Extensis has announced a major new release of Portfolio that includes client and serving applications. The new releases bring major new features and improvements to the asset tracking software. According to Extensis:
Offering a comprehensive digital asset management solution, Extensis® Portfolio(tm) 5.0 now helps photographers and creative professionals save both time and money by allowing them to efficiently manage their digital content. Using Portfolio, users can quickly catalog, share, repurpose and distribute creative assets such as photographs, logos, illustrations, Web pages and multimedia files with a minimum amount of effort. Available April 2000, the full Portfolio product line includes:
- Portfolio 5.0 - Operates as a standalone, in a peer-to-peer network environment or as the client for Portfolio Server. This customizable solution allows creative individuals and small workgroups to efficiently organize and manage their digital content. PortWeb, the Portfolio Web server plug-in is included free. With PortWeb, users can easily create an electronic portfolio of their assets to be published on the Web.
- Portfolio Server 5.0 - Consists of five free Portfolio 5.0 clients, PortWeb and Portfolio Server. This scalable solution helps larger agencies and companies streamline their image management workflow. Additional clients can be purchased as needed.
- Portfolio SQL Connect - Designed for enterprise users needing to connect Portfolio Server 5.0 with a Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle 8i database.
- Portfolio Browser - A read-only version of Portfolio for royalty-free distribution; the browser allows users to organize and professionally display their images on CDs.
Completely Customizable
For creative professionals struggling under the weight of digital content, it is important to be able to group these assets, along with their accompanying information, in a logical and meaningful way so that they can be quickly and easily retrieved when needed. Fully customizable and searchable, Portfolio is capable of adapting to the unique needs of the user, allowing them to record only the information most important to their individual workflows. With Portfolio, users can create custom fields to organize their entire library, with the option of arranging and locating files by subject, theme, date or any other desired category. They are also able to customize their views, displaying any combination of details for unlimited flexibility. Users are then able to view thumbnails of these files, along with identifying information, to help them visually scan and then quickly choose the correct one. Other customizable features include the ability to:
- Search across multiple catalogs, even via a Web site;
- View all pages of multiple-page PowerPoint, QuarkXPress or Acrobat documents.
- With the PortWeb plug-in, dynamically publish content to the Web;
- Read and embed invisible Digimarc(tm) digital watermarks to protect copyrighted content;
- Group assets into hierarchical categories.
Showcasing Your Work
Portfolio offers a variety of quick and easy solutions for viewing and presenting a library of digital images. For example, users can choose to display their images automatically as a custom slideshow. This feature allows them to painlessly create quality presentations to meet the needs of any potential situation.
Portfolio also offers the option of making any selection of images available on a CD along with the Portfolio browser, for professional distribution to customers, vendors, and clients. Publishing Portfolio collections to CD is a quick and simple way to provide these images to others, as those viewing the work needn't install any software-they just insert the CD, run the browser and instantly view the collection of images.
Another option available to Portfolio users is the ability to save and send their digital content as a QuickTime movie. This functionality benefits users as they may distribute a fully functioning, self encapsulated slideshow presentation quickly and easily for any computer user to view.
Release 5 is expected to ship in April of this year. Pricing for a single user will start at US$199.95 with upgrades priced at US$99.95. Portfolio Server 5 will be priced starting at US$2499.95 and head higher from there. The company has not yet added the new product to their web site (as it is not yet released), but you can find more information on version 4.0.
