By: Erik Vlietinck
Fri, March 07, 2008 - 7:23:00

http://www.dutchsoftware.com

Developer DutchSoftware has a tradition in custom solutions for the global publishing market. The company is active in Europe, the US, Asia Pacific and South America. Shortly DutchSoftware is going to be releasing Elvis, not some sixties’ rocker’s site, but a highly scalable enterprise-class media content store based on Adobe’s AIR and Flex technologies. DutchSoftware spent an afternoon with us, presenting their alpha version and explaining what makes Elvis unique.

DutchSoftware has good connections with WoodWing Software. In fact, the very first release version of Elvis will have complete integration with Smart Connection Enterprise built right in. Other integration modules will rapidly follow suit, or integration with other Content Management Systems can easily be configured by the integrator using SOAP. But I’m running ahead of myself: first let’s cover the basics of Elvis. Elvis is meant to be an open source based, flexible and scalable digital asset management solution that has all the advantages of existing DAM products but none or few of the disadvantages. 

In the course of the presentation I got from Bastiaan Born, the company’s Commercial Director, I quickly grasped that Elvis has some unique features as well. Those include completely drag-and-drop aware and capable, an installer that competes with those of desktop applications, an architecture that allows for almost infinite scalability and just enough functionality to serve its exact purpose: delivering a centralised media content storage pool. A structured view of Elvis’ functionality goes as follows:

• Drag and Drop into Store
• Import Print, Web, Video production
• Automated cataloging processes
• Automatic creation of previews and thumbnails
• Existing filesystem or hotfolder import
• Metadata enrichment
• Powerful search engine
• Semantic and Synonym search
• Dynamic filters for fast searching
• Search results grouped by media type
• Large size previewing
• Drag ‘n drop to create collections
• Save and share collections
• Add custom metadata
• Export collections to Web, Print and Video production
• Drag ‘n Drop content in desktop applications
• Automated export
• “Live” search in Store through webservice

Elvis is Based on AIR and Flex

Except for the functionality that comes out of the experienced heads of the DutchSoftware team, most of Elvis’ good looks are courtesy Adobe’s AIR and Flex technologies. It is amazing what a developer can do with AIR and Flex, provided he can come up with some good ideas of his own. Using Flex and AIR gives Elvis’ its flexibility. Several millions of assets can be stored in the system without bogging it down. Elvis has no difficulties processing a constant stream of assets entering the system.

Elvis’ considerable flexibility is due in a large part to the concept itself. DutchSoftware didn’t want to use a database as the underlying core technology. A database couldn’t provide for the flexibility the developer wants to deliver, so instead DutchSoftware opted for a search engine approach. One of the nice results of not using a database is scalability. Elvis uses the search engine in clever ways, using a custom-made Media Processing Engine.

The search engine by itself is just an indexing and search library and does not contain crawling and HTML parsing functionality. At the core of the search engine’s logical architecture is the idea of a document containing fields of text. This flexibility allows the search engine’s API to be independent of file format.

Elvis’ Media Processing Engine creates thumbnails for images and extracts metadata already available in source files (such as EXIF data). Import is done automatically in the background or by dragging and dropping items in the import screen. Also files can be selected from hard disk drives, USB Flash Drives, etc. Restricted only by access rights that are defined on the administrator level, every client user can drag files in and out of Elvis.

An enterprise system that accepts desktop ease-of-use always earns good marks, because it removes the threshold that keeps people from actually using the system. Another such a clever feature is what happens when you drop a video clip in Elvis. Automatically, the system will create 20 seconds clips from a larger clip, and this will make it easier for an editor to select just the right part of the video for his project. Additionally, each video clip in Elvis can be scrubbed.

Drag and Drop Digital Asset Management

While administrators or old-school users can create “Collections” to have some kind of categorisation of the data in the data pool, there is no real need to create collections as there is with traditional DAM systems. Instead, Elvis has dynamic and easy-to-create filters for fast searching through millions of items. This approach avoids the tedious definition of structures and “catalogues” which have always been a point of discussion. Even the most skilled librarian will not be able to define a structure that suits every user’s way of thinking and searching/browsing. However, collections are useful to easily share data with others, or to assemble content, e.g. related to one publication.

Elvis has few shortcomings, even in its alpha version, but there are a couple that I would like to see addressed. Versioning is the most important. As the system has been conceived now, there is no real versioning system. According to Bastiaan Born most users will drag items out Elvis and when they have edited them, they will drag the processed item back in. This will automatically create a new version of the item. Except for the “Last Modified” date and time there is no directly apparent way of figuring out which version was the preferred one. Perhaps Elvis should have a rating system such as those found in lightweight applications like Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture.

Strengths of Elvis --except for what I covered earlier-- are the integration with Smart Connection Enterprise, the direct send to Web Content Management System capability, and the direct e-mailing capability. Elvis only dropping low-resolution images (with a live link to the original) in the layout application also earns a thumbs up as it keeps bandwidth requirements low.

Elvis’ server application is built in Java. The Media Processing Engine generates previews and thumbnails like JPG for images and Flash movies for video files. The Storage Engine can handle multiple import channels. It can import and index existing File store structures, it can use a hot folder or automatically import from print or web production systems. On import existing relations like folder structures or publication structures are preserved, so hierarchical structures are readily available within Elvis. The high resolution originals are stored on a read-only share.