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Digital Asset Management Tools
Asset Timer 
“With Asset Timer, I love how I can set a period of days or months prior to its expiration when an asset will be flagged to let users know that it’s about to expire. It’s important that we don’t print any images that will expire in a few months. It would cost hundreds of dollars to reprint a different image.”
Pete Stott, Nu Skin
Xinet® WebNative® Suite Asset Timer allows you to manage digital asset usage by assigning start and end dates directly to the assets.
Feature Overview
Managing the use of digital assets can be a daunting task for any Art Buyer to administrate. That’s why Xinet developed Asset Timer. This significant feature provides a way to control the use of your assets by specifying a range of usage dates—by day, month, year, even down to the minute. Once an asset is expired, it can not be output by any user, to any device.
Establish Asset Availability Dates
Digital rights management offers control of asset usage and eliminates the need for users to rely on complicated document check-in/check-out systems. Asset Timer puts you in command and simplifies the process. With this feature, authorized users can administer asset availability by simply assigning a date range to an asset in order to restrict its usage for any number of reasons. Limiting a file’s availability in this way provides protection to ensure that an out-of-date asset won’t be misused after it has expired. Furthermore, you can set a condition so that expired assets are automatically watermarked, flagged or hidden from a user’s view. Assets can even be highlighted to alert administrators when an asset is reaching its expiration date.
This simple window shows the usage start and end date fields for the
for the pictured asset. Because it has expired, the asset is watermarked.
Administrator Interface: Usage start and end dates define time parameters
for an asset’s availability based on licensing agreements. These dates can
be modified only by a user with administrator privileges.The expired asset is
watermarked and cannot be used or output.
Save Time with Asset Timer
With Asset Timer, users clearly see which assets are available and which are not, so less time is spent searching for the most current file or keeping track of file usage rights. Availability status is displayed through the WebNative Suite browser, showing Available or Unavailable. When no date range has been assigned, no status is shown. Assets can also be filtered by status, so users see only what their permissions allow. Unavailable assets can be watermarked or completely hidden from view.
User Interface: WebNative Suite displays assets and their statuses. The
unavailable asset is watermarked, and can no longer be downloaded.
Streamline Asset Requests
Many assets expire over time—they become outdated, are replaced with new images, or usage rights expire. Yet just because an asset is unavailable doesn’t mean it can no longer be used.
The Asset Timer Usage Request form enables a user to quickly and conveniently request access to unavailable assets directly from the WebNative Suite interface. Submitting this form sends email to one or more designated recipients so availability can be restored on an as needed basis. One standard template for this usage request form is provided with Asset Timer, and you may also create custom templates for further customization.
Unavailable Asset: User can request use of an asset.
Asset Timer Usage Request: This customizable form simplifies and speeds communication between a user and administrator when requesting use of an expired asset.
Manage Digital Rights
Integrated throughout WebNative Suite, the Asset Timer tool can be used to warn users or prevent unauthorized use. Printer queues can be set up so that, if their output contains expired assets, it can watermark them or fail to output them entirely—allowing easy enforcement of digital rights.
For example, operators doing early stage layout can use watermarks to make users aware that rights have not yet been established for certain images. Before being sent off for output, the job can be passed through a queue that ensures all assets are available before allowing output. This also ensures that re-prints and re-use follow asset usage guidelines without burdening operators.
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