Document Storage Management
- Copy/Paste File Management
- InterSync File Indexing
- File Classification and Association
- New File Collector Capabilities
- Server-Side Script Execution
- Improved Library Import/Export
- Helper Applications for Archiving
- Archiving Automation
- Archiving Workflows
- Metadata Management
- Branded Web Portal for Customers/External Users
New Features in Digital Storage Manager 2010 Standalone Edition
Built-in SMTP Server
Administrators now have a choice of using their own SMTP server or a new built-in SMTP server to send email. Using the built-in SMTP Server provides administrators with the benefit of simplifying setup, the ability to offload email operations from their main mail server, and the ability to quickly set up test systems with no corporate IT support.
HTTP Support
Desktop applications now use the HTTP network protocol to communicate with the server. This allows them to efficiently communicate over the Internet and through firewalls, just like a web browser.
Form Editor Usability Improvements
- Guides can now be shown, hidden, and locked
- Guides can now be copied and pasted
- Zoom in/out with Option + Scroll-wheel (Mac OS X) or CTRL + Scroll-wheel (Windows)
- The content of selected controls can be highlighted
- Select amongst overlapping controls
Enhanced MetaScript
Capabilities
New MetaScript Functions
New additions to MetaScript provide administrators and developers with a range of new capabilities, including:
- The ability to open a specified web page in the default browser defined on the host operating system.
- The ability to programmatically display and populate popup menus and popup lists.
- The ability to work with additional mouse events and additional object-related events.
- The ability to control through MetaScript the appearance of background images, buttons, borders, text, and more are also provided.
- More...
Create New Records from Find Results
Small improvements to how someone works can often make for large improvements in results. For example, many Workgroups users spend a significant portion of their day searching for and creating new records. By adding the ability to create new records from Find results, users can work more naturally and efficiently without changing windows or contexts in their application.
Ticket Zooming on Mac OS X and Windows
Desktop client applications now support form zooming to ensure that a form is equally legible on high resolution and low resolution monitors. Zoom settings are saved as a user preference, ensuring that once set, the system provides a consistent and accommodating environment in which to work.
MS Office MetaData
Microsoft Office 2007, including PowerPoint, Word, and Excel, is now fully supported by our built-in metadata engine. Content and thumbnails are captured for many Office applications. As always, text content is fully searchable from within the system.
Outlook, Entourage & Apple Mail Support
The new Document Organizer feature includes support for MS Outlook, MS Entourage and Apple Mail. Users can simply drag & drop emailed attachments, or even the emails themselves, onto the file collector to have them automatically copied to the specified folder location.
Retrieval Features and Workflows
With simplified retrieval workflows and support for industry standard backup tools, the Digital Storage Manager module for Workgroups 2010 streamlines your retrieval processes. Need a file that was archived to DVD months ago? No problem. The system will alert you that it’s no longer online and will even prompt you with the media label information for the DVD you need in order to restore the file yourself. Work in an environment where a centralized archivist or cybrarian is responsible for restoring files? Let the system create a retrieval request for you.
Branded Web Portal for Customers/External Users
The optional Image Portal web portal provides a simple yet secure portal for providing external freelancers, marketing departments, customers, or vendors access to important files from any location with an internet connection. When a user is defined in the system, their access can be restricted to view only files belonging to a particular customer, file types, locations, or limited by scores of other criteria. Users can then search, view, collect, and download online files or create Retrieval Requests for offline files. Collaboration has never been easier.
Upgraded MetaScript
MetaScript, the scripting language used by Virtual Ticket, has always been based on industry standard JavaScript. Now we’ve upgraded it to support all the features of JavaScript 1.8, giving developers even more capabilities to create robust solutions quickly.
System Setup
A new System Setup window unifies and consolidates setup and administration functionality previously distributed through the File Cabinet and Reports and Custom Queries windows.
New Standard Forms
The standard forms installed with every database have been updated to include improved organization and a great new appearance. If upgrading, new standard forms will be added with a "[Workgroups 2010 R2]" suffix, providing you with the opportunity to review and choose the new features, designs, and form elements you would like to adopt.
Mac OS X Service Replaces Finder Plug-in on Mac OS X 10.6
On computers running Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), a new OS X Service provides functionality previously available through Production Pack's Finder Plug-in. The new service's functionality is available through the contextual Services submenu, and is customizable through Services Preferences.
MetaScript Actions
Write global MetaScript actions to automate various functions within Workgroups. For example, launch custom Dashboards when users log in, open dynamically prefilled Finds and other Virtual Ticket windows from Application menus, run automation scripts against third-party applications, and more.
Digital Resource Explorer
Use a powerful digital resource browser called Digital Resource Explorer to browse all the files of your team or workgroup, regardless of their current location. Even files that are currently offline or unavailable are available to Digital Resource Explorer. Users familiar with navigating their file system with either the Mac OS X Finder or Windows Explorer will be right at home navigating all the files across all the storage locations used by their teams and workgroups.
Full-Size Document Previews
View full-sized multi-page previews and extensive document metadata, right down to the fonts being used, box size, and text content, for all files and documents. Preview extraction is performed automatically by the system. Once captured, preview information is available regardless of whether the file is stored online, near-line or offline.
Find Files by Custom Metadata
Use the built-in search capabilities to find files based on file metadata including extracted text, keywords, associated customer information, related project information, and more. The Digital Storage Manager module provides you with more ways to quickly locate the documents you need, based on the information you’re likely to remember.
