Digital asset management software beta test

[PhillipT]

I asked Jeff before posting this, since I wanted to avoid posting direct marketing information to the forum. My company is currently developing a low cost digital asset management solution designed for small interactive media studios called infoBOX , and we would like feedback on adapting it to meet the needs of those involved in architectural visualisation.

 

InfoBox’s feature set includes:

 

Basic project management (define project process in terms of phases and activities, monitor project progress...),

 

Digital asset management (version control, search, archive, metadata,annotation, project association, usage monitoring...)

 

Team co-ordination (project logs, time sheets, activity based costing, messaging...)

 

Inbuilt web portal software for supporting company, project and client specific

web sites (ie work in progress etc)

 

Content authoring tool plugins – we are currently developing and testing software add ons to authoring tools such as RadishWorks's forthcoming Cosmos Creator (3D web and interactive 3D authoring package) and Photoshop to enable content to be booked in and out of the project repository from within standard applications and workflow environments.

 

Infobox evolved from our in house tools and a number of software frameworks I have adapted for clients in order to meet our own and their project and process management needs on interactive visualisation projects. I originally started work on the project because we couldn't afford the likes of NxN Alienbrain (the studio version of which, is extremely well suited to architectural visualisation projects that involve interactive visualisation and animation production) but required a similar feature set for a small studio environment at a much lower price point.

 

InfoBOX’s initial release will be towards the end of the first quarter 2004 and is targeted at small game design and multimedia studios. We are aiming at the $750 to $1000 price point for a studio licence which comprises the server suite and as many client connections as you need, along with web based support and one year of free software upgrades.

 

I am interested in adapting InfoBOX to the needs of those working in architectural and construction visualisation and would appreciate feedback on the sort of features and requirements that you might have in terms of:

 

Supported content authoring tools (e.g. 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, Maya etc)

Project Management Features

Archiving Standards

Systems Integration requirements (e.g. MS Exchange, Palm, MS Project)

Operating Systems (Linux, Windows, OS-X)

 

Feedback can be posted directly to us at:

 

InfoBOX-ArchFT@handprint.ch

 

Or here in this forum and I’ll try and answer any questions you may have.

 

Finally we will be running a closed beta test program in the second quarter of 2004 and if you or your company would be interested in participating we would like you aboard. The purpose of the Beta test is to refine the program, get users feedback on its feature set and user interface and as always ensure that we trap any bugs and beasties that may lurk, before we ship.

 

If you would be interested in participating in the BETA – please email us at

 

InfoBOX-Arch-BETAtest@handprint.ch

 

 

thanks.

 

Phillip

 

Phillip Trotter

Handprint Technologies.

www.handprint.ch

 

[ September 29, 2003, 09:41 PM: Message edited by: PhillipT ]

[garethace]

What kind of desktop, or interface does it have. Does it allow me to find every document related to a project all from the one desktop?

[PhillipT]

Hi Gareth,

 

in the current version there is a web based interface and a dedicated client. Current focus is on completing the web based interface first and then the dedicated client. Look and feel is common to both systems, though the user interface is currently going through review as a result of feedback from our current alpha testers. Once we have the new interface design fully implemented I'll post some screen shots of the system in use on a real project.

 

There are a number of ways at looking at any one project, in terms of overall project, project milestones, project phases, activities, users and project documentation. In the documentation view you can select all documents associated with a given project, a specific project phase, project activity or user. You can also monitor when documents have been booked-in or out against project milestones. [ added - you can also monitor what files are available on a day,week or month basis]

 

At present we're working on a media asset manager plugin which will provides thumbnail and image zoom support for viewing 2D and 3D graphic animation and video files along with any stored meta data, in situ within the data repository.

 

Media files stored in the data repository can be retreved on both a project basis and via associated metadata in terms of collections. For instance if you want to store all your textures relating to brickwork - they can be retrieved by either the project they were used on or via keyword or by visually browsing the brick texture collection.

