Working in IT presents a variety of challenges, especially when you're on a Mac. Whether it's running on licenses because your Mac users never release them or needing to manage recordable devices because of oversight by some regulatory committee, Centrify can save you a lot of time and headaches. Just like that - bam!

 

Centrify has a very low cost desktop version that allows you to control rights on Apple computers. Part of that is the ability to easily roll out dozens of new machines with minimal work. It's a common need, and we've a way of doing it no one else has. Centrify's DirectControl for Mac allows for joining Macs to AD and applying REAL Microsoft policy using Microsoft's Policy Management MMC. Stop trying to pass off configuration management as policy, and then spending hours explaining it to your auditor.

That's just the tip of the iceberg with Centrify, where you can:

-Create accurate, robust and customizable reports on everything AD
-Deploy, Manage, control and Customize your Mac Desktops.
-Manage your Mobile devices and control your BYOD devices (bring your own device)
-Realize all of your Single-Sign-On (SSO) desires.
-Manage user-privilige on Windows, Linux and Unix systems
-Monitor, Record and Audit user activity on Windows, Linux and Unix.

So when you're working in IT, there's no need to get that sinking feeling that your Mac will give you more hurdles and obstacles than you have time for. Centrify can make management and control problems go away with a bam!

 

 

 

 

 

This is an update to one of our most popular blog posts:

Adobe is embracing the cloud with a streamlined service that issues a monthly charge for its apps. Lots of people aren’t happy, and the other day our COO stepped in to detail his skepticism. 

It’s not all bad news. In fact, some of us love clouds.

There will never be an ideal time to take the Adobe apps to the cloud, and there is always going to be a very uncomfortable transitionary period. Now is as good a time as any, especially when Creative Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services. The immediate benefits to the developers at Adobe and their ability to push updates faster is the real sell.

A common complaint is that people don’t want to have a persistent online connection to use Photoshop. You need to be online when you install and license your software, and annual membership users will need to validate every 30 days. Users will still be able to use products for 99 days even if you’re offline. This has proven true, we havent heard any complaints about 'not being able to work without being connected'

When it comes to coordinating with a group or team, files created by the Creative Cloud apps can be shared like any other file. For example, you can share files through Email, FTP, and so on. You have 20 gigs of storage space that you can use to sync files between your devices and access them whenever you want.

Creative Cloud doesn’t wall you off from other users who aren’t members of Creative Cloud either. You can let non-member view the files in a browser. Viewers can view relevant metadata, turn layers on and off and even download files for editing, all without knowing what Adobe Creative Cloud is.

People have been concerned with retaining ownership over what they create through the Creative Cloud, but as the myths article explains, Adobe claims no ownership or copyright over any of your work. It’s all yours.

The biggest issue we've seen is what our biggest fear was- the latency and delay in opening, saving, and working from the cloud is crushing production. Internet pipes are still too costly for anything similar to the experience creatives and studio folks are used to with local high performance file servers. Once the dream of CFOs and financial planners, pushing these assets into the cloud is driving up labor costs due to the sheer inefficiency of trying to access enormous files across the WAN.

At this point, it's clear the CC suite of applications has been a great success for Adobe, and usefull to the end users. Production though, is still being kept local due to access speeds and times

Adobe is forcing everyone into the cloud. I'm torn, for several reasons.

It's all good for Adobe. It’s a nice, regular, ka-ching. Smoothed revenue generation. As soon as you license, the clock starts. You have to act quickly to get the lower upgrade price. It's still pretty ham-handed, and the replies are not too favorable to Adobe. They’ve been catching heat on Facebook and Twitter too.

The $20 per month for an upgrade from CS6 seems like a good deal. Like the first free sample from your corner purveyor of joy. But no information of what happens once they have you. How much are you interested in trusting them?

Secondly, the feature set across the board is pretty mature. I haven't been overwhelmed by the last two releases. Some "nice to have" stuff, but nothing that's a slap my forehead, how could I have lived without that. A lot of our customers don't upgrade quickly, but wait for things to settle down in a dot release. Many skip a version. That's no longer a money saver.

You could wind up paying for new features you're not ready for. Is there a graceful way to downgrade if things blow up? Or revert?

Lastly, it depends on how well the licensing is executed. Putting production at risk is never a good idea.

Just try explaining to your client you blew the deadline because Adobe had an issue with your license.

I'm quite curious as to others’ reactions. How do <you feel?

Change is brought about by individuals determined to make a difference in other peoples' lives. One of the engineers at the NAPC team witnessed people living in poverty and was moved to action.

NAPC Systems Engineer Scott Creamer describes the mountains of Appalachia as being "like a third world country", and notes that some of the Appalachian people live on pennies a day.

Scott is currently working with the Appalachia Service Project. The ASP operates similarly to Habitat for Humanity, but focuses on fixes existing houses rather than constructing new ones. This year Scott is foregoing traditional vacation locales like Cancun or Hawaii and traveling to West Virginia for a week. He will be working on one of 20 homes selected as the most needing repairs. These are life-saving repairs designed to provide basic standards of living to people in Appalachia: Fixing holes in roofs, repairing windows, and providing basic plumbing and sanitation. 

