain, Tony Lapolito said, they tend to think of Henry Ford’s linear supply chain, but in today’s global business environment linear supply chains and some physical supply chains are becoming obsolete.

What it Means: Supply chains are no longer a one-way street. Today’s digital supply chains have to be bidirectional, they need to consider the metadata attached to the content, almost like an email paradigm, but with a payload attached to it.

“Linear Supply Chains Are So Henry Ford” from Dustin Mattison on Vimeo.