It's 2010, the worst is over (or so they say). So now it's time to get focused and see how to leverage what you have and maximize revenue. Make a list of your team's expertise and the technology you own and see what new services you can offer or what processes you can improve. Your clients are looking for what's next, so make your offering what's next! Too often companies get stuck in what they know and aren't willing to put in the extra efforts. 

If you're confused – NAPC offers refresher training, online video how-to's (flatheadu.com) and free 1 hour training webinars every other Friday. 

I have leveraged the Xinet WebNative Suite in a couple of large advertising agencies, saved thousands in freelance and created six figure new revenue streams.  Now it's your turn - we at NAPC want to hear about your success stories; not read about the client you lost.

Often, Archiving of Digital Assets and other legacy digital files is an afterthought. Production just runs out of live working storage, and needs to make room, so they drag "a bunch of files" off to an Archiving location that frees the working storage space for use with new projects. There is often little thought put into the process, and the files are just forgetten - until you need them again. If the original plan is lacking, it's possible that you'll find the system lacking.

So what do you need to think about?

 Lots of things, it turns out.

•  How long will you need to keep the data?
• Will you need to keep all of it that long?
• How much can I spend to do implement?
• How much can I spend to maintain it?
• How much time do I need to implement it?
• How often will I need to do it?
• How quickly do I need to restore it?
• What regulations or standards are already in place?

Wow. And that's just the big items. There are also lots of little things to consider as well. I hope you have some time, because this could take awhile.

What's first?

Probably the first thing you should consider is whether there are any regulatory or standards bodies that will have jurisdiction over your Archiving process. Many organizations are subject to rules set forth by standards and regulatory practices that institute rules or guidelines that you are required to follow. If you plan your Archiving scheme beforehand, you should be able to meet nearly all of the rules and regulations that these organizations represent. Some things you may encounter in you're foray into Archiving might be:

• Sarbaines-Oxley
• ISO 9001/9002/10012
• ANSI
• FDA
• Military/Government Regulations

All of these have at the very least "good practices" guidelines that they expect you to follow. I won't get into them here, but if you're subject to any of those organizations oversight, you should look into the requirements that they impose upon you. Often, they will offer you nearly everything you need to make a well-informed decision.

How long will you need to keep the data?

That's just the simple question. If you're like most of our customers, you have lots of different types of digital assets. In addition to actual WIP, supplied artwork, and purchased artwork, you probably have fonts, process documents (.doc, .xls, etc), templates, etc. If so, you may want to manage these separately, as the need for maintaining (or even Archiving them) may vary depending upon their type and your requirements for storage. For instance, fonts and process documents might only need to be kept for a 2 year period, where actual artwork might need to be stored indefinitely. If you choose to manage these separately, it will make the archiving process more complex, but will save you on storage requirements and tape costs in the long run. In addition, you may decide that for some of your storage needs, charging the customer to maintain their assets is an option. In the WIP case, this is difficult to do, however once you've gotten into Archival data, then it becomes a much more viable option. Archival data requires Real Estate for storage and man-hours to maintain and manage. Those are line items that are difficult to argue. It's not like WIP storage, where storing the data is necessary to produce a product. Once the data is gone from WIP, it becomes a logistics issue, where tapes need to be stored either Nearline, Offline, or Offsite. Nearline storage is the most intrusive and expensive. It requires using up a valuable tape slot, making it unavailable to use for Disaster Recovery or other Archives. Offline means that the tapes need to be stored in a vault onsite, with climate controls and a person to manage those tapes. Offsite means just that - buying storage offsite in a climate controlled vault.

What media options do I have for Archive storage?

This depends upon the prior question and your desire or need for longevity. Generally speaking, for most organizations the choice is limited to magnetic tape, DVD/CD media, or nearline disk. There are other options, which you're welcome to investigate, but these three are the most popular. There are also promising technologies in the works, such as holographic storage and optical tape, but those are at least 5 years away.

