Prepress
vjoon Unveils Unique Integration of Publishing and Digital Asset Management Systems
Monday 07. December 2020 - Publishers, creatives, and marketing teams, as well as many other divisions in enterprises, use it to speed up their workflows and can thus face the challenge of an ever-growing volume of digital content with confidence.vjoon, a leading global vendor of industry-independent solutions for managing digital content, introduces vjoon K4 Version 11 and vjoon seven Version 2.
The latest versions of K4 and seven mark a new milestone in the integration of a publishing system with a digital asset management (DAM) solution. The latest versions of the two solutions are the answer to a continuously expanding volume of digital content and the desire for a modern integration between a DAM and a publishing system.
“Publishers, creatives, and marketing teams, but also many other divisions in enterprises, have to produce and publish new content faster than ever before. In addition to their creative output, it is the smooth function and cross-system use of their assets that gives them a competitive edge,” says Andreas Schrader, CEO of vjoon. “With the integration of K4 and seven, we have established a new benchmark, enabling our customers to clearly position themselves in a future-oriented manner to leverage their competitive advantage.”
Unique integration with extensive usage options
The connection between K4 and seven is bi-directional. On one hand, assets can be placed from sevens browser client directly into Adobe InDesign via drag & drop and used in K4 for production. The same applies to the associated metadata, so that a caption, for example, can be automatically taken from the metadata and placed in the layout.
On the other hand, it is also important for seven users to see how and where assets are already used in K4. A corresponding “where-used” list is automatically available in vjoon seven, enabling users to make quick decisions on how and where to use the assets, including other publications and media channels.
Among the most powerful features of the integration is its ability to control asset rights use and re-use. As the principal system, seven governs usage rights of all assets in the editorial system. For example, when image rights expire, it is the user in seven that decides on its use in K4, and it is marked accordingly. Images marked this way are then recognized early on in the production process, and can be exchanged for appropriately licensed, legally compliant images.
Another example of the effective interaction between K4 and seven is the creation of content for websites. Assets from seven, such as images or graphics, can be easily integrated directly into the article in the content editor and then published on the website in a fully automated manner via the vjoon WordPress adapter.
All in all, the extensive usage options of this unique integration not only simplify content management but also accelerate the creation and publication of content. This integration is available starting with K4 version 11 and is included at no charge to customers using both products.
vjoon seven Version 2: Focus on collaboration and scalability
The latest version of vjoon seven now also provides so-called collections. They allow selected content to be collected and made available to different user groups. This can be content for specific publications, images from a photoshoot, or branding elements. Collections thus form the basis for sharing content with specific teams, external users, or third-party systems such as Web CMS or marketing automation.
Also the prerequisites for operation in Kubernetes clusters were created, an important element for the high scalability and fail-safe nature of the DAM platform. Starting from the smallest size of operation, the Single Node Kubernetes Environment, companies can quickly scale their system on demand and increase performance. Since cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), offer billing models that are accurate to the minute or even to the second, there are great advantages for companies in this respect. While at peak times the security of being able to scale quickly and easily is guaranteed, during normal operating hours only a small environment may be required and billed.
In any case, scalability is among the more prominent features of vjoon seven. The platform is based on Elasticsearch, a highly scalable full-text search and analysis engine. It enables large amounts of data to be stored, searched, and analyzed quickly and in near-real-time. seven manages content with the help of a sophisticated metadata management system that takes all common standards into account and already understands more than 22,000 metadata fields.
Assets can also be assigned to specific users for editing, and the workflow affords control by a status on the asset. vjoon seven also has a lot to offer in terms of connectivity to leading creative tools and office programs. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and InCopy as well as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are already connected, allowing users to work with their familiar applications directly from seven.
Thanks to the stringent API first principle, vjoon seven can be expanded quickly and easily. All features of the platform are accessible via a REST API so that its functionality can be extended and adapted to individual requirements. The decisive advantage for companies is that they can shorten the internal time to market for new applications and features and can easily integrate existing systems with vjoon seven.