News from our CEO
Scott Seebass 

Spring's arrival seems to have brought with it some improvement in our global economy. This is certainly a welcome change, and it's nice to talk to customers who are feeling positive about the future. This is the fourth recession we've experienced at Xinet, and each has taught us some lessons on what to expect in the next year or so.

We're already starting to see some familiar patterns emerge in our customer base. For some, it's the belief that nothing has changed. These customers think they can continue to do business the same way they did a few years ago, and as the economy recovers so will their business. While this is likely to some extent, things most certainly have changed with the recession, including business conditions. For one, most companies have not invested heavily during the recession — as we hopefully begin to exit it, those companies that recognize new opportunities and invest in pursuing them will find themselves recovering and expanding more quickly.

On the flip side, there are people who are convinced that everything has changed. In the last few weeks I have talked with people who believe that social networking has altered everything, with a fervor that's eerily reminiscent of the dot-com boom. While social networking will change certain things in certain markets, it will have little effect on most people given the diverse demographics of the larger world.

Historically, the time immediately after a recession is the most dynamic of a business cycle. It's the occasion for determining those opportunities which arose during the recession but were not capitalized upon. These opportunities are as simple as capturing the customers of a failed rival, and as complex as identifying a new market and developing a method for establishing business in it. In our experience, it's those customers who look both forward and backward who'll be with us as we leave this recession behind.

Feature Spotlight
        
Triggers and Actions boosts productivity with automated management of repetitive manual tasks. This versatile feature lets you initiate actions in the WebNative Suite database or file system to automate simple or complex workflows. Individual tasks like sending e-mail notification of approved assets, entering metadata into a file, or archiving a completed job folder, are handled automatically by WebNative Suite—any time, day or night.

WebNative Suite comes with several Actions ready to use, many of which integrate with our other tools. For example:

• Uploader applications work with Triggers and Actions to send automatic e-mail as notification that files have been delivered to the WebNative Suite server
• Annotations works with Triggers and Actions to move approved files from one job folder to another when a datafield is marked as Approved by a client
• Asset Timer works with Triggers and Actions to automatically archive assets that have expired

Actions are also simple to create, using the administrative GUI. Your workflow can be more efficient in a few simple steps.

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Asset Browser acts as a Web browser within Adobe InDesign, allowing you to search and place assets from a WebNative Suite site directly to a layout, through secure log-in access. To help you understand Asset Browser's capabilities, we have new scripts available in Xinet Tech Notes. One script updates metadata values in InDesign text boxes, and another opens all InDesign documents for a particular image with the click of a button in WebNative Portal. Here is where to find them (please note you must be logged in to view Tech Notes):

General information about AppleScripts and Asset Browser can be found in Tech Note 269. Information on scripting Asset Browser on drag-and-drop is in Tech Note 299. Note: this example used to be in Tech Note 269.

Learn how to update metadata and generate PDFs with some layers hidden in Tech Note 300. This Tech Note provides three script examples. One updates metadata values in text fields placed by the script example in Tech Note 299. A second script verifies that all obsolete metadata has been removed from its dedicated layer after an update, and the third demonstrates how to create separate PDFs for different layers of the document and add them to a running Uploader application.

Starting with WebNative Portal 3.03.01, administrators can designate AppleScript to be run by clicking a button in Asset Browser—without requiring a drag and drop. Tech Note 301 contains an example which identifies and opens all InDesign documents that contain an image upon clicking the AppleScript Button for that image.

Use these scripts as is, or adapt them for your unique workflow. If you have any questions, please contact Technical Support.

Release News
                
In March, Xinet released WebNative Suite 16.03 and WebNative Portal 3.03.01. SGL's release of FlashNet 5.8.15 was announced in February. All new releases are available to AXIs, developers, and all customers who are currently enrolled in the Xinet Maintenance Program.

WebNative Suite 16.03 contains several bug fixes, detailed in its Release Notes document. See below for how to access these.

