The Hyland Nuxeo Platform is a cloud-native,
cloud-first, scalable solution which utilizes automation technologies to
improve efficiencies, increase accuracy, and provide its capabilities. With
it’s low-code technology, organizations can implement Hyland’s Nuxeo
Platform with customizable features that allow organizations to develop a creative workflow. Employees can then create,
tag, organize, and share dynamic content, including rich media and 3D digital
assets and their metadata to be used in…
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Xinet
Score 7.0 out of 10
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North Plains Systems in Toronto now offers and supports Xinet, a digital asset management platform with an emphasis on collaboration and sharing. The California company Xinet, the platform's original developer, was acquired by North Plains Systems in 2012.
Nuxeo works very well for us as a Digital Media Asset Management tool. I understand given its flexibility, it has also been used for managing insurance claims. It seems to be well suited for uses where some customization is required, yet there is a desire to leverage best practices, reusable code components.
Tracking rights-managed assets. Xinet provides advanced features such as watermarking and expiration notifications.
Integration with Adobe. Xinet can be configured to access assets from right within the apps.
Desktop integration. Xinet can be accessed by the browser but also as a mountable server volume on the desktop. Unlike Box, Dropbox, etc., the mounted volume does not require consumption of hard drive space.
For my position, I didn't learn enough of Xinet to truly utilize the whole program, only one or two people in my department understood it inside and out.
During my time at the agency, we were unable to get the annotations to work on assets. And that would have been helpful to have to streamline our process of asset quality control.
Nuxeo provides a WebUI that they are always improving based on customer feedback. The interface is designed with flexibility in mind - this means that it must be customized to the business's use case before it can achieve its maximum usability.
The Nuxeo Studio interface provides developers and administrators the building blocks to achieve much of this customization - they just need to put the building blocks together in ways that best meet the end users' needs. The API and SDKs allow for more advanced customization.
Xinet is intuitive to use. It is perhaps the only DAM that features a traditional mounted volume, so anyone working in an environment with local servers will love it. Search is accurate and faceted searches allow users to narrow search results. Setup requires a lot of training if you want to leverage all of its complex workflow capabilities.
This is something that we have struggled with a bit. We push the boundaries of Nuxeo in this area, both with the number of assets and the size of assets. We have a lot of large, long videos, and we are continually tuning performance in this area.
Nuxeo support is very willing to help whenever there is an issue. We have a weekly touchbase with someone from the Nuxeo team that we discuss any development issues with, and there is an open line of communication between our team and the Nuxeo team. They have been supporting us phenomenally, every step of the way.
Support is handled by third-party server integrators. Our partner, NAPC, has always been there when we've needed them and also develops unique plugins to expand XInet's capabilities.
I attended instructor-led trainings at a couple of points when I was first beginning to serve as project manager on Nuxeo projects. The first one that I attended was meant for business users and decision-makers. The second one was meant for system administrators. The first one provided a great introduction, through demos, of how Nuxeo could be adapted to very different business use cases. The second one, like many instructor-led trainings, was meant for users of a variety of skill levels, and so it could be a bit slow at times for students with a stronger technical background, but the instructor was able to include more advanced components as well.
Nuxeo University provides an ideal starting point for developers and system administrators who are new to the Nuxeo platform. So, in terms of online training for developers and administrators, the learning paths are definitely available. In terms of training for end users: keep in mind that Nuxeo is a foundation with building blocks - what you do with those building blocks is up to you and depends on your business's specific use cases. For this reason, end-user training is largely up to you because it will need to depend on how you've built and configured the system. That said, I've seen the companies that I've worked with configure the system based largely on end-user input, and so it has fit very closely with what those users wanted to do and how they wanted to do it. In cases where elements of the UI weren't fitting quite right with what users naturally wanted to do, based on their process flows, we've often found it easy enough to adapt the UI to the users, rather than using training to adapt the users to the UI.
The technical support team of the Nuxeo was always on the go to help us. Being an IT technician, I haven't faced any such issue, but the problem was that it took much longer than anticipated. Otherwise, we didn't need to get other implementation partners to help us in its implementation.
It is built on open-source technologies. A very small footprint is required to run it. It can be run in a cloud and utilize the power of cloud services, unlike other competitors.
We selected Xinet based on having a large number of potential users and wanted unlimited web seats. Paying a one time software fee versus a monthly seat payment was a big draw. Telescope was four to five times more expensive and was not feasible at the time. We liked Basecamp but we needed a local solution for storage, not hosted.
Xinet is a great platform to build off of. We use it in combination with Enfocus Switch which has greatly improved the automation capabilities and we use Xinet as the portal for external users. Our internal users very rarely interact with the Xinet GUI.