 

We also intend to provide support to check files in and out of the repository from various software packages.

 

What would your prefered interface style be?

 

Phillip

 

[ September 30, 2003, 08:25 AM: Message edited by: PhillipT ]

[garethace]

Something like Scopeware Vision's interface. Arnie Williams has written some quite interesting opinions of software for architects too. Just go back through the monthly editions to find his talks on the subject.

 

Jim Gray has was interviewed by a guy called Patterson (the inventor of RAID) here. My own instincts are to store projects according to date as oposed to by project. This is basically my own thoughts on the matter.

 

Brian O' Hanlon.

[PhillipT]

Gareth,

 

thanks for the feedback. Scopeware is a useful product and had an interesting interface. Arnie Williams collumns are often keepers - interesting view point. I have experience of the proudct model approach in construction engineering and the problems of getting senior people involved from research I did in the UK construction industry some years back. Will look back through the other columns, since its been a while sine i read the Cadenceweb ona regular basis. thanks for the pointer.

 

On the date order - I agree with your reasoning - being able to search for and order all files by date is very useful. I'll make sure we include it.

 

One point that might be of interest is that there is a scripting interface to InfoBox - so it should be quite easy to create interfaces to the likes of Scopeware as well - something that I will have to look into.

 

thanks for the feedback, any more thoughts would be welcome.

 

Phillip

[garethace]

I am most familiar with the Bently products like Triforma, and I like the idea of using Project wise software in some more simplified format to have for architectural practices. I know that Frank Gehry, the LA architect, uses actual physical study models - thousands of them - per project. And what he does is, photographs them each day, to preserve some kind of record to the design process.

 

While I know that Architectural practices tend to group all their projects around years/client mostly. I believe this is fundamentally useless from a designers point of view. I mean, I know almost to a certain time, of a certain month, (e.g. October 1995) exactly what model, drawing and project I was then working upon. Perhaps I have just a better memory than some, but generally speaking Architectural projects outlive technology by a long mile.

 

Architectural design is about a client coming to you in 1997 with an idea, when you have Apple Mac I word processors and drawing boards. And you actually bringing that design to a developed design stage in 2003, using Hyperthreading Pentium 4 boxes! You see my point?

 

Hence, why dating, rather than client/job takes absolute importance in my view. It is useful to be able to look back over the last decade and notice every twist and turn in the process, you had with a particular client. You tend to forget the details, and those are the details you will find yourself screwed on later. (Legal bills, disagreements, conflicts of interest etc.)

 

In other words a mess. The Architect/client relationship is unlike that of buying a new kettle. You go in and buy the kettle, and get a receipt with an amount and date on it, with the name of the premises. Architect/client relationships require more than just a receipt - they get very f***** messy, and the more a client tends to build (say a developer client) the more skilled they become at making you work, and spin your wheels, and cannot charge anything, and you end up frustrated and cannot properly charge the client for your hard work and long hours.

 

The prices of every A3 colours print and A1 B+W print out, and the reason for printing it, for the client, should be in this database of project defined by dates. Then the Principle architect has something real, something solid and something worthwhile, apart from the standard CAD drawings he/she might do.

 

That old saying, "Its all fun and games until someone looses an eye" does apply. See the post by James here. I am fed up to the front teeth of listening to the endless amount of crap and hard-luck stories architects have to tell. The reason James only got paid £600 by the government to design a Master Plan, was James didn't have his organisation, and recording properly set out. I am sure if the government discovered you didn't pay taxes in 1996, they 'wouldn't let you off'.

 

I think that Frank Gehry's comments here are fair enough. I mean, I have the height of respect for Thom Mayne but paper Architects do need to be more business-like. And these are the kinds of people your software should be targeting.

