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Project Management & Control
Cumulus Enterprise makes the organization and management of
assets—and the projects in which you use them—easier
than ever.
Virtual Asset Containers
Categories have long been one of the
most powerful features unique to Cumulus systems because they
enable users to create structures that reflect the ways in
which their assets are organized and used. Cumulus Enterprise
takes that power one significant step further by enabling
users to attach searchable metadata to those categories, turning
them into virtual asset containers that help users manage
projects and track their progress.
Category metadata fields make
it easy to turn categories into meaningful asset "containers"
that can help you manage projects. Here, two voice annotation
fields are used for Project Manager (PM) and Art Director
(AD). Using these fields, these managers can convey audio
messages to others using their built-in computer microphones.
In addition, drop down menus provide easy error-free selection
of project status and manager names.
Imagine a workflow that produces a
magazine. Each issue would be a category, complete with searchable
metadata fields that help define the issue and its production
status. Example fields include:
- Issue Number
- Release Date
- Art Director
- Layout Artist
- Graphics Budget
- Story Budget
- Production Status
- Advertisers
Additional metadata fields could be
used to capture post-release information you'd want for the
archive, such as:
- Circulation
- Production Costs
- Delivered Within Budget
In all these examples, the metadata
stored within the category is searchable. This makes it easy,
for example, to search and find all issues handled by a certain
art director that came in under budget and exceeded circulation
estimates. Or, you can find all issues published in the previous
2 years in which ads for a certain advertiser were placed.
Once you find the issues (categories)
you need, you're just a double-click away from seeing all
assets used in them too.
Custom Category Tabs
Using Enterprise, you can create custom
Category Tabs that suit your work flow. This enables you to
define different organization hierarchies and determine, via
permissions, who can see which, as is shown in the following three images:
It might make sense for managers or catalog administrators to be able to see all the category structures your catalogs contain, as shown here.
Your designers would probably prefer to see a cleaner interface that displays only those organizational structures of use to them, like the "Format" structure shown here.
Your accountants, on the other hand, could make better use of a structure that enables them to see assets based on the fiscal years in which they were acquired.
Everyone is dealing with the same assets,
but the ways in which each group uses them differs. The "Projects"
tab visible in the images above illustrates a case in which the same structure is
useful to more than one group. While the "Formats"
structure appears only to users in the Designers group, and
the "Year" tab appears only to accountants, both
groups see the "Projects" structure.
Cumulus Enterprise custom category tabs enable you to
provide workspace interfaces that make sense to everyone.
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