The updates focus on making its production and digital asset management systems and its brand management platform more accessible for users and simplifying the transfer and sharing of assets being produced by different users.
Xinet is North Plains’ production asset management system, heavily used by creative production teams and agencies and integrated with Adobe Creative Suite.
New features for the system include the Xinet Pilot desktop application that allows users to drag and drop digital assets into it without having to be in Adobe giving users more flexibility to synchronise asset production.
Using North Plains’ ConnectR technology, launched in December to smooth the transfer of assets between North Plains’ products, Xinet can now push assets to the firm’s recently launched On Brand and Xinet Digital brand management products.
Previously it was only possible to push assets to North Plains’ enterprise-scale DAM system, Telescope, but the upgrade has also enabled metadata and assets to be “pulled” back from Telescope into Xinet creating a bi-directional workflow for asset transfers.
Product line manager Bob Bennett said: “This really cements the role of Telescope as a central repository. This is big news for users of our products who want to really get that combined power of Xinet and Telescope, as well as those people who want to feed an On Brand system directly from Xinet.”
“This interoperability really ties creative teams closer to other parts of the business that are using their creative work.”
Other new features include the introduction of Unicode support meaning that Xinet can now encode multiple languages within any one metadata field rather than one language per field.
MP3 audio thumbnails have also been added to improve browsing, while the system can also now be licensed without a hardware dongle on Windows and Linux.
As well as the enhancement to ConnectR technology within Telescope, upgrades in the DAM system include an auto-complete function in many of its data entry fields that filter out non-matching items as the user types speeding up data entry.
Upgrades in On Brand, the brand management platform and marketing management resource, include enhanced user permission to give more control over what assets can be viewed, downloaded and shared, and by whom.
Additionally On Brand can now be used to brand portals in multiple languages, making the system more globally accessible.
All three updates versions will be ready for shipping by the end of the quarter.