Find Files by Text Content
Full text searches let you find document files by searching on the very text contained in the documents. The Digital Storage Manager module for Workgroups 2010 captures the text content of common file types including QuarkXPress, Adobe Illustrator, PDF, and Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. The text content is stored as metadata and can be used to find document files regardless of whether they are online, offline, or residing in a secure storage location.
Helper Applications for Archiving
Use built-in support for the most popular third-party archiving and media authoring applications to simplify your archiving activities. Helper applications exist for:
- CA Software ARCserve
- EMC Dantz Retrospect
- Roxio Toast
- Rimage CD/DVD Production Systems
- Built-in Mac OS X CD/DVD Authoring
- Nero
- Microsoft Removable Storage Manager (RSM)
Archiving Automation
Use powerful archiving features to quickly and simply archive to your choice of offline media or to online servers. When archiving to online servers, the system even creates disaster recovery and archive media in one step, eliminating the countless hours and expenses involved in maintaining large storage repositories.
Archiving Workflows
The Digital Storage Manager module for Workgroups 2010 supports two types of archiving activities. The first is a decentralized workflow, which enables individual users within a workgroup to perform their own archiving functions. The second is a centralized workflow where a central archivist or cybrarian handles archive and retrieval requests in the form of queues. Users in a centralized workflow may assign a date on which files or folders are archived, while users in a decentralized workflow assume the responsibility of archiving their own files.
Metadata Management
Use InterSync to automatically extract existing metadata from your digital resources and smart metadata management features built right in to allow you and your team to easily add additional metadata not already contained within the files. For example, add keywords at the job or project level and let the system propagate these down to the related files. Or, add customer information to a project and the system associates it with all the related files. You can even search for individual files based on Metadata assigned at the job level.
File Classification and Association
A unique InterSync feature allows administrators to teach it your file and folder naming conventions. Based on rules set up by the administrator, InterSync indexes each file or folder and classifies them by adding searchable keywords or automatically associating the files or folders with your job tickets.
Self-Service Password
Reset
Users now have the ability to reset their own passwords without going through the system administrator.
New File Collector
Capabilities
File Collectors have a range of new properties and functions in this release. Cosmetically, snap-to sizing is replaced by continuous resizing in order to provide for more control in designing the appearance of file collectors in forms. At a functional level, several new properties provide greater flexibility in designing how the file collector behaves and new metascript functions provide administrators and developers with the ability to programmatically refresh the contents of a file collector, sync with the file system, and work with mouse-click events in file collectors.
Additional details are provided in the release notes.
Server-Side Script Execution
Make your system run lightning fast, even across the Internet. The new server-side scripting capabilities make it easy to optimize performance by running transaction-intensive scripts on the Application Server. Results of scripts executed on the server are transparently available to the form.
Improved Library
Import/Export
Library import and export capabilities have been enhanced to include:
- Single-click installation of ticket and solution libraries downloaded from the Developer Center.
- User Groups and Permissions can be exported and imported with corresponding entities.
- All entities can be skipped, replaced, or renamed on import.
- New and open XML-based library format.
Document Organizer
Perhaps one of the most powerful features in the Workgroups 2010 release is the Document Organizer, a new folder mode in file collectors. With this new mode, users can use file collectors placed in their tickets to organize their files and keep everything in the right place! Files, emails, email attachments, scanned documents, and even entire directories can be dropped into these new file collectors and the system will automatically copy them to the correct location in the file system. This location can be set by the user or determined programmatically. For example, use the Digital Storage Manager module to automatically create the correct folder on the file server for each new Job. Then, use the file collector's new folder mode so that everyone working on the job has a single place to drop their job-related files, emails, attachments, etc... The file collector automatically copies these resources to the right folder on the server and the system indexes, thumbnails, and extracts all the metadata. Not only do misplaced files and a poorly organized file repository become a thing of the past, but achieving this for your team, department, or workgroup is as easy as dragging and dropping.
Folder Searches
Right mouse-click on any file collector and search its contents. The system will automatically build a find that searches the referenced locations and can even help you add additional filter criteria to make finding your files quicker and easier.
Copy/Paste File Management
Users can take any digital resources (files or folders) and copy/cut and paste them into a file collector. If the file collector is set to the new folder mode, the files or folders will be copied or moved automatically. It’s that easy. No file system navigation to tread through to ensure your files are placed in the right location.
InterSync File Indexing
Utilize a powerful high-performance indexing technology called InterSync to provide real-time capture of extensive file metadata including Adobe's XMP standard and text content. Originally developed for enterprise deployment in MetaCommunications' Virtual Ticket product, InterSync has proven itself in the world's most demanding production environments. InterSync watches over online Windows 2000/2003, Mac OS X, Xinet, and other SMB/AFP file servers to ensure that all files are automatically indexed, analyzed for useful metadata, thumbnailed, and previewed in real-time as files are added, deleted, and modified.
Cloud Hosted
Digital Storage Manager 2010 is now available for installation on site or as a new hosted subscription service through Workgroups.com. Hosted services are quick to implement: no server software, setup or hardware is required to get up and running. For customers interested in working from the cloud and reducing their IT overhead, subscriptions start as low as $39 per user, per month (plus server fees).
Sign up for service now.