Last week, our Xinet interface E6 hit a major milestone - 15 Million page views! Since its launch 4 years ago, we've watched with awe as our users adopted, extended, evangelized and brought the best out of the NAPC product suite (and our development team). Click here for a free trial copy!

Across 6 continents (dang you, Antarctica), 137 countries, and all 24 time zones, People are working faster, smarter, and more efficiently, every hour and everyday. I've had hundreds of conversations with users, gotten ideas and feedback, and worked the agile process to get the best product to market swiftly. We started from scratch - an entirely new development team, an entirely new attitude, and one huge blank slate.

We knew speed was paramount. Feedback to user actions critical. A beautiful, easy to use interface a must have. Mobile friendly or stay at home. Always ready, well in advance of the latest Xinet version was a non-negotiable checklist item. Improving navigation across all interfaces and reducing clicks was also a flat out requirement.

Thanks to agile methods and a fantastic team, it all got done! We released and started getting feedback, our development group became an even more manic whirl of ideas and creativity. We attacked metadata entry: creating a simple, intuitive, all-in-one single screen entry point. We added multiple ways to send Supermail - from the finder, and from our 'steal a link' feature. Our eyes are always focused on making production and sharing of assets easier.

Next we created beautiful new themes that are interactive and customizable; built out a screamingly fast and stable SSO with the IdP of your choice; did a complete rewrite of AFR to rigidly enforce DRM. The snowball was rolling, gathering size and momentum. Integrating site creation, login, and theming in one single screen and admin interface. Creating an API that will never change, allowing easy-peasy creation of Xinet plugins.

vFolders (dynamic collections of assets) eliminates the need to manually notify folks of new assets or new completed work. Alongside the automatic application of metadata, new things show up in a users Virtual folder. Xray (top level DAM search without logging in) is our latest feature. Find something, and grab that preview for your deck on the fly. Or login and get the hi-res version. Heck, open the asset directly in the finder from search results.

In sum, thanks for your love, care, and feedback. E6 allows Xinet users to see further and more accurately into their work and production solely because we stand on the shoulders of giants - the user community. Thank you!

To mark this milestone, we'd like to offer a free trial to the entire Xinet community. If you're looking for more from your Xinet interface, take E6 for a spin. Self installable, lives alongside any Xinet Portal install, it "just works". We'd love for you see what we've been up to, and maybe make your work lives a fair bit better.

Click here to D/L a copy of E6 and prepare to be blown away.

NAPC has dedicated  25+ years to providing local network assistance to creative advertising marketers and focus groups supporting local businesses of all sizes.

We provide our clients with Xinet production digital asset management solutions to boost productivity, and as a result increase your income. As a natural extension of our business model we started working with ProofHQ about 5-years ago, and Workfront adopted us as a co-sales partner after their 2015 acquisition.

Why Our Clients Choose Xinet

Soon after deploying Workfront two of our largest brand marketing clients announced plans to continue their use of  Xinet, based on astounding prior results. For production-centric workgroups, when Xinet and “Modern” DAM solutions are put to the test our clients always choose Xinet.

Due to our deep direct experience servicing the unique needs of creative production environments we were able to confidently tell these clients:

“We’ll of course help in any/every way possible but please avoid any hasty moves; there’s much more to this puzzle than you’re currently aware.”

Psst..If your still not convinced see our amazing clients

Xinet and Workfront The best of Both Worlds….

We Know Change Is Hard..

Creative Marketing Advertisers utterly freak out when they hear of some grand plan involving moving their very large (~ 10-100TB) work-in-process data volumes from a clunky old current in-house server room/closet to some sleek new cloud-based data repository.

Let’s Keep The Past In The Past

Clients that prefer to inappropriately web-host production-oriented digital assets find themselves struggling to keep up and start getting the “deer-in-the-headlights” look; others simply stare down at the floor and politely shake their heads “no;” the rest just outright rebel. With web-hosting production assets comes wasted time, energy, and high levels of disruption.

Before anyone can even begin a task, they find themselves killing time with extra coffee breaks and checking email all the while waiting for files to load, and either fear being fired for lagging productivity or feeling the need to eventually quit due to coffee interrupting sleep.

Their bosses also fear being fired when they ask Sr. management for more staff to meet the previously productivity level…

It’s Never To Late

Each client ultimately came back to us a couple months later with the same request: “Can you help us connect our Workfront projects to our Xinet assets?” We, of course, said “sure” and then went to LEAP to show off our seamless, bi-directional Workfront-Xinet interoperability.

For more information please visit: http://www.napc.com

Northplains’ Xinet version 19 introduced several new features that you may have missed and you might want to have another look at because some of them are pretty cool.