The group has about 100 volunteers; 20 adults and 80 students, including Scott and his oldest daughter. The group leaves a caravan of vans July 13th, sleep on air mattresses in a community center and work 12 hour days. Scott is excited for the chance to help people, and to enrich his and his daughter's lives with the experience.

"Seeing the plight of these poor people moved me to action...I'm very excited to have my daughter see the world differently. I'm told everyone who goes on these trips come home better than when they left."

Scott currently needs to raise $800 to cover the cost of the trip as well as building materials. Let's help Scott make life better for people in Appalachia together!

CreativeBanks 4 Tutorial - Creating a New Bank from FlatheadU on Vimeo.

 

NAPC's CreativeBanks is used for user management for the website of your digital asset management deployment. It integrates with Active Directory, controls access for users, rotates passwords, and even manages branding. Greg Sposato takes the professor's podium at Flathead U to walk us through how to make your first bank in Creative Banks 4. Customizing the theme, adding uploaders, security models, and user notifications are a few steps covered; be sure to watch the video for the full guide.

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Calling all New Yorkers! The Art and Practice of Managing Digital Media 2013 conference series begins in the Big Apple on May 2 and May 3. This program is built by and for the digital asset management community. Media, entertainment, advertising, healthcare, retail, government, and education are among the industries represented, and with 500 professionals already registered, it's a great opportunity to network and learn.

Some notable topics throughout this two day event:

-Telling your Brand Story: DAM's Evolution in 2013

-The Impact of New Meaning Based Computing on Understanding Rich Content – Why Does This Change How We Interact with Our Customers?

-Seven Secrets to Making the Most of Your Digital Assets 
 

Sponsors include NAPC partners North Plains and Adobe, and the speaker lineup includes DAM veterans such as David Lipsey of Optimity Advisors, Tracy Askam of HP Autonomy and Holly Boerner of American Express Publishing.

Good DAM contributes directly to the bottom line. Whether you're new and looking to develop a sound business case or want to share your vast DAM knowledge with colleagues, this is an event you won't want to miss. 

If you happen to drop by the event, be sure to look for us! 

Ask any experienced Dalim TWiST Administrator, "what's the key to TWiST workflow engineering success?" and they will likely respond with "Reg Ex" (short for Regular Expressions) and "SetParamFromRE" (set parameter from regular expression). I would add "TwistTable" and say, "master these three elements and you can do just about anything in TWiST".

Even so, I wish to bring to your attention a fourth element, an often unnoticed, unused feature of the SetParamFromRE tool: the "Manage Expressions" feature.

 

So, what have you been missing?

Using the Manage Expressions feature allows you to save, and over time, build-up a "library" of expressions that will undoubtedly save you and your organization hundreds of TWiST man-hours. On a more personal-level, having a library of expressions will save hours of [workflow] debugging heartache.

If I had a dollar for every time I had typed [getmem Document SizeMM_Width], ran a file, found the value to be empty and gone back into SetParamFromRE to fix it…(sharp Admins already see the issue, don't you?)...I could have bought a Dunkin' Donuts franchise.

The problem, if you have not spotted it, is a single keystroke: "m". The correct syntax is: [getMem Document SizeMM_Width], which returns the value of the variable $TwistTable(Document,SizeMM_Width), the width of the document in millimeters (mm).

You see, simple typo's are thieves of time. Taking action to prevent them is a wise investment that will promptly pay dividends. I encourage you to start building your own library of frequently used expressions, today.

Where to begin?

A great place to start is the "Document" category. This default TwistTable category contains the most commonly used/needed workflow variables like geometry, resolution, colorspace, and channels. Just drop a FileCheck and ShowMemories tool in your most active production workflow and you'll quickly see that there are 36+ variables containing 'decision-making' values.

Heck, I'm willing to bet you are already calling 2 or more Document category variables in the majority of your published workflows now.

Once you've become familiar with the functionality of the Manage Expressions feature, it's up to you to make using it a part of your workflow engineering process. I'm confident that you're already thinking of adding a few custom expressions, you know the ones, those situational statements that took a bit of trial and error to work out, as prime candidates for your new library.

Here's a non-TwistTable expression that every TWiST Admin needs. In the image below, I'm using the command expr, to convert millimeters (mm) to inches (in) on-the-fly. This expression, along with "Convert SizeMM_Height to Inches" were probably the first expressions I saved when Manage Expressions was added to the SetParamFromRE tool in 2007.

You may be wondering, "if I'm saving these expressions, where is the parameter file?"

Your valuable keystrokes are stored automatically by TWiST in a separate, parameter-like configuration file: Expressions.cnf. Location: /symlnks/var/6.0/setup/TWiST/Expressions.cnf

Take care friends, it's easy to overwrite this valuable file [arrrgh]…so I suggest keeping a copy outside of your TWiST environment as your investment grows.

