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Xinet WebNative Suite is a standard among Digital Asset Management (DAM) or Media Asset Management (MAM) users. Xinet was founded in 1991. It is a privately held company with a stable management team; its founder still acts as the company's CEO (Scott Seebass). Xinet's WebNative Suite is a collection of tools that together create a complete DAM workflow system. The software is used across 28 countries in 16 languages. Xinet WebNative Suite is enterprise-scale DAM. It costs around 50,000.00 USD to install a basic system. For the money you'll get unlimited web users, unlimited Windows client users, and an unlimited metadata filed DAM server with a 5 concurrent user limit on Mac clients with AFP volume mounts. It's used by companies such as Ogilvy, Taylor James (photographic services), Telemundo, Creativebank (merged with Blue Hat), Saturn and Saab, etc.
Xinet’s WebNative Suite DAM is a modular system. It comes with two components at least. The key component is the main server and the system in the studio where image retouchers edit the images that users will place in their layouts. The second component is the WebNative portal. The portal sits outside a firewall and is an application level proxy server. The underlying database which manages the metadata and assets on the file server is a MySQL database.
Xinet obviously handles all image formats, but out-of-the-box can’t handle video. To get that functionality as well, you need to buy the video module, an extra 12,000.00 USD value.
The workflow Xinet presumes to exist starts with graphic files coming in from multiple locations into the server, then going through a retouching stage, and an approval phase, to finally end up being ready for publishing. A strong search and retrieval functionality enables end-users—layout designers, advertisement managers, etc—to place the assets wherever they need to.
This workflow requires Xinet to have in place different elements: an asset collection server and file server (the actual DAM system), transcoding functionality, a portal (the WebNative portal), an approval system, a proofing system, a graphics engine, a print server and a PDF engine.
The WebNative portal adds HTML display capabilities. The system uses basic user and group permissions templates on the main server and can partly apply business rules on the Portal box to divide up users in different permission groups, i.e. the rules determine what an editor can be shown in contrast to what a designer can be shown. A second level of access security is by date. Assets can have expiration dates ‘stuck’ to them, so users are unable to see non-watermaked versions after specific dates.
Xinet WebNative Suite scales from a Mac Mini and a Mac OS X 10.4 Server for small shops, to a variety of servers that accommodate very large shops. As the portal is based on XHTML templates with on-the-fly generated preview images, the client can be any type of computer that can run a GUI-based web browser.
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