Digital Asset Management Blog Public Edition Of FocusOPEN Digital Asset Manager Released Today.

Today we officially launched a public edition ofFocusOPEN Digital Asset Manager with an AGPL licence.

We have always used open source licences as it’s long been our belief that it’s the only honest and practical way to supply software for larger businesses where the support and service delivery element are the most important elements of what we do. However, in the past we have been reluctant to provide a public release (i.e. one you can download off websites etc) because it is a rather different undertaking to servicing the needs of enterprise clients.

Before taking this step, we wanted to make sure we had support facilities in place that would make it a worthwhile experience for end users, rather than a lot of the ‘abandonware’ that a lot of open source apps can end up becoming if the developers don’t have the resources to invest into their solutions (whether time, money or both).

So, why have we decided to release a public edition now? Over the last 12-18 months we have had numerous enquiries from creative agencies and SMEs (especially the former) who wanted a commercial grade DAM system but did not have an enterprise budget. Daydream are also relatively unique in our choice of .NET and SQL Server for both an open source vendor and DAM systems in general. This meant we had an equally large number of enquiries from .NET developers working either for their employer/client or on their own account who did not want to switch over to PHP or Java in order to implement DAM.

The public AGPL edition has a large section of the capabilities of the enterprise edition, this is a small sample of the key features:

• Plug-in based Asset Processing Server (APS) for transcoding and proxy generation
• Multi-brand capable (ideal for agencies with different clients)
• Full text indexing and search
• Faceted search and tagging
• Category or taxonomy search and tagging
• Usage approval workflow
• Upload (or ingestion workflow)
• Embedded metadata support
• Advanced user security and user permissions modules
• Batch cataloguing and bulk uploading

Continues @http://damblog.daydream.co.uk/digital-asset-management/public-edition-of-focusopen-digital-asset-manager-released-today