asset tracking

[mskin]

anyone use OpenAsset by Axiom? looks like a cool product, but what can it do for me and my coworkers that we couldn't do in bridge or picassa? any ideas of the costs?

thanks

[BrianKitts]

they came in and give us a live demo. It's great for large firms with many people on the road needing access to marketing materials. Has some great features for standardizing powerpoing templates, as well as built in scripting to publish images in multiple formats (hires, web, powerpoint) all from one source file.

 

All that being said it needs it's own server to run on, and it's a bit pricey..... so unless you're rolling in the projects and on a mad marketing run for a large corporation, then no it's probably not the right solution for a typical viz operation if that's you.

[mskin]

thanks Brian. we're a medium size architectural firm. we have 10s of thousands of photos scattered throughout the servers - over 30 years of projects. its difficult to manage for most people. file structures that may make sense to marketing don't necessarily make sense for architecture and modeling.

 

i'd like to know what the most effective strategy for organization might be. i wonder if its more of a meta tagging problem, in terms of tagging photos with key words... project, project number, building type, location, etc.... is there something that people are using to do this? not everyone in our office can have bridge so thats out of the question, but what about picassa or another low cost option? it seems like anything we do is going to require a large amount of up front work - keywording images. i don't know, but other firms must have dealt with this issue.... thanks again.

[BrianKitts]

Tagging was one of the biggest concerns that we had... you only want to do it once, and you're correct it takes a lot of time upfront to set it all up. The best option is actually to use windows explorer for tagging everything. That way if you're running on windows 7 or XP with the windows search add-on anyone can search for images by their tags. Also if you host your images on a sharepoint image gallery the tags will transfer over (as long as your running the latest version of the sharepoint server) the previous did not support tags.

 

For your more advanced marketing people who do use bridge, it has the ability to flip it's search engine over to use the windows search index which will read your tags as well. But that's pretty much where my knowledge stopped. We were in the process of investigating new management systems when our company was acquired by a large company that already had their own CRM in place.