North Plains Systems Corp ., the leading provider of video and digital asset management (VAM and DAM) solutions, today announced enhancements for its enterprise-class DAM TeleScope platform, allowing creative professionals to work more effectively and seamlessly with creative authoring applications and tools. The enhancements also provide a convenient, cost-effective method for organizations to extend their media distribution capabilities.

North Plains bolstered the TeleScope platform by adding three new features:

• Two plug-in applications for Adobe Creative Suite® 3 that strengthen its integration to creative publishing workflows.
• Distribution Broker, which enables TeleScope users to extend the platform’s ability to distribute media.
• Zoom Broker, a feature that enhances the creative professional’s ability to conveniently view large images at high magnification levels.

North Plains has long realized the immutable requirements of creative teams to efficiently work together while minimizing any interruptions to their creative workflows caused by the necessity to leave their editing suites to use another application. North Plains’ latest plug-in applications provide creative professionals with greater ability to leverage the synergies offered by the Adobe Creative Suite 3 design platform and TeleScope’s industry-leading DAM capabilities. Version Cue® CS3 is Adobe’s workgroup collaboration solution designed to facilitate the management and collaboration of a team’s files directly from within familiar Adobe CS3 applications. With the TeleScope V ersion Cue CS3 plug-in, creative teams can extend this functionality through the addition of TeleScope’s robust file management, security, permissions, workflow, and distribution capabilities. Users don’t have to leave their Adobe CS3 applications to leverage TeleScope’s powerful feature-set, so creative workflows can run more smoothly with no requirement for learning a new application.

The second plug-in integrates TeleScope with Adobe InDesign® CS3 page layout application, allowing users to work more productively in a number of ways. The TeleScope InDesign CS3 plug-in enables users to continue designing rich and compelling page layouts within InDesign, while providing access to the TeleScope repository directly from the application. Creative designers benefit through their ability to search, browse, access and edit all media assets stored in the TeleScope repository to which they have permissions. Complex workflows and repetitive tasks are streamlined while asset reuse and repurposing is greatly improved. Organizations benefit by the heightened security provided by the TeleScope solution as well as decreased incidence of lost media assets attributed to creative professionals storing their work in the TeleScope repository as opposed to their desktops or network file systems.

“Creative teams generally perform most of the asset authoring work outside of the (DAM) system using specialized editing tools. Higher end (DAM) products integrate with authoring toolsets… provide access to workflows, and check-in and check-out assets within these authoring tools,” wrote Stephen Powers, Senior Analyst with Forrester Research, in the April 2008 report, Market Overview: Digital Asset Management. “This eliminates the need for creative roles to enter a separate application to perform these tasks, and reduces disruptions to the asset creation process.”

Distribution Broker is a new feature that facilitates the automated migration, replication and distribution of an organization’s digital assets. The feature enables content distributors to easily scale their distribution operation without incurring the added expense of purchasing or building a custom media distribution solution. The solution is ideal for any organization that requires a robust, reliable solution for copying or transferring media such as video, audio, photos, or graphics to multiple destinations such as an FTP site or supporting application for video editing or for web content management. Repetitive tasks are eliminated through the solution’s ability to distribute digital assets by query or by “event trigger” such as a change in metadata or a manual event trigger. This substantially reduces an administrator’s time and effort. With the ability to arrange queries to be executed at specified times or to recur automatically, network congestion can also be minimized.

Zoom Broker is a feature which greatly enhances the creative professional’s ability to conveniently view large images at magnification levels of up to 100 % directly from the TeleScope interface. With Zoom Broker, TeleScope can display the image in a preview window, enabling the user to zoom in and out and pan the image in all directions. Ideal for creative professionals from the print & publishing, advertising or marketing industry who work with large images, photos, and graphics, Zoom Broker reduces valuable time required throughout the editing processes by enabling highly detailed previews of large media assets without the need to first check-out or download the asset.

“TeleScope continues to lead the DAM industry with the most comprehensive support for creative teams today,” said Hassan Kotob, President & CEO of North Plains Systems. “These new features further TeleScope’s support for work-in-progress, providing creative professionals the ability to edit, collaborate and manage digital assets stored in TeleScope without having to leave the applications they know.”