Newest Version of Market-Leader DAM Software Cumulus

July 13, 2006 – London. Canto, a global leader in Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions, today announced the release of Cumulus 7, the latest upgrade to its established Cumulus product line. Designed to integrate seamlessly into creative workflows, Cumulus 7 offers significant performance gains and enhancements for security, Web-based DAM, automation and usability that benefit users, administrators and project managers alike.

New features promote increased asset control, faster production, and more efficient collaboration, improving the business of organizations that have made asset management an integral part of their marketing and communication processes.

The innovations that improve the users' workflows are a large part of the advantages offered by Cumulus 7. A new intuitive user interface will help users become more proficient. The ability to identify and manage the relationships between assets is now available for all Cumulus solutions. This means the images referenced in QuarkXPress or InDesign layouts, pages contained in MS Word documents, and even slides in PowerPoint presentations can be virtually "connected" to the assets that reference them. Cumulus 7 Enterprise can even catalogue referenced files automatically when the layout files are catalogued. The new interface allows the user to easily find Alternates or Variants, or trace other relationships between assets.

"Cumulus 7 delivers a lot of innovative techniques and users will find that the system's ability to automatically manage how assets relate to each other is invaluable." said Jennifer Neumann, Canto's CEO. "Manually managing all the relationships between assets is outright impossible. By solving this relationship management issue, a Cumulus DAM system becomes a must-have solution."

With the introduction of Shared Collections, Cumulus 7 reduces search times and eliminates the risk of co-workers and clients using the wrong assets, as they immediately only see the asset records related to their current projects, without any searching.

Users can now label and rate asset records with visual tags that make it easy to see which assets have been approved, rejected, put on hold and which are new.

Other enhancements include innovative "Actions" to automate workflow steps, new image conversion and processing features, creation of PPT presentations and printing improvements. PDF proof sheets can be created, even if you don't have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer. Print Templates allow users to define output layouts to re-use and share with others.

Web Services integration enables Cumulus 7 to become a standards-compliant participant, with minimal development efforts, in complex, Web-based application infrastructures. Web collaboration has been optimized with the Cumulus 7 Web Clients now working just like Native Client applications. Record and Category View Sets can now be used with the Cumulus 7 Web Clients, and context menu support has been added. Overall performance has been improved and especially the time to connect to catalogs has been reduced.

The Cumulus product line has always been an industry leader with regard to permissions power. Cumulus 7 takes this legacy a few steps further, offering asset security and control beyond what has ever before been offered by Canto.

The back-end of Cumulus 7 has also seen some powerful updates with database engine and server enhancements such as the introduction of mirroring and transforming Cumulus 7's database engine into a high-performance "permanent" cache.

Cumulus 7 Server and Client software also run "natively" as Universal Binary applications on Intel-based Macintosh computers, so the Client is now "Cocoa-native." Together, these important features ensure Cumulus Mac Clients and Servers are delivering the best performance Mac OS Cumulus users have ever seen.

Availability

Cumulus 7 Server Solutions for Workgroup and Enterprise are immediately available. Server versions for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris, and Client versions for Mac OS X and Windows are offered.

Canto products are distributed by JPY plc in the UK. For more information on all Canto products and services go to  www.jpy.com

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