Hear about the North Plains nGage 2015 conference and what is coming in Xinet V18 from our intreped travelers, Mike and Larry who ventured out to this years conference in sunny Orlando, Florida. Not only was the weather great, but so was the content, speakers, presentations and hearty discussions with clients, partners and vendors. Read on, you will feel like you were there.

Mike Gershowitz, Vice President 

My Orlando trip for North Plains' nGage Conference was delightful! Just the 85 degree warmth would've been sufficient, but this conference also had a very rich agenda. 

During Partner Day, North Plains' new executive team impressed me as enlightened professionals who listened while presenting their product development roadmap. They also asked for future contributing ideas, announced some smart, like-minded speakers for an enriched eGage experience and ended an excellent day with a relaxing cocktail party with many global North Plains channel partners. All were eager to collaborate in an effort to best service multi-site Xinet clients, including SYD Conseil - Cogito Digital Management, Bay Digital, and Visual Products Japan.

North Plains most intriguing development roadmap topic to us at NAPC by far was the upcoming Xinet Version 18 release, which further resolves many of the most important issues affecting current users, as well as potential new users. What's still a future is the ability for a 'master' Xinet file system and database to effectively synchronize with local, disparate deployment instances.

Read the rest of Mike's NGage 2015 experience here

Larry Chase, Vice President

Well folks, just back from the North Plains nGage Conference in Orlando and it was a great one. We experienced great weather and outstanding company with fellow Integrators and clients from around the world. There was an outstanding Keynote delivered by Robert Rose, a Content Marketing Strategist, Author and Speaker. His presentation on content marketing was quite impressive, and I have since looked up a video of a similar presentation to share.

One of the main highlights on nGage was the announcement of some very cool updates regarding Xinet, specifically the forthcoing release of Xinet 18. This had all in attendence very eager to learn more about this roll out.

We were all thrown into a whirlwind of activity with North Plain's (NP)  notice this year of the End of Life of SGL's FlashNet for Xinet. Here's the State of the Nation with regard to Archives:

In the immediate near term there's a great new archiving solution using modern software. The builder of the integration has a long history of writing to exactly this space, and his current tools allow restores from FlashNet as well. For the medium term, we can help you setup a system that will give you easy access to archives using the familiar tools, while you restore as much legacy archives as you feel needed. Long term- you restore files using the base FlashNet software, for as long as you can find hardware that will support the tape technology in use at time of archive.

SGL's FlashNet is going away, and in it's place we'll be relying on Archiware's P5 Archive. This backup software is robust, modern, with a hugely enhanced toolset, and a long history or being present in this exact space of Graphic Arts. We're excited by the options and capabilities it presents, from hyper-intelligent backups to much better hardware support, to a modern web-based interface. Archive to Disk? check. Perpetual intelligent incremental backups? check. Ability to offload backup off primary disk to either other disk or tape? check. It's great stuff, and we can't wait to help you getting  it in place and using it.

FlashWeb and it's recent replacement WebNative Archive are going away, being replaced by InPress' OnFile. InPress has been building solutions for Xinet for forever, and has a rich history and understanding of how to write robust code for the ecosystem. They have hundreds and hundreds of instances of InPressive and Accelerator out there, and a great tool set that enhances the Xinet experience. NAPC has been doing business with them for years, and are really excited and pleased by North Plains choosing of InPress as the heir to building out the interface between Xinet and Archive. Jorgen and Co. are well on the way to an initial release that will fulfill the common need- an easy way to find archives, submit them for restore, monitor progress, or ask an admin to restore files.

The other large concern we've been facing is how to ensure continued access to legacy archives. SGL's licensing machine is going dark next summer, so if there's a HW failure that requires a new license, one won't be available after that, which is a crippling prospect. We've worked out with NP a strategy for setting up a legacy restore server: a separate, static Xinet setup, one that has a small license but full access to archives through the web interface, to allow for easy user restores while a larger restore operation takes place. We're envisioning this as a small older server (or VM) with the older tape library attached.

