JWT London is regarded as one of the giants of the UK advertising industry. Department S, JWT London’s in-house studio facility, offers a wide range of services to the agency including design, retouching, 3D artwork production, digital asset management, multimedia and repro fulfillment capabilities.

The agency’s wide variety of clients includes Kellogg’s, HSBC, Shell and Unilever. With Xinet® WebNative® Suite, Department S is able to offer Xinet’s leading digital asset management system as a central part of the service that it provides to JWT.

Several years ago Department S was using Xinet and running Helios alongside the live work system to move assets over to Xinet for archiving. The studio evaluated which system would provide the greatest benefit to the studio, the agency, and its clients and decided there was greater potential with WebNative Suite. WebNative Suite gave the ability to have live data on the system, archive data, share asset management and use FTP all on one server. Although it was a big step, the studio migrated completely to the Xinet system.

“One of the key incentives to move forward with WebNative Suite was that we had clients who were inquiring about asset management because they wanted to be able to distribute their assets globally. We found that Xinet’s system was the only product that was going to make it easier for the user at the other end as well as making it easy for us to manage internally. So the whole product gave us ease of use more than anything else; it gave us exactly what we needed,” said Jason Van Praagh, IT manager for Department S.

The Xinet system brings Department S several key benefits: it allows staff and clients 24/7 Web-based access to both live and archived files, offers them the ability to search assets using either standard or client customizable metadata, and provides a place where all the assets, images, designs, artworks and related files can be stored securely on the Department S server.

With Xinet’s ease-of-use, Department S can ensure that clients get exactly what they need just as soon as they need it. The studio can e-mail a client with a PDF, which they can then read, approve or edit by logging into the site, and be in and out within a matter of minutes. Clients can also log into their site, find the asset they’re looking for, check the metadata, make sure they’ve got usage rights for the actual asset and download it very quickly. For every aspect in which Department S uses WebNative Suite – from internal volume mounting through distributing assets – they have been able to rely on the functionality of the Xinet system.

“One of the things we like most about WebNative Suite is the stability. Before, we had a situation where our live server wasn’t always stable. The Xinet system provides a completely stable environment that everyone understands and everyone knows how to use. As a product, it’s solid, it’s very easy to use, and everyone seems to have got their head around it very quickly,” said Van Praagh.

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