Canto on Wednesday announced the release of Cumulus 7, the latest major revision to its Digital Asset Management (DAM) software for Mac OS X and Windows. New to this release is Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs, improved asset control, faster production and more.
Cumulus 7 features a new user interface, with the ability to identify and manage the relationship between assets — images referenced in QuarkXPress and InDesign layouts can be connected to the assets that reference them, for example. You can also easily find “Alternates” or “Variants” and trace other relationships between assets.
“Shared Collections” show users the asset records related to their current project or projects without requiring users to do any searching.
Users can also now label and rate asset records with visual tags to show which assets have been approved, rejected, put on hold and which are new.
“Actions” are linked to automate workflow steps, new image conversion and processing features have been added, printing improvements have been added and PDF proof sheets can be generated. “Print Templates” let you define output layouts that can be reused by other Cumulus users.
Cumulus 7 Web clients work like the native client software; Records and Category View Sets can be used by Web-based users, and context menu support has been added. What’s more, Cumulus 7 features improved overall performance — Canto said the time to connect to catalogs has been reproduced.
Database engine and server enhancements having also been added to this version — mirroring is now available, for example.