[garethace]

Now having established that Architects partake in some very public, and high profile works and commissions, it is now also necessary to include the following:

 

Get used to the terms like 'Incubation project' in particular. What that actually means, is that the Principal Architect normally buys in very cheap labour in the form of 'year-out' students from colleges at home and abroad, to put on the larger, more design-oriented urban master plans and concepting stages of large jobs.

 

How to quantify and record work on these projects is difficult to do. But the main point you must grasp here, is the amount of design brains, which can actually come and go, through the many years duration of these projects. Sometimes the actual clients for these jobs, as developers sell off land etc, or governments change.

 

Unlike things such as accounting practices, or law practices where people stay min. 3 years and often much, much longer - in the architecture firms, designers move around rather like urban nomads. Look at the Curriculum Vitaes of most Architects to observe this phenomena for yourself.

 

It could on the one hand, be construed to someone, as like the leaking of value knowledge capital of the organisation. And I feel certain myself, based upon reading of literature like Susan Conways, Unlocking Knowledge Assets published by the MicroSoft Press, that your software might help small team-base organisations like Architects to capture much more of their knowledge assets.

 

Brian O' Hanlon.

 

P.S. This is the kind of Software Product I believe, that every Architect out there must know, should know, and will need to know in the INformation age. My writing here, is probably as good a reference as you will find. But also threads like this one here delve deep into the Client/Architect relationship. Architects such as Louis Kahn, are the ultimate in good architects building great buildings for rather simple people.

 

Brian O' Hanlon.

[PhillipT]

Gareth/ brian

(BTW - which would be the correct one to use?)

 

Much good information and insight - thanks.

 

Thats partly the purpose of the beta test is to find out what features fly and what don't in differing architectural practises. I worked with a large constructor some years back and remember well the arguments about IT, workflow and communication and the differences between the project managers, architects, construction managers and quantity surveyors about working practises, record keeping, information flow and contractual boundaries.

 

And while there are some parallels between the the interactive media teams we work with now and architectural studios (outsourcing, high turn over of team members, student projects, client changes, tools sets, information management needs, need for knowledge management etc) there are many differences between the two worlds. Thats partly the reason for asking for people to give us feedback and participate in the beta so we can try and address at least some of those issues as we develop InfoBOX. Its also why we are targeting different market sectors with different development schedules - each has its own special requirements and considerations. I really appreciate the comments and links.

 

Many thanks

 

Phillip

[garethace]

Brian/Gareth, don't care. gareth is what I used on most tech boards. But when its about Architecture, I normally go by Brian. It helps separate e-mail boxes etc. (More data-management)

 

Yeah, I would advise you to look at the Mad Hatter article at Aces too. And this idea of a software house, an environment to work in to develop solutions for clients is one I did like.

 

But I am talking to people at the moment who work in manufacturing, and how MS Project is part of how they work. Although, the Project management aspects of trades, sub-contractore, contingency sums and groundwork, is the normal arena for the Project manager. I find that Architects are normally very dumb, when it comes to costing for time and expertise in the design phases of a project.

 

The general feed-back seems to be, that weak Architects or managers above you in the chain of command are very dangerous, requiring most employees to keep personal daily diaries. And the culture of passing off blame, in widespread in Architectural practices. In fact this discussion here at CGA, was what first sparked off my Archiseek one about work practices.

 

The general conclusion from the Archiseek discussion was one about Architects have cluster based groups rather than Principal lead models of working. And that globalisation in general is affecting most jobs nowadays. The passing around of information can be woefully inefficient.

 

My own experience of charging clients for IT administration, training and hardware maintainence or installation was very bad. You never finished up with the original deal you started out with. And clients generally used every trick under the sun, to crawl out from under obligations to pay up. I mean, when I wrote things on paper and gave them to the client to mind, without photocopying them - they always just disappeared, leaving me and my memory to work it out later. The client had me by the balls then. It was pointless e-mailing clients, as they never received any e-mails concerning costing and time spent on jobs. Mysteriously. But at least with Scopeware or something, you can track changes to the original agreed works and installation costing structure. And get a fairer price for work you are doing.