WebNative Portal 3.03.01 contains several new features:

• Support for 32 bit and 64 bit Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
• Support for 64 bit Mac OS X 10.5 ( Leopard)
• Japanese language improvements
• Annotations triggers, such as triggering on a new "Approved" stamp
• Minor bug fixes
  

SGL's FlashNet 5.8.15 includes a number of bug fixes and implemented features as follows:

• Improved barcode scanning, eliminating the need for manual barcode scanning and saving of the magazine
• Recognition of when a tape is in a drive rather than its assigned slot
• Allows backups to pause when a group runs out of media, then resume when more media is available to the group
• Disables taking drives offline
• Allows backups and restores to NFS mounts, which compensates for the discontinuation of the SDSS Client module
• Email reports about FlashNet backups and restores now say "passed" or "failed" in the subject line
  
  

Full details about new products and features and a complete list of bugs fixed for our product upgrades can be found in the “Downloads” area of our Web site under “Released Software”. See the “Release Notes” folder within the individual Xinet product folders. If you have questions about product releases, please contact Xinet Technical Support.

Q. How can I use Triggers and Actions to send e-mail to an address contained in a metadata field value?

A. There are several ways to do this. Use this example, or choose from the variations below. First, set up a text data field as a pop-up, with the e-mail addresses as the pop-up choices (for example: larry@xinet.com, moe@xinet.com, and curly@xinet.com). Note the keyword ID of your new field as listed in the nativeadmin Database > Data Fields > Summary page. Then create an email action setting, and enter this:

$KEYWORDxxx_VALUE

where 'xxx' is the keyword ID noted earlier. Finally, create a trigger set that fires on any change to your new data field. You might require the new data field to be filled on upload, so that the client must choose who will receive the notification of the upload. You can read more about Triggers and Actions in the WebNative Suite Administration Guide (please log in to access this link).

Variations:

• Set the "Sender" in the email setting to the WebNative user who triggered the action with the $USERNAME variable (for example, $USERNAME@xinet.com).


• Move or Copy to a path based on the value of a metadata field, by using the "Path" option when creating the setting. In this case, the metadata value might represent a customer name. For example, the destination could look like: /Volumes/raid/$KEYWORDxxx_VALUE/Incoming, so that the action moves the file to a directory based on the customer's name.
  

*Please send us your question for the expert. It could be featured in the next Xing!

Customer Spotlight

We feature a French communications management company, Gutenberg Networks, and an American digital marketing agency, Solution Set, in this issue of Xing. From strengthening client relationships to speeding up production, each have improved the way they work with WebNative Suite.

Gutenberg Networks, a subsidiary of the DDB Group, is a 500-person company headquartered in France that specializes in communications management. Working with domestic and international clients such as Carrefour, Orange, and Total, it designs, produces, and manages client communications across broadcast, Web, press and print.

Gutenberg Networks already had Xinet® FullPress® and WebNative® and chose to deploy WebNative Suite in order to better service clients, in addition to improving their production workflow. “WebNative Suite allows us to be even more responsive to our customers’ needs, which helps us build tighter relationships,” says Laurent Garreau, Director of Information Systems.

*Read the full Gutenberg Networks case study.

SolutionSet is a 400 person multi-channel digital marketing agency that delivers integrated brand and technology solutions to companies like Adidas, AT&T, Radio Shack, and eBay. Previously known as Haggin Marketing, SolutionSet’s customer relationship management (CRM) expertise and creativity enabled it to develop integrated communications programs that provide measurable results for its clients.

The company knew that it needed a DAM system that addressed production workflow while providing assets to internal and client workgroups; today all six SolutionSet offices across the United States utilize WebNative Suite, with almost 2000 accounts accessing the system globally. “Three years after our initial install, we are still realizing the benefits of WebNative Suite. It has been a tremendous contribution to meet the demands of our clients’ schedules, go-to-market programs, and campaigns,” commented Phil O’Neil, database services administrator at SolutionSet.

*Read the full SolutionSet case study.

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