In the longer term, for 'deep' archives that weren't worth the effort of restoring in bulk, you'll be able to attach a standalone drive to an even smaller box, and restore the very occasional file through the much beloved X interface. There's never been a license needed for FlashNet to restore through a single tape drive, licenses are only needed to drive a robot or to use the higher level functionality.

We're all over this- we understand the value and need for robust archiving and access to the lifework of your company. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, etc..., etc....

rob

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!

As the Holiday weekend starts up for us all, lets close the week out and chat a bit about all the cool things that are coming to the masses soon.  Xinet is going to be releasing version 16 of it’s suite of tools including a new, faster version of Portal, a unified web interface for all administration, easier tools and setup for PDF Image replacement, greatly enhanced video capabilities, basic web based markup and annotation tools and a whole bunch of other “under the hood” improvements.  Currently, NAPC is testing beta 2 of version 16 and we’re all pretty impressed with it so far.  One of the biggest features I’m excited about is the enhanced video features.  Let me esplain (as Ricky would say).

Xinet, in the new soon to be released version of video in Suite 16, has greatly enhanced how users in Portal interact with video assets.  In the current release of Video 2.0 in Xinet, it is possible to stream many video formats, create keyframes at a preset interval, and really, thats about it.  With the new version, you’ll be able to do much, much more.  First and foremost, the ability to create what I would call mini-reels, is now available as a basket plugin in Portal.  This is how it works:

1)    User logs in to a Portal site and identifies the files they want to work with.  Those files could be video files of various formats, InDesign files, static picture files, just about anything you can have in Xinet.
2)    The user would then add those files to a shopping basket.
3)    Once in the basket, the user would click the basket plugin named “Video Generation”
4)    This brings up a new Web 2.0 type of interface to arrange the assets into whatever order makes sense to the end user.  Asset arrangement is made simple by using drag and drop in a web browser-me likey!
5)    Once in the correct order, the user can set the ‘in and out’ times of the files based on keyframes generated by Xinet or by hours:minutes:seconds.
6)    The user can also set basic fade outs from clip to clip as well.  Gives it a nice touch!
7)    Once the files are arranged in the correct order and the in/out times are set, a new video file can be generated from those assets in either a Quicktime, Windows Media, or Flash format.
8)    The server then generates the appropriate file on the Xinet file system and once done, it gives the end user the ability to download the file to their desktop.

Here's a peek of what it'll look like:

This is huge everyone.  Think of it this way, if you have 30 second spots for a client for all of 2008, and they want to create a quick reel of all the ones that won awards (that you made of course!), they can quickly log in to Xinet via Portal, collect the assets, set the times and format and let Xinet make the file for them.  To be clear, this is not intended for broadcast but more for the web or computer screen aka small screen.  I think this is a huge leap forward for Xinet and since I used to work in the broadcast world, it’s pretty exciting for me as you might be able to tell!

On top of that, screen detection for keyframing is also part of the new release.  The current version can be set to sample a keyframe at a set interval say every 5 seconds or so regardless of scene change or not.  That can potentially add a bunch of useless keyframes into your database.  With the new scene detection functionality, you can set the admin preferences so it is “smart” and only creates keyframes when a scene actually changes with tolerance controls.  So, instead of keyframing a movie that is 1 minute long and getting 12 keyframes (when sampled every 5 seconds), you may only get 7 or 8 frames stored in the database. This can be very helpful!

Overall, we have a lot to look forward to with the upcoming release of version 16 of Xinet’s Suite of tools.

Enjoy the weekend all and as always, if you have any questions on any of this information, please give us a ring and we’ll be happy to help!  Want to see this new functionality for yourself???  Give your Account Manager a call and we’ll be happy to show you all the new stuff.

Happy 4th of July!

Brian Dolan