Apple put the handwriting on the wall a while ago that they were phasing out their own protocol (AFP) and Northplains has embraced that long coming change by providing a path to Apple’s implementation of the SMB protocol (SMB2/SMBX). Northplains has reworked their licensing packages by creating larger total logins of AFP users, (until end of life by Apple) and doubling that number for concurrent SMB logins.

So if your older version license has 32 AFP users, your version 19 license will have 50 AFP users and 100 SMB users. So they’re rounding the AFP numbers up and then doubling that new number for SMB users. That’s a pretty clean resolution.

The new version 19 license will work with Samba 4 and higher. Samba 4 out of the box is a much more secure, overall better version of the stack for connections to these servers.

Northplains has also addressed one of the most common client requests that I've gotten and it’s about upload reporting. With version 19 we can now create an aggregate upload email action. Gone are the days of getting an email for every-single-asset-uploaded. Now when a user uploads several assets it’s aggregated as one journaled report/email notification. Whether it’s several assets or a hundred, the report is based on the upload session, not each individual asset.

Business Rules Filters were introduced in version 18 but administrators had to create and edit a JSON file to control how they worked. I’m not a code writer so I found it effective but a bit tedious.

With Xinet19 Northplains put the task into the GUI. I’m finding it very intuitive and easy to use and it gives you some very powerful controls to hide assets and even folders without having to pay as much attention to siloing protected data.  

We’d be happy to show you all of this! If you're not already on 19, we can get you scheduled for an upgrade to Xinet19 ASAP. Please reach out and lets keep your productivity improvements always on the rise.  

For more information on Xinet and DAM.

It's been 3 years since I took the NAPC development team back under my wing. In that time we've rewritten our products, gotten amazing results for our customers as well as record sales, added new resellers, and had a huge surge in our market share as people have come to realize the NAPC difference.

Here's a quick review of what's been going on behind the scenes. I was going to make a fancy timeline, but we did so much so quickly I just couldn't wrap my mind around how to show it graphically.

 Yes! We hit the 3 Million mark for E6 usage!

How we started:

We implemented Agile, I became a signatory of the Manifesto for Agile Software. Agile is almost like CrossFit, you just can't help but tell folks you're into it. It's world changing, man...

We rebuilt product licensing from the ground up, planned out self installers and autoupdaters, automated version tracking of customer code, and about a bazillion other things you never see. Why should you care? We cut about 2.5 man weeks of labor a month when we were done. That's time we can perform QA, Document, and Code. The things that matter to YOU.

Once the foundation was poured and leveled:

We dove into the products- how they were used, and what could they become? We spoke to every customer, and discussed where we were heading. Some of these sessions got downright electric, as folks got what we were thinking, and the ideas were flying back and forth. A TON of where we are now came from that, so give yourselves a golf clap if you're one of the 200 or so folks I spoke with.

Here's a short list of major features that came from those calls-

Better info about version changes (thanks John)

Easier navigation without moving from the keyboard (thanks Evan and krewe)

More feedback (damn near everyone, but especially Charlie)

Documentation (emberassingly widespread, but the tip-o-the-hat goes to Carol)

Self updaters (thanks RP. I mean our resellers)

Drag and drop file management (Ginnie)

23 different SM improvements (Ginnie  ;)  )

A 'real' metadata interface (Emily and Dave)

Awesome uploader interface (Charlie and Emily)

Make AFR work (Todd, Kevin)

The list goes on and on. I was looking over my contemporaneous notes, and the thing that stands out is your desire to be part of the process, and help us to help you.

We dove into wireframing, blueskying, and figuring futures out as we were also doing final bug fixes for our existing suite. The developers mandate was to squash bugs, not put some scotch tape over 'em. After numerous insurrections were put down, this really started paying off. Again, the time we saved here allowed us to do what YOU care about, delivering amazing new tech that makes your worklife easier, better, and simpler.

The good stuff- releasing code:

Since we live and breath Agile, we started releasing code. First out the gate was the basics, with a couple ooh-ahh factors. Then we started adding in functionality as the market demanded. Turns out we're not mind readers, and things that seemed important to me no one else cared about. Alternatively, things that felt 'buried away' were actually key to production. Agile lets us react immediately as demand changes and evolves. Hey, did I tell you we do agile?

Oh, and of course we started a formal Beta program, so users could get in early.  I cannot thank the early adopters and Beta testers enough. Power users helping deliver powerful, rock solid features.

On a whimsical note, the developers made a video, showing the lighter side of the last 3 years :) We all love this stuff!

