Elvis DAM is a scalable digital asset management (DAM) solution, offering Filtered Search, Collaboration features, Image Editing, Metadata management, Approval Process control, Version control and Asset Sharing.
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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.
WoodWing Assets work exceptionally well in companies where they have a large number of digital files, that they need to manage and search. Media, advertising and marketing companies benefit significantly when using Assets to manage their digital images, video and content as the most approved as well as latest versions are automatically kept of every digital file. Companies that have a small number of digital files, with probably less than 10 staff, probably don't need a system to manage their actual digital files, provided they are in a structured folder base, that everyone can access.
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.
It is incredibly easy. For an idea on the onboarding or training of a basic user, this is the only system we know of that training takes literally 1 hour, and the basic user is fully up to speed. Very intuitive user experience. Easy ability to share files (simply right click). Easy ability to search for all digital files, and even content within the digital files, if you cant remember what the file name was - just this feature alone saved us hours everyday
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.
WoodWing support has been good, they do feedback quickly when reporting an issue and do keep you up to date with where they are in the process of resolving the support issue. The support team is knowledgeable and take the time to fully understand the issue. I do feel they should have an online support ability to assist with basic user issues, as opposed to having to log a ticket every time, but that would be the only reason I have not given them a 10.
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.
Overall Elvis DAM is a great product although when you compare the solution to other providers of similiar asset CDNs such as Amazon's AWS, Rackspace CDN or Cloudinary it can get quite expensive. This is especially true if you have a team that is at the larger enterprise level in which case you are charged by the user.
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.