Prepress Technology March 2000
Canto's Cumulus forecast in Honolulu
By
Lisa Larson
Prepress Editor
Riding a wave of success with its recently upgraded Cumulus digital asset management system, Canto Software Inc. captured its share of the DAM market, and includes the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on its list of satisfied Cumulus customers.
The Star-Bulletin has been using a 4.0 version of the Cumulus system since the beginning of last year, and it's working great for the newspaper, said Dean Sensui, chief photographer for the Star-Bulletin.
"It provides two things. One, it provides a way for the photographers to file their images and get it to a place where all the editors can easily get at it," said Sensui. "Two is that any editor can quickly go into Cumulus and find an image within a matter of seconds and drag it to their computer for immediate use and layout."
The fact that images are available to editors so quickly is an important feature to newspapers operating on tight deadlines. The Star-Bulletin's previous system required users to drag images to an export window, then to an export folder and then pick it up as a fully expanded TIFF file, explained Sensui.
"(With the old system) it took a long time to move across the network and several minutes for the editor to pull it up," said Sensui. "With Cumulus, because it's in its original JPEG format, it can be immediately popped into a Quark layout."
The Cumulus system allows newspapers to catalog every photograph on the central server, not just the published images. The Star-Bulletin has about 25,000 images cataloged online. "It almost acts like an archive system," said Sensui.
The Star-Bulletin selected Canto's Cumulus media management system because of speed, convenience, overall hardware and software cost, and the ability to allow the user to personalize the configuration of the system.
"It's up to the system administrator, whereas with a proprietary system, you're stuck with certain hardware and you're at the mercy of whoever wrote the software," said Sensui. "You've got greater flexibility in how you want to configure the system, and the cost is tremendously lower than you would find with a proprietary system."
The Star-Bulletin started with 20 clients using the Cumulus software, and has been using a "leftover Mac 8100" for the server, which has been working just fine.
"It doesn't crash. It's always very stable," Sensui reported. "Everything crashes, except Cumulus."
Training and technical support are basically a non-issue for the newspaper. "We provide our own technical support, and we hardly have to do anything with the system.
"It takes very little training to show someone how to get something on Cumulus," said Sensui "There's never a question of ëhow do I get it out of here?' It works on a level that just about anyone can easily understand. You don't have to be a technician to work with it."
Cumulus was well-received for its workflow improvements during its yearlong installation at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. "It's helped us keep our lead in terms of being an afternoon paper with same-day deadlines," said Sensui. "It's taken a lot of the frustration out of working with the constant evolution of digital technology."
A new Cumulus has arrived
Cumulus 5.0 promises to do even more and be even user-friendlier with 85-plus new features, including new multimedia and presentation capabilities, customizable category fields, and voice annotation to images, photographs and other assets.
Cumulus e-mails assets via a menu shortcut to an e-mail application, connects to other databases using open database connectivity, and supports standard cross-platform operating system technologies, such as drag-and-drop, ColorSync and QuickTime.
Cumulus 5 can also output to HTML. Once a user sets up a collection, or selects a subset of assets from within a collection, the collection or subset can be output in HTML format for display on standard Web browsers.
Links can be created between the automatically generated thumbnail images on the HTML pages and the real assets, or to copies that Cumulus 5 places in a folder ready to be uploaded with the HTML files.
Options and pricing
Included with the enterprise version of Cumulus 5, Vault software offers asset security through versioning and check in/check out, which logs asset transactions and prevents others from using the same image. Aside from workflow management, Vault can be used as a means of revenue generation by charging clients based upon access to the asset vault, Canto said.
Web Publisher allows users to post assets on the Web, search and download assets from a Web site. Pages can be automatically generated and assets are converted to JPEG previews that can be viewed using standard Web browsers (see related story, pg. 32).
Canto's Browser allows royalty-free browsing of assets on CDs, cartridges and other removable media. Connect provides a native connection between Cumulus 5 Enterprise and legacy database engines, such as Oracle, SQL and Informix, without the bottleneck of ODBC.
The Enterprise Edition of Cumulus is priced at $25,000 for 20 clients and will run on Mac OS X Server, Windows NT, Windows 2000, IRIX and Solaris. Additional clients are $295. Server upgrades are $295 and client upgrades are $75.
The Workgroup Edition, with a five-seat price of $2,495, which includes the server, runs on Mac OS, Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT and Windows 2000, IRIX and Solaris.
Canto Software
415.703.9800
www.canto.com