By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, September 26, 2007 - 11:03:00

http://www.canto.com

Canto will demonstrate its Cumulus CS Companion product for the first time at Apple Expo today in the booth of Canto partner Idea7. Cumulus CS Companion is poised to substantially increase work group productivity by enabling users of Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications to take advantage of the asset search and management power of the Cumulus digital asset management system, without ever leaving their Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications.

Using Adobe Version Cue CS3 as an interface, Cumulus CS Companion is designed to offer users of CS3 software programs, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere, Dreamweaver, Bridge and more, direct access to Cumulus managed asset collections. Work groups that already use Cumulus will gain immediate integrated access to existing catalogs and collections, without any programming or professional integration services. Adobe Creative Suite 3 work groups new to Cumulus can easily migrate, with absolutely no production downtime.

Other demonstrations will showcase the rock solid Cumulus 7.5.1, released in August, and products from Idea7, Canto’s “Platinum” partner for France. Idea7 provides a number of Cumulus-enhancing products, such as Web Suite Pro, Indexer Pro and Dicom medical imaging cataloging.

Cumulus CS Companion makes cataloged asset collections available from the open and save dialog boxes of Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications. A single double-click opens a catalog, revealing its cataloged assets in thumbnail or detail lists that can be configured from within Cumulus. Cumulus categories appear as standard folder structures. Users can search, browse, edit, check-out/in and even catalog new assets, all from within their Adobe applications.

Cumulus CS Companion interfaces with the Cumulus Server as a recognized software client, so many of the automation tools popular with the conventional Cumulus software clients, such as the automatic notification to a manager or client that a file is ready for review, remain available.

The Cumulus native software clients for Windows and Macintosh provide easy asset access for users outside the Adobe Creative Suite 3 work group. This makes manager and client approvals easy and enables users of other software products to share the same collections. The optional Cumulus Web clients further expand access flexibility by offering Web-based anywhere, anytime access to entire collections.

Access permissions are controlled by the Cumulus Server. All software clients use the same user permissions, so no matter whether a user connects via Cumulus CS Companion, the Cumulus native clients or the Cumulus Web clients, they can access only those files for which they have permission.

Permissions can be user- or group-based, and can be determined on a per-catalog or per-asset basis, depending on the Cumulus edition used. Setting permissions is easily handled by users, without the need for a systems administrator.

Advanced options available through the native and Web clients include finding assets based on their relationships to other assets, creating, editing and deleting categories, and using drag & drop to make category assignments. Using the Cumulus native clients, users can easily configure catalogs to suit their organization’s work flow needs.

Cumulus CS Companion, based on the Adobe® Version Cue® CS3 software developer kit (SDK), was developed in collaboration with Canto partner Mark 5.