Over the years, magnetic tape seems to be the most popular choice for long-term Archival storage of digital assets, although some do use DVD/CD storage, and more organizations are asking about the potential of nearlining assets to disk storage. Some of this decision does depend upon your budgets and the amount of data that you are Archiving, but only to a lesser extent. Nearly any organization can afford to purchase at the very least a stand-alone tape drive for archival purposes, and then just manually write files to tape. If you're still writing Archives to DVD/CD manually, you should probably consider the possibility of adding a stand-alone tape drive. It will make your process much more efficient, and allow you to store Archives in a more supportable and reliable fashion.

Magnetic tape is the most popular choice among our clients, as most require a Disaster Recovery backup, and have already chosen to have an attached library for that purpose. This makes the choice for tape much simpler. In general, magnetic tape stored properly will last 15-20 years or more. Tape degradation is possible, and over extended periods of time data loss can occur, however assuming that Archival tape is only written once, and the tapes are then stored (once full) in the proper environment, you should be perfectly fine assuming that the data will be there when you need it. That also assumes you remember where you put it in 20 years. NAPC generally recommends that any Archival data is written to two separate tapes. This ensures that whatever happens to one copy of an Archive, you will still have a second option for retreival. Tape, being a magnetic media, is vulnerable to magnetic fields and humidity, and to a lesser extent humidity and temperature variations, so proper storage is essential to longevity. Probably not a good idea to store it on top of a large electric motor, or inside the Large Hadron Collider room.

Anectdotally, DVD/CD media appears to be more prone to data degradation than does tape (or disk for that matter). DVD/CD media is very sensitive to bright light and temperature variations, as well as air pollution and humidity. Also, the quality of manufacture seems to dramatically effect this media's longevity, as does the age _before_ writing to the media. You can purchase all different types of writable DVD/CD media, some even with a gold media layer. The manufacturers may tell you it lasts as long as tape, however our experiences, and the experiences of our customers seems to contradict that. Mind you, duplicate DVD/CD Archives, which we also recommend with Tape-borne Archives, can alleviate most of these concerns, as having a duplicate copy of your Archives ensures that the files would need to be damaged on both media before you would ever lose a file. It's very difficult to guage an effective life expectancy however, as we've seen DVD/CD media that is unusable after only a year, and then some that has lasted 10 years.

Nearlining Archives to disk has been gaining ground lately. The idea is that you present inexpensive, slower disk to your Xinet server, and move Archives to that disk, and then just running a tape backup or mirror/snapshots of that data for Disaster Recovery purposes. Given the relatively small expense of adding a large quantity of disk to and existing Enterprise storage device and the simplification it provides, this has been becoming more attractive to larger organizations, as it allows them to run Enterprise-level backups along with their existing backup strategies. For some organizations, this makes documenting and managing these Disaster Recovery schemes simpler for the purposes of explaining them to standards and regulatory inspectors. That alone can sway the powers-that-be to allocate monies for the expense. The scenario is typically more expensive than tape, however, and unless there are other more enticing rewards for doing so, it can be a less viable option. The reliability is generally the same as that for live data, in that only if the device fails in such a way that data on the disk is lost, will the data be lost. Most enterprise-level storage maintains the data it stores via various error-checking schemes, so the chance of data loss even over lifetimes greatly exceeding that of tape are slim. However most organizations would replace the underlying device(s) long before that. I hope.

So which should I chose?

That's not an answer I can offer. It definitely requires some study on your part, and depends largely on what sort of work you do, and what your actual needs are. You'll probably spend a lot of time in meetings discussing the actual needs of your customers and end-users, and what exactly their requirements are, as well as what your needs and resources are. If you need any assistance or guidance in how to best approach this, you should feel free to call your NAPC Account Representative, and they will be happy to help point you in the right direction.

Where can I get more information?

The Council on Library and Information Resources has some good resources on media:

CD Media

Magnetic Tape

And as always, feel free to contact NAPC for any help in defining your Archiving strategy.

I've spent the last couple weeks upgrading 2 of the largest Venture database in existence. One took 6 days, the other 7 to convert everything, but baby was it worth it!

