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>

Now that version 3 of Portal is out, the markup and annotations feature is available to those that upgrade.  Now, that doesn't mean go out and install it immediately people!  Always make sure to contact NAPC first before any upgrades and ya know what, we're here to install it for you any way!  So, back to my point.

Portal 3, annotations & markups, yeah that's right!.  It's a very cool feature that deserves it's own min-blog.

Let's make this easy . . . the notes below come directly from Xinet's release notes of Portal v3:

"WebNative Portal 3.0, in conjunction with WebNative 16.0, allows on-line annotations of all images, documents, and videos. A palette allows users to add text, boxes, stamps, or sketches, and all of the annotations can be done in black or a range of colors. When adding annotations, the preview can be magnified for closer inspection. Individual annotations may be saved (with or without comments), deleted, or temporarily hidden from view. The annotations are stored in the Venture database, so any other WebNative user may access saved annotations via mview in Portal but the annotations are not saved to the file on the file system."

If you'd like to see a demo of this, please contact your Account Manager so we can arrange a quick demo.  Just another reason to get Portal or upgrade to the latest version!

Portal 3.0 Data Interchange

Xinet is close to releasing the third iteration of their popular platform, Portal, and with this release comes every developers dream – an API.

Portal DI (Data Interchange), makes available all the core functions of Portal such as:

·      Listing files/folders within a directory/volume

·      Listing volumes

·      Read and Update metadata attributes for files

·      File manager operations such as upload, download, move, copy, etc.

·      Search

Xinet Portal 3.0 itself uses Portal DI to gather all the information it needs to build the site interface!

How does it work?

Portal DI is a REST-based API that serves JSON formatted data.  What this means is that you communicate with it using standard HTTP (GET or POST), and JSON formatted data is interpretable by nearly every language known to man at this point!  The simplicity of a REST-based API, coupled with the accurate & widely accepted JSON formatting makes this API truly a breeze to work with.

What can it do for me?

Portal DI essentially makes your DAM information modular.  Data about your assets can be accessed from anywhere and that data can be used in a variety of different ways.  As a developer who has been working with Portal for two years, I can’t explain how much easier integration with third-party platforms will be with Portal DI.

Can you show me an example?

Below is a very simple example of how to retrieve a list of volumes for a particular user (in this case 'demo').

As you can see, Portal DI is both simple and powerful.