As MacWorld gets underway today at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MetaCommunications, known for its Virtual Ticket and Job Manager solutions for the graphic arts print production community, is extending its reach into the creative environment with its latest offering, Digital Storage Manager. The company bills Digital Storage Manager as the first Intranet Search & Archive Management System for Creative and Prepress Workgroups. Quoting research from GISTICS that indicates that an average of $8,200 per person per year is spent on file management activities including searching, verifying, organizing and archiving files, MetaCommunications has targeted its inexpensive and easy-to-use Digital Storage Manager at solving this rampant problem.

Bob Long, Executive Vice President at MetaCommunications, is quick to point out that Digital Storage Manager is not another Digital Asset Management solution. Rather, it is specifically designed to aide creative workgroups to better manage the creative process. While there is some minor overlap in functionality with Digital Asset Management solutions, the bulk of the functionally is additive. Digital Storage Manager integrates with Quark, InDesign, Illustrator and other packages commonly used by creatives, and features real-time indexing of files similar to the functionality of Google Desktop Search, including both metadata and full text. It also offers a very nice extended preview capability through the Digital Resource Explorer. Running on Mac OS X on the client side, Digital Storage Manager ships with Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE) that supports a 2 GB database free of charge. The product can be downloaded for a free 21-day trial, and is priced based on the amount of total storage under management with unlimited client and Web access, starting at $995 for 100 GB, with incremental upgrades up to unlimited storage under management at $19,995. This entry-level pricing strategy makes it affordable even for small creative groups. At this point, there are no plans to support the PC platform on the client side.

Digital Storage Manager supports both decentralized and centralized archiving workflows, with the centralized workflow being managed by a cybrarian or archivist. It can integrate with Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) products such as Retrospect and ArcServe. Its ability to collect and assign metadata is quite robust, and it completes searches very quickly. The company also offers a software developer’s kit (SDK) for integration with FileMaker and Print MIS systems to be able to pull metadata directly from those systems.