One last nugget: if you manage a multi-host environment or work in a multi-site organization, you can distribute the Expressions.cnf file. In this way, you can share your contributions with a colleague and build-up the ultimate expressions library.

As always, consult your User Documentation as the primary resource for all things TWiST.

Filtering Based on Metadata Values from FlatheadU on Vimeo.

 

Like all great universities, Flathead U offers summer courses long after everyone has put their learning caps away until September. We know that it's just as fun to continue education. Our latest update to the Flathead U discusses filtering based on metadata values. If the value matches the users primary group on an asset or folder, then the user can see and search for it. Any asset that doesn't have a matching value is filtered from view. This video has a lot to talk about, so kick back and enjoy learning!

Friends,

As a member of NAPC's customer-focused, technology-taming Customer Support team I passionately advocate and support our customer's [your] investment in Dalim Software's industry-leading solutions TWiST, DiALOGUE and ES.

Today, I'd like to share with you and perhaps get you thinking about customer-facing 'branding' opportunities within ES.

I would imagine that many of you ES administrators have already achieved some 'branding' knowingly or un-knowingly when you used the Customization-Theme Configuration feature to add your organization's logo to the Login Screen?

 

How about applying your own colors to the ES interface? Sure you have. Since you [may] have created a custom look and feel for your ES users and customers, why not consider applying your custom theme to some new, branded e-Mail templates!

Your ES 3 installation came with (8) e-Mail templates and (11) default Notification templates. For this exercise and introduction, we'll choose the File Event condition as our E-Mail template source and create a new template by modifying it.

First things first.

You don't have to be a programmer or .html wiz to edit the templates, so please, keep reading. If you are a wiz, consider sharing what you've learned with a coworker and helping them along. Regardless, everything you will need can be found in tools you use everyday and the 'know-how', trust me, you already have it.

Ready?

Let's start by identifying some 'parts' you will be adding to the template to achieve some enhancement. Color. You'll need to determine the hexidecimal value of the color you will be applying [ex:#bf2e1a] and a raster version of your logo. Your art or logo file should be in [.png, .gif .jpg] format using the RGB colorspace. Indexed or Greyscale colorspaces will also work.

Login to ES as an Administrator. Select "Administration" mode and then navigate to and open the File Event E-Mail template. In the message body, Select All and Copy to capture the entire message body. Launch your text-editing application and Paste the message body into a blank document. It's a good idea to perform Save As... "File Event" so you have a backup of the E-Mail template [for safekeeping].

In the message body, Find and Replace "#252525" with your color. Find and Replace "header.png" with the exact name of your logo [ex: my_logo.png]. So far so good? Now perform a Select All, Copy.

Switching back to ES...the File Event E-Mail template...

Click in the message body area and Paste your edited message body into the template. Click OK to close the template editor window, and then click Save to update your File Event template.

That's it, the editing is done.

On your ES 3 server, navigate to the "images" directory:

/symlnks/common/tomcat6.0/webapps/Esprit/images

Copy your logo into the "images" directory. [EOF]

Returning to ES, perform an action in ES that will trigger a File Event Notification condition, and check your E-Mail. There is your newly 'branded' E-Mail message!

Okay, before you get too excited (and waste alot of time designing a masterpiece) allow me to make an important point: ES 3 E-Mail templates must be under 2048 bytes. Yes, that's bytes. To put that number into perspective, this blog message would have ended six sentences ago at the [EOF] marker!

So friends, take care to keep your customization simple. And for you 'clever', self-reliant users who have jumped to the conclusion of overcoming the 2048 hurdle, let me be perfectly clear: I do not advocate 'hacking', so don't even go there...

The upside is, you can get some attractive results and stay under the 2048 limit with a bit of trial and error. So keep at it. I am confident that you'll be successful in adding a little style to your messages, even with the size restriction.

Now, the good news is, we all can also look forward to a better branded future in ES. That's right, the engineers at Dalim Software are aware of [yours, mine and] the marketplace's desire to design and compose attractive, branded E-Mail messages and have taken action to relax the size restriction in the next "dot-oh" release of ES...ES 4.0.

Stay tuned, my friends.

 

Scott

As our region recovers, we hope you and your families are safe and sound. Our thoughts are with the communities that have been hit the hardest. We want you to know that NAPC will stand with you as the recovery effort continues.

Your systems have been designed for resiliency and should come through just fine upon restoration of utilities. We'd like to offer some common suggestions on re-powering equipment to minimize the effort required to get back in business.

Once you're back in the building and ready to start powering up the systems, work from the outside in-

Power up the Tape library, fiber and ethernet switches.
If bound to directory services, make sure the DCs and DNS servers are up and running
If your raid has multiple chassis' daisy chained off the head unit, power those on first, and wait for them to come up and settle down to a steady state (usually a few minutes)
Power on the Raid controller, and wait for a few minutes again, until it's settled down and is fully up.
Finally, power on the Production server.
Your Portal server can be turned on at any point through the process.

Please let us know if there's anything we can do to help you through this crisis and recovery.