One of the biggest pain points of large Xinet installs databases is performance- to increase  performance when you have Millions (or tens of Millions) of records, you need to 'index' things you search on. In the old version large sites could take a week to drop, repair and recreate the database should something corrupt (and things do corrupt- if someone kicks out a power cable, you're gonna break MySQL tables).

Last week I put an index on the file table of one of these GINORMOUS sites in under 4 hours. Under 4 hours compared to 3 or 4 days! Oh, and during that time? Venture was usable.

That's just awesome.

Happy New Year all!

Since we all work on Macs in some way shape or form, I thought I’d talk a bit about Apple Inc. to start the year.  As a company, Apply is as strong as it has ever been and looks to continue to dominate the consumer market with new desktop & laptop computers, phones and other personal gadgets that are designed to make our lives easier.  Is the Apple tablet computer coming soon???  Hmmm, we'll see!  On the enterprise side, I think Apple did the right thing by dropping the Xserve Raid and continuing to upgrade the Xserve itself.  The Xserve is one of the most popular servers we help integrate into our customers sites especially with small to medium sized Xinet installs as it performs well in those areas.  I think Apple will continue to grow and refine it's Xserve product over time mostly because the server version of Mac OS X is fairly straight forward to maintain by an IT professional compared with other systems.  That's not to say it's super easy to maintain the Mac OS, just a little more "mac" like with buttons to enable a service versus editing a config file in a text editor for example.  You know what I mean right!?!?

On another note, MacWorld this year normally would fall on the second week in January but has been moved to mid-February this year.  Why?  Well for one reason, Apple as a company is not going to be exibiting at this years MW and the Consumer Electronics show in Vegas has always been on the same week as MW.  So, IDG (the people organizing MW and plenty of other trade shows) decided to move it out to February.  I for one am happy since there is no "overshadowing" of either show now and . . . I've never been to San Francisco in February!  Yeah, probably not much different than going in January but it'll be something different, I guess....  So, what will Macworld be like without Apple???  My guess is a litte smaller, a little less hype, and less people but, MW lives (for now any way).  Some people say this one will be the last.  I have no clue if that is the case but what I can say is that Apple fans of all types will still be there and even if there is no MacWorld 2011, there still will be passion for a company that makes gadgets intended to make our lives easier.  I'd even bet that there will be more Apple fans next year but I can't say for sure because my crystal ball is not working right now.  It runs on Vista! :)

Look for a new blog entry after MacWorld as I will report on what I find while out there.  For now, Happy New Year and may 2010 be the best year so far!

Oh and one more thing, if you or anyone in your company plans on attending MacWorld, drop me a line so we can discuss Xinet's new Suite 16 upgrade over an Irish Coffee or whatever adult beverage you prefer!

Brian Dolan

<bdolan@napc.com>

Here comes 2010 and now is the chance for your organization to leap into the new year with new services and more value.

You thought the hard part was getting the money to buy the technology. The truth is that developing sustainable efficiencies and business models with the technology is harder. It takes leadership and a push for change management. I see many clients talk about all the great things they are going to do with the technology they are going to buy (or bought) – but they rarely do. I recommend making this your New Year's resolution (I hate them too). Think about how to make a few minor changes to your companies bottom line by using the Digital Asset Management system you invested in. Perhaps you have a new online DAM training effort to get your team on board, or have some clients in for a show and tell.

In the coming year – demands will be high to offer better services to your clients. It's a perfect time to deliver the Better DAM Mouse Trap.

CSS frameworks have been around for a while, and include popular frameworks such as Blueprint, 960GS, and YUI.  CSS Frameworks are a great way to ensure cross-browser compatibility while working within a clearly defined standard – both of which are extremely valuable in modern web development.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

Most of the popular CSS frameworks are cross-browser compatible, meaning that if the developer follows the style guides defined in the framework, the resulting website should look the same in every browser.

Some CSS frameworks utilize a reset style sheet to accomplish this, while others simply code toward each given browser to ensure proper compatibility.  Every browser has pre-defined values for given HTML elements.  For example, Internet Explorer may set the body’s default line height to 1.0em, whereas Firefox may set it to 1.1em.  A reset style sheet sets all the default values for every element to the same, thus creating a blank slate for the framework to work from.

