Friday, June 01, 2007

Canto Releases Cumulus 7.5 Update

Canto Software announced today the immediate availability of Cumulus 7.5, offering enhanced support for Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007 and Adobe InDesign CS3, in addition to a wealth of new features and benefits.

"Cumulus 7.5 further realizes the potential of many of the technologies introduced in Cumulus 7," explains Canto co-founder and chief technologist Thomas Schleu. "We've also been able to fulfill a number of user requests and enhance reliability and performance."

User requests addressed in the upgrade include the ability to hide master category tabs from certain users or groups to provide an easier-to-understand workspace, and the ability for Cumulus 7.5 to perform user-defined "trigger" actions when a metadata field is changed to a certain value. For example, Cumulus 7.5 can automatically email a manager when a workflow status field is set to "Delayed."

The Cumulus 7.5 Mac OS X and Windows software clients now include a collection basket that enables users to easily gather assets via drag & drop for batch access and processing, or just convenient "light table" viewing and organization.

New formula-based metadata fields can automatically determine an image's orientation (portrait or landscape), create space-efficient output displays for views and reports, perform numeric calculations and if-then decisions, and much more. The built-in formula editor features an in-line help reference to make formula creation easy even for non-programmers.

In addition to new enhanced support for Windows Vista, Office 2007 and InDesign CS3, enhanced metadata support has also been added for Apple's iWork Suite (Keynote and Pages). In all, over 40 new file formats have been added to the list of formats for which Cumulus provides enhanced metadata support, or improved for better support. Support for RAW digital camera formats has been increased for Cumulus 7.5 by a massive 50 camera models, bringing the total number of RAW formats successfully tested to 185.

Reliability is enhanced by the addition of catalog journaling, which virtually ensures no catalog damage comes from power outages or system failures. Journaling is a standard option on all Cumulus 7.5 Servers, regardless of platform, and can be enabled (even on pre-7.5 catalogs) using a single check box.

The Canto Web Clients have been updated to include the Calendar and other side panels previously available only in the Native Clients. In addition, category assignments can now be made over the Web using drag & drop, and "mass" metadata edits are now possible, and performance has been greatly enhanced for high-traffic sites serving hundreds of simultaneous users.

Pricing & Availability
Cumulus 7.5 upgrade is available free of charge to Cumulus Workgroup and Cumulus Enterprise customers on UAP or Software Maintenance (SM) subscriptions. Customers can download the upgrade from the Canto website or try a free trial version.

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