NOTE: mildly NSFW

A heartfelt thanks to all, and a bonus

I'd like to personally thank everyone involved, from the customers, to the developers, to the NAPC employees who  made this possible. We have a great team, one I'm incredbly proud of. Since you made it allll the way to the bottom, click this link if you want to beta our rewrite of CreativeBanks- CB5. We now give you a single interface to create and brand sites - CB5 is built into E6, so there's only one place to go. Fewer buttons, far less bouncing between screens, this cuts about 50% of deployment time from what's needed to rollout a landing page/E6 site.

We've been running a  Version 19 beta internally for a few weeks, and it's great stuff. Alongside major news about SMB support and SAML there are some really, really cool improvements in the display layer.

E6 of course will be fully compliant and able to take advantage of the new nuanced abilities provided by the upgrade right out of the gate. We'll also have a information-rich list view in E6 at the same time, for users that need to see lots of files on each page, with metadata and a preview. It's DAM good, if you have that need.

Join us and NP on the 1st, and see what all the fuss is about!

-

See you on December 1st

THIS is the Xinet User Interface you've been asking for!

Create visually stunning, mobile friendly, and state of the art interfaces for each of your customers and end-users with E6 from NAPC. We've spent years developing for and extending the underlying toolset to meet the needs of our hundreds of customers in order to bring you a fully customizable UI with tools that you could only dream of.

We've built this interface from the ground-up based upon our years of experience with Digital Cybrarians, Studio Managers, Retouchers, Video Production departments, Brand Managers, and Printers. We've done our best to add all of the tools and UI enhancements that our customers and their customers have asked for. And we're adding features everyday. Here are a few screenshots showing just a touch of what you can get from Xinet when you use E6 from NAPC:

A Zoomable, pinchable, dragable viewer!

Mouse-over large previews!

A swipe-able, side-scroller Gallery View with popup metadata!

A Drag-N-Drop Lightbox for basket integration, side-by-side compare tool, emailing and file management!

Call NAPC today to schedule a full demo of our product suite. This is something you should really get excited about. We are!

    Welcome back from the holidays! To start your year off right, here's a list of some really cool improvements we've made over the last 2 months or so in E6, our Xinet interface. We're focusing on usability, performance, and generally easing the adoption of using a DAM system, both for casual and power users.

In no particular order, here's what we've been up to-

We released a new theme- 'Air'. It allows a single background image across all pages, custom volume and folder icons, and lots of other neat features. Check it out:

New 'uploader' plugin- a really nice interface for editing metadata on lots of files. It does drag and drop, and drag and select to choose the files you want some metadata applied to, etc... We'll port the code to Batch Keyword Apply in the next couple weeks, so your cybrarians will have a *much* easier time of setting and correcting metadata on groups of files. And of course, we kept the best bits from the original version- individual progress bars, feedback to the users.

'Steal a Link' in SuperMail- both when browsing in E6 and from the Mac desktop. You can now get a SM link copied to your clipboard to add into a personal email. We had lots of folks who didn't want to send a SM to themselves, then copy the link from there into their email client.

New versions comparison function- you can compare 2 files side by side and zoom in on them. Choose different versions of the same file, (even if the filetpes are different!) and compare them.

You can now export and Import E6 sites- Host to host, or on the same host. We had someone build a site on a Dev server in Cali, export it, and import it into the Prod server in Chicago. Cool stuff!

Gallery view- who doesn't love themselves a Gallery? We then added drag&drop to it, because well, drag&drop.

E6 AFR with SuperMail- with fine grained permission rights. It's awesome - reusing the SuperMail interface, it's 100% reliable (a marked improvement over the OOB experience). Check out Sully's video here: bit.ly/E6_AFR

True SSO- we built a SAML plugin for E6 that will work with any idP out there that 'speaks' SAML 2. It just works, as I like to say. 

Better Navigation- We're always looking for how to bump productivity and ease of use. We added in the ability to navigate up through higher levels using the breadcrumbs along the top. Little triangles of joy I call them. The developers try and tell me stuff like "it's built with AJAX, so no page load hit", but I just nod my head and enjoy the experience.

Internationalization- It's a global world, and people want a familiar touch. We fully support any and all date formats automatically, based on your browser's settings. If you're in the US, you see month/day/year. If you're in Europe, day/month/year. Text is easily customised too, everything can be translated usng a simple text file.

InPress plugins compatibilty- We wrote E6 with an eye towards openness and ease of integration. All InPress plugins are fully compatible with E6, as are all WebNative Basket plugins. 

Documentation- We're documenting everything on our online docs, usually the same day a new feature get's released. Click the help button on any page, and you go right to the correct help page for that subject.

    So, start the new year off right, and push that 'update' button in Elegant6.  Or,  jump the E6 install  line by dropping us a line - helpdesk@napc.com . Make the subject "E6 install" or "I need me some E6" (fastest response for that one), and the installation elves will get cracking.

              Make your users happy. Make your work life better. E6.