BOSTON, Mass. (MacWorld Conference & Expo) – July 11, 2005 – MetaCommunications, Inc., a leading developer of business management and workflow solutions for the graphic arts industry, today announced the availability of Digital Storage Manager, the first Intranet search and archive management system for creative workgroups. A powerful and intuitive product, Digital Storage Manager solves a few of the industry’s most challenging problems – finding, tagging and archiving the myriad files used in the production process. MetaCommunications will demonstrate Digital Storage Manager July 11-15 in booth #414 of the MacWorld Conference & Expo at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. “Graphic arts organizations are under tremendous pressure to increase efficiency and profitability,” said Robert T. Long, Executive Vice President of MetaCommunications. “Digital Storage Manager significantly reduces the time, labor and costs required to manage the ever-growing cache of production files. Our innovative, cost-efficient Intranet search and archive management system puts a ‘high beam’ on Spotlight for Mac OS X Tiger, enabling creative professionals to take the ability to find, tag and archive beyond the desktop to an entire workgroup’s network.” Find, Tag, Archive Every day creative workgroups generate thousands of digital files, such as images, logos, PDFs and photos, which are used to produce advertisements, brochures, direct mail, product packaging and Web pages, among other types of art. Historically these creative, prepress and publishing files have been either saved on local computers or stored haphazardly on various fileservers or offline media such as tape or CD. Because the files have been assigned little or no metadata -- pertinent descriptive information about the files, such as authors, customer and job information, copyright information, formats, locations, size, versions, etc. -- it has been difficult for colleagues to access the files for use and re-use. According to GISTICS research, an average of $8,200 per person per year is spent on file management activities, which include searching, verifying, organizing, and archiving files. Creative professionals spend an average of 1 out of every 10 hours of their time on file management. Searches alone account for a full third of that time. Digital Storage Manager solves this problem by providing a unique database file system that represents a centralized view of an entire network’s online and offline production files, real-time indexing of the files’ uses, customizable metadata tags, online and offline file search and retrieval, and one-step archiving and backup. Digital Storage Manager’s array of benefits derives from its unique strengths in the functions of finding, tagging and archiving files: Find: The out-of-the-box, turnkey system, which is built on proven technology in MetaCommunications’ award-winning Virtual Ticket product, enables users to quickly and easily search across an entire network of online servers and offline repositories to accurately find any file regardless of location. Tag: Customizable file tickets enable administrators to setup custom metadata schemas for an organization. Users may access the file tickets to efficiently visualize and assign metadata they deem pertinent. Digital Storage Manager also automatically captures rich document metadata, including Adobe’s XMP standard. Archive: Digital Storage Manager’s unique “archive it and forget it” technology allows simultaneous archiving and backup of online and offline files in one simple step, significantly reducing archiving time and eliminating expensive maintenance. Key Components of Digital Storage Manager - Digital Resource Explorer – Online production servers are automatically indexed by server agents, creating a mirror of pointers to actual files. Users can use customizable file tickets to quickly and easily add metadata to individual files or entire folders in real-time. Digital Storage Manager automatically captures file metadata and preview information from the most commonly used creative tools in the industry. Files or folders can be archived by selecting items in the window. - Production Jobs – This view enables users to manage files and folders as a job. Jobs can be assigned metadata which is automatically propagated to each file belonging to the job. A job can either be archived immediately from this window or a date can be set for it to be archived later. - Digital Resource Search – Production users can search across online and offline storage to find files based on standard file metadata, customized job and file metadata or the contents of many file types. Searches can either be saved by each user or published to groups of users. - Cataloging – This window allows users to bring legacy files into the system. - Retrieval Request Queue – This window enables archivists to easily manage and fulfill requests for offline media and automatically notify individuals when their request is complete. - Archiving Queue – This window provides a workflow for batch archiving of files and editing of metadata. It also enables archivists to manage online archives, and back up and archive files to offline media in one simple step for disaster recovery. Digital Storage Manager offers integrated plug-ins for QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign and Illustrator, and Mac OS X Finder, allowing users to edit metadata within familiar native applications without disrupting workflow. Digital Storage Manager also integrates with industry leading backup/archival solutions including Brightstor ARCServe, Dantz Retrospect, Powerfile R200, Roxio Toast and Mac OS X Disk Utility. Digital Storage Manager has an SDK for integration with third party systems including FileMaker Pro. Production systems may be queried for metadata and applied to files or folder automatically, A Digital Storage Manager Web Server is also available to customers who wish to provide restricted, browser-based file access to external departments, customers, and vendors. Pricing & Availability Digital Storage Manager offers enterprise technology at a desktop price. The product is licensed by the total storage under management. Mac OS X and web client access is unlimited. MetaCommunications is offering introductory pricing through October 31st, starting at $995 for 100 GB of managed storage. Pricing for storage increments of 250GB, 1 TB, 2.5 TB, 5 TB, and unlimited are available. Digital Storage Manager will soon be offered by select resellers, distributors and OEM partners. For more information, call 800-771-6382, e-mail [email protected] or visit http://www.meta-comm.com/sales.