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Landor Associates deliver branding services, including brand research and valuation, brand positioning and architecture. Landor adopted Cumulus as its digital asset management system in 1997. Landor uses Cumulus to store brand assets for its key clients and projects in a series of online catalogues.
These catalogues, such as one for a leading international beverage company that contains records for over 30,000 assets, are managed by Landorʼs in-house teams of brand asset managers and indexers. IT-Enquirer Was given the chance to test-drive the Cumulus version used by Landor: Cumulus Enterprise Server.
Canto Cumulus is a Digital Asset Management solution that comes in at least three flavours: the Desktop version for individual users, the Workgroup version for small to medium-sized environments, and the Enterprise version for large environments. Cumulus operates in a highly competitive market.
In the Workgroup market segment, the competition comes mainly from Extensis Portfolio. In the Enterprise segment, competing solutions include DAM solutions such as Xinet, and even document management systems.
In this first part of the review of Cumulus Enterprise Server, we’ll examine the server part of Cumulus. In the next review, we’ll discuss the Client.
Cumulus Enterprise Server: The Basics
Cumulus Enterprise Server is based on a Client/Server model. The server has three components: the metadata server, the processor server, and the asset server. While the metadata component stores metadata of various types, the processor server integrates third-party technologies. The asset server provides a clear abstraction level between Cumulus and storage technologies. This allows management of CD/DVD jukeboxes and HSM systems.
Cumulus Server can be taken to be a middleware solution as it communicates between the levels of the operating systems, storage devices and databases and the user interface level.
DAM users on the desktop level will perform all tasks related to their system. With client/server systems such as Cumulus Enterprise Server, there is an administrator who has to take care of specific tasks. Admins will install the server and manage the license and activation of the software. Furthermore, they will be responsible for providing catalogues to Cumulus clients by creating new ones or adding existing ones to the list of catalogues administered by the server.
They will have to configure the catalogues to meet the needs of the workgroup where these will be used, and make catalogues available or unavailable to clients. They will also set up individual permissions and maintain the catalogues themselves.
Luckily for him or her, the server enables the admin to delegate all or some of these tasks to others in the organisations. Through a remote, client-based admin console, other users in an organisation can be assigned specific tasks to perform on the catalogues and their assets.
Advanced Features of Cumulus Enterprise Server
Cumulus Enterprise Server comes with an advanced setting which allows an admin to work with roles. Once you’ve started working with roles, there’s no turning back, so the decision to do so should not be taken lightly.
On the other hand, many large organisations will like to set up a role-based system, because it allows them to set permissions and other settings on a level that sits between general settings and per-user settings. If you have 10,000 users set up in 100 roles, it’s also a lot less work to set up the permissions and settings for those 100 roles than it is to decide for 10,000 individual cases.
Another advanced feature of the Cumulus Enterprise Server is the database mirroring capability. Mirroring enables the admin to use the Cumulus database as a caching engine to ultimately save data into an external SQL-compatible database such as MySQL.
When setting up such a mirroring scheme, it is important to note that changes made to the catalogue data from within the SQL database — i.e. without using the Cumulus environment — will not be written back to the Cumulus server.
Another disadvantage in terms of overhead could be that each catalogue requires its own database. Each database requires its own JDBC driver.
Another way to set up mirroring is to set up Cumulus catalogues as mirroring target databases. This requires a second Enterprise Server installation.
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Experiencing the Cumulus Enterprise Server
As I expected from such a scalable and elaborate client/server system, setting up the server is easy enough, but setting up the catalogues, metadata storage and the system overall, takes a lot of preparation.
It is simply not possible to set up a server for a large number of users the same way as you think about your asset manager on your desktop. There’s a lot to take into account and a lot to foresee.
I must say that Cumulus Enterprise Server has all the features in place to make that possible. It would have been surprising if it were different. What is less obvious, however, is that Canto seems to have grasped the idea that admins like simplicity as much as individual Mac users do.
I don’t know if the ease-of-use is a result of Cumulus being available for the Mac such a long time, but admins won’t have a hard time configuring and maintaining the server, the catalogues and the assets. The most difficult part will be to work out a working concept for mirroring, load balancing, backing up, etc.
All configuration options are grouped together in one tabbed window, which has a contextually driven interface — some options won’t be visible unless it’s relevant. Furthermore, the catalogue setup and maintenance is as easy as it is with the Cumulus Client. If you have ever used Cumulus on a smaller scale before, chances are that you will rapidly grasp how the Enterprise Client works.
The only thing that confused me for about an hour, was how to set up categories and keywords. I simply couldn’t imagine it would involve adding branches to the Cumulus default tree stem which is always visible in the left column if you select the full view, and then dragging your thumbnail to the category and/or keyword you want to assign it to.
Protecting Catalogues and Assets with Cumulus Enterprise Server
Cumulus Enterprise Server comes with a full set of protection measures. You can backup your assets using a scheduler. You can copy or move your assets to a Vault — a system which allows you apply versioning to your catalogues and assets. Catalogues that get damaged somehow, can be repaired.
Deleted records can be recovered if you allow it. You can have catalogues of 1 TB in size in version 7. Version 7 also offers more fields, which creates a problem: if you have version 6 catalogues, they’ll have to be migrated to the new version’s scheme. This will take time. I couldn’t test this, but I can imagine it will take a lot of time if you have large catalogues.
Data can be exported to other database engines. Catalogues may also be archived. Cumulus Enterprise Server allows you to take assets off-line, update the file references, and still be able to search and retrieve them. The performance of search and retrieve is independent of the size or the status of your catalogue.
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