Well-defined Standards & Constructs

A good CSS framework provides well-defined standards and constructs.  Blueprint, for example, provides a nice grid system that one can utilize simply by setting the proper classes.  So, setting the classes “column span-36 last” will ensure that the element you’re styling will span 36 columns and then will clear so preceding elements fall underneath it.

Constructs such as these provide for faster development and also help the developer to design more maintainable interfaces.

Tableless Web Design

Every modern CSS framework provides the proper constructs so that the every day developer no longer needs to utilize tables to create complex & beautiful web designs.

Tables are VERY slow for the browser to render and should really only be used to render tabular data.  Divs are much faster for the browser to render, more flexible, and just as easy to use as a table with a CSS framework.

Conclusion

When developing software, it’s always a good idea to not re-invent the wheel.  Frameworks provide a good, well-tested set of rules and functionality that a developer can code against, thus resulting in better software developed in a shorter amount of time.

CSS frameworks are no different.  They provide a developer with a solid base, a rich set of tools, and allow you to lay out your design with confidence that it will be cross-browser compliant, fast, and maintainable.

A collective groan fills our room of developers at NAPC. Another Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) incompatibility with one our products has been uncovered. The preferred solution is to quit IE6, take a deep breath, and launch a different browser. Unfortunately, for a number of our customers this is not yet an option and we are faced with the challenge of trying to make an old dog (circa 2001) ignore a new trick.

In the late 90s, developing interactive websites required you to choose sides between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Each offered its own subset of exciting new features that were guaranteed to not work on the other. If you strayed from anything but the most standard HTML tags one of the browsers would fail miserably. Many stale and boring (but functional !!!) websites were born. This was also the era where all colors were picked from the limited "Web-Safe" palette to avoid dithering.   

Thanks to the adoption of standards for HTML and JavaScript, common rendering engines, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) most of these show-stopper browser incompatibility issues have gone away, leaving fewer magical incantations that the Web 2.0 developer needs to keep in their toolbox. The majority of these workarounds, unfortunately, have to do with IE6. A quick look at the style sheet for NAPC's Elegant for Xinet Portal reveals a number of hacks to fool IE6 into doing the right thing:

# Ignores the html>body line
hr.mainhr {  top: 120px;  }
html>body hr.mainhr { top: 115px; }

# Ignores the pseudo-commented line
input.btn{ width: 150px; }
/* commented backslash hack v2 \*/
input.btn{ width: 156px; }
/*end hack */


These examples are minor tweaks that take into account differences in the box model used by IE6. More serious issues arise from bugs with CSS v2, ignoring transparency in PNG files, and differences in traversing the HTML Document Object Model. The latter usually results in a breakdown of the friendlier Web 2.0 AJAX features.

And the developers groan.

We are aware that Internet Explorer 6 still commands a significant market share on corporate PCs, and wherever possible we do try and maintain some level of functionality on IE6. However, our products use a great deal of Web 2.0 technology to provide sophisticated interfaces and cutting edge design and IE6 is incapable of keeping up. To be fair, it isn't as bad as IE5 on the Mac was !

With the exciting HTML 5 spec around the corner a number of big players on the web (ex: Facebook, YouTube, Digg) are actively encouraging their users to upgrade or switch browsers. So are we.

I am always amazed on how many companies buy DAM technology for their business need and then find out about a new project and look for new technology to buy. Why doesn't the company look hard at what they own and see if it can fill the void? It's a pattern that relates to understanding change and implementation. It's rarely the software, it's the plan, the ability to execute and create the business model they dreamed of before they purchased it. Taking it to the next level, leveraging the investment and keeping current.

Is it lack of effort, no change management skills, no vision, fear of failure or resistance? Perhaps some or all of the above. The problem is most companies don't recognize the most important qualification is desire to CHANGE. If you wait for your users, clients or management to dictate change – it's probably too late (or getting late). 

Look for opportunties to implement the technology, show the benefits, design a plan and create the change. Doing these things make your company better and make yourself more valuable. Is it easy? No. But not changing is not an option.