 

I suppose that D Wright's discussion on making a proposal here does a good job on it. The government here in Ireland, have done a good job on LUAS by some accounts, coming in on budget at around 750 million. But some more people argue, that the 1996 estimate of 250million was made on the back of an envelope! So there you go, even a that level!

 

JD Edwards E-Gov software is being used in the Health Boards and Finance department in Ireland now, so that GOvernment departments don't simply use invoice based accounting practices, which can lead to huge overspends by departments each year now. Oh, the celtic tiger isn't roaring any more.

 

Brian O' Hanlon.

 

[ September 30, 2003, 01:45 PM: Message edited by: garethace ]

[Jeff Mottle]

Phllip,

 

We have a home grown system here at Smoothe that is very much like the one you are developing now. The one thing that it does not account for is mulitple international offices. Unless you are a very large corporation and have dedicated T1 betweeen your offices you are forced to transfer data with standard shared internet lines, which can be slow for large 100 MB/GB assets. We all have access to the web interface which reads assest from a central server but we are planning to do mirrored local servers as well that mirror themselves at night so that offices are not more than 12-24 hours out of sync. This out-of-sync only happens with physical assets like textures, models etc, but the data is still there. My suggestion would be to have a module that would allow you to connect to muliple mirrored servers, have some sort of syncing functionality or the ability to see and control syncing and what is not yet synced.

 

For example, I could see that an asset exists that was UL by the London office but I need it before the sync that will happen tonight. I could then tell the server to force that asset to miroror itself rigth away. If London is sleeping I will not be able to get it until the following morning or ater the sync happens.

 

Anyway...just a thought.

[PhillipT]

Jeff,

 

and there was i hoping we might get Smoothe to beta test...

 

[though in case your interested we will be opensourcing a chunk of this - so depending on your home grown solution - there might be tools and utilities you can use)

 

The suggestion for sync module is a very good one - and i can see the requirement. We already have the core functionality to do this in the server, we just don't use it in this way (we already use the file manifest for version control and syncing between clients and server).

 

Extending this is feasible and it should be possible to sync either individual files, all files in a project activity, phase, collection or project on demand or on a prescheduled basis between any designated mirror repositiories.

 

I'll add this to our requirements list, thanks.

 

Phillip

[Jeff Mottle]

I think we may still be interested. I know there was some discussion of looking at NXN, so we migth be in the market for a new system. The one thing our system does not do it version control or locking of files. I'm going to forward this to a few people in London to see if they might get involved. If they do decided to move to a new system, we migth as well get involved in the features we will need.

[PhillipT]

Jeff,

 

we would certainly welcome Smoothe's input

 

though please note, we won't start work on the arch version for a wee while yet since we are committed to shipping the i-media developer edition in the first quarter next year.

 

At this point I'm gathering additional requirements while I'm working on the server api and integration layer as a result of feedback from early alpha testing. Partly I want to to make sure we don't exclude something that we want to do later by a poorly informed decision now (mirroring servers is a good example - we have the core functionality but didn't consider this scenario) and to start future activity planning the next stages of development.

 

{Though, if you guys decide to go the NxN route - drop me a line and i'll put you in touch with the person we spoke with when were evaluating our options before deciding to run with InfoBOX, if it would help.}

 

phillip

[PhillipT]

Just a short update. Thanks to everyone who contacted us for further information or to express interest in the beta test. Overall, the feedback we got and interest in infoBOX, in terms of people asking for more information on the beta (and interactive media versions), general feature requests and suggestions was more than we could have hoped for.The response was fabulous.

 

Many thanks also to those who wrote with details of their software environments and required workload performance (typical size of assets and files needed to be managed, location needs etc), the information you gave us really helps in establishisng which 3D production software will be supported and where we need to optimize in the innitial version.

 

Thanks again,

 

Phillip