Your Workflow, Only Better

DAM systems that force users to work in certain ways always fail when put into fast-paced production workflows. You're creative; no one ever said anything about patient. Cumulus lets you work the way you want to work, and handles any file types you can throw at it—from images to sounds to video to Flash to presentations to layouts to virtually anything—if you can store it on a computer, Cumulus can catalog it.

A typical Cumulus-enabled workflow works like this:

Get Your Files In

Drag-and-drop files into Cumulus to catalog them. If your work group prefers to store assets in a central location that everyone can easily access, Cumulus will put them there for you automatically—even if that location is a Web or ftp server accessible coworkers the entire planet over.

Getting files into Cumulus is as easy as drag and drop. Files are either cataloged with no further user interfaction (using settings defined in advance), or you can prompt the cataloging user make some decisions as to how the file will be handled and where it will be stored.

Even better, imagine you've created a new InDesign layout chock full of artwork created just for that document. Wouldn't it be great if you could just drag the one layout file into Cumulus and have all the newly created artwork cataloged automatically at the same time? You won't find power like that from lesser DAM systems, but it's a standard feature in some Cumulus-based products.

If certain metadata need to be embedded into newly cataloged files, Cumulus can do the “rubber stamping” for you automatically when the assets are cataloged. You can even set up a "drop folder" that Cumulus will catalog files from automatically at intervals you define.

Metadata can be applied to assets as they're cataloged, using Metadata Templates, or editable text fields the catalog user can edit on the fly. Assign categories in advance, mark the inbound assets as "needs review," embed a copyright notice, and more.

Find the Files You Need

Finding cataloged files is the main point to using Cumulus. Search by keyword, file format, modification date, and just about every other aspect you can think of. If you need to define ways of finding files that's unique to your workflow, you can easily do so. The flexibility of Cumulus enables you (or your system administrator) to define custom metadata schemes that reflect your workflow, personalizing your Cumulus system and streamlining your workflow.

Metadata fields can be used for workflow control as well as asset information. Here, fields are used that indicate the asset's production status in addition to target audiences, which is useful at distribution time. License information is included too, which enables this work group to rely on the Cumulus Scheduler to check for expired licenses nightly and automatically change the License Status field, or even remove access permission to the file.

Take a quick look at what "custom metadata schemes" means in the real world. The following table offers some examples of how different workflows might categorize asset (file) metadata:

As you can see, some metadata fields are common to more than one type of workflow, while others are business-specific. Using Cumulus, you can define as many metadata fields as you need. The example above shows seven different fields, but it's not uncommon for a Cumulus catalog to have 40, 50 or even more metadata fields. Even better, those fields can be of special types to suit the information they contain. This means that Date fields are, in fact, dates. You can sort by them, or use them to find "newer than" or "older than" files. Another popular field type enables you to define menu options for metadata. This is a great way to deal with workflow status, such as "In Layout," "In Production" and "Completed." Another field type permits only simple yes/no values: Is the file ready for distribution? Now you'll know for sure.

When you need a file, you search for it using the metadata your work group has defined. Need to quickly find all the MRI images taken during a certain month that were recorded by a machine you've since learned was defective? No problem. You'll even have ready access to the physician and patient contact info you need to get the word out. Need to quickly find and take offline all assets whose license has expired? That's easy too.

The Find Tool enables you to define, save and share complex search queries. A multitude of search options makes it possible to find even the most elusive files quickly, every time. This image shows a query that finds all files whose names contain the word "boeing," and have been assigned to "David" with a status of "Urgent." Once saved, this search can be run from a drop-down menu whenever the user wants. The variables $Today and $Now can be used for "live" time references.

Get Your Files Out

Once you find the file(s) you need, getting them into your production programs is easy. You can drag them right out of Cumulus onto your computer desktop or, with many popular programs such as Photoshop, Microsoft Word and InDesign, you can even drag them right from Cumulus into your documents. To make this even easier, Cumulus offers a unique “always on top” palette window mode that offers ready access to your asset libraries—not to mention the powerful search features of Cumulus—right from within your favorite applications.

The Cumulus Palette mode offers users access to their catalogs right from within their favorite applications. Here, an image is dragged from the Cumulus Palette window right into a document in Photoshop.

Read about the asset format filters currently supported by Cumulus Core-based applications for enhanced metadata support.