News from our CEO
Scott Seebass
 Recently I found myself in southern California, and unexpectedly wet. Southern California had been having an uncharacteristically wet fall, and it was raining quite heavily. I had left the sunny skies of northern California without a jacket or umbrella, and was paying the price for not checking the weather before my trip. I needed an umbrella or a jacket, so I headed into a nearby shop.
In the first store I went into, I noticed that the products being promoted in the store were still very much "fall" items, but some of the flat screen displays showed winter fashions unrelated to store contents. I wandered a bit, didn't see what I wanted, and moved on. At the next store I found a printed POP display in the front window offering umbrellas, $10-$99, and directing me to the menswear department. I wandered through the store to menswear, and parted with some money for an umbrella—but not before considering several nice jackets on the way.
The point of this story is that one of these stores had a much more effective marketing promotion, and it proved successful.
Both of these retailers are Xinet customers, as are many of their suppliers—agencies, circular printers, POP producers, and so on. They both attempt to tie register results back to marketing, purchasing, stocking, and every other part of the retail experience. In this case, one of them executed more effectively and got the sale. I don't know what went wrong at the first store, but there are many possibilities. Maybe their marketing model didn't have a small enough focus to see the bad weather in southern California. Maybe they didn't have an umbrella supply lined up, or their new digital POP system wasn't ready to make day-by-day changes. There are a number of places that the process could have failed, and any one of them would have prevented the whole process from working optimally.
Many of Xinet's customers are involved somewhere in the retail process and work on tight deadlines with short turnarounds, often without any visibility about why their deadlines are tight or what goes wrong in the rest of the system when they can't deliver. They simply know what job they need to do, when they need to complete it, and set their business up so they can do it reliably while still making a profit. In any large system, modifications must be made in many places before a single systematic change can happen. A seemingly simple thing like shortening the feedback time from register to in-store marketing by one day might involve hundreds of suppliers and thousands of individual tasks. The next time your supplier demands you be ready with their work on Monday, but doesn't pick it up before Tuesday, you can remember that you are part of a much bigger process, and your part needs to work for the whole process to succeed.
Feature Spotlight
While many customers are aware of the time savings available with Xinet WebNative® Picture Wrangler®, some may not be. Customers using Adobe® InDesign who started using our system after the release of CS4 might not have been able to benefit from its features, as we have just recently been able to complete our engineering work to support CS4. We are happy to announce that Picture Wrangler is now supported in InDesign CS4 and CS5, and of course still supported in QuarkXPress versions 3 through 8 and InDesign CS, CS2 and CS3. Picture Wrangler relinks multiple images in layout documents—quickly, simultaneously, effortlessly—with one click of a mouse.
Relinking placed images to high-resolution files in complex page layouts can be a time-consuming task. Whether your user is a local designer who wants to relink assets before going to print, or a remote layout operator who is replacing retouched images in a document that has been moved to the server, Picture Wrangler simplifies the process and saves valuable time, with fast, easy relinking to high-resolution files.
Updating to WebNative Suite 16.05 will allow you to add this and the rest of our Adobe CS plug-ins to versions up to CS5.
Release News
In September we released Xinet WebNative Suite 16.05 and WebNative Portal 3.05. All new releases are available to AXIs, developers, and customers who are currently enrolled in the Xinet Maintenance Program.
WebNative Suite 16.05 contains several updates:
Picture Wrangler is now available for InDesign CS4 and CS5 for quick relinking files from FPO to high-resolution assets.
Updated plug-ins—WebNative ID, Annotator ID, and Asset Browser ID—are all available within Adobe CS5.
WebNative Portal 3.05 includes updates to the Xinet Uploader:
Uploader 2.0 improves upload capabilities by allowing files of up to 4 gigabytes in size (with appropriate user-permissions and a WebNative server running Apache version 2.2 or higher). It will also now automatically re-try the upload of a file that fails midway.
An updated product manual corresponding to this release is available within the "Downloads" / "Documentation" section of the website. Look for WebNative Suite Administration Guide, version 16.05. Please note, you must be logged in to access this link.
Full details about new products, features and product upgrades can be found in the “Downloads” area of our Web site under “Released Software”. See the “Release Notes” folder within the individual Xinet product folders. If you have questions about product releases, please contact Xinet Technical Support.
Xinet Community News
 Xinet hosted two developers' training events at our Berkeley headquarters during the week of September 13-17. Our first two-day session was targeted toward AXIs doing their own development work, while the second session hosted members of our Developer Program who are doing the same. Twenty-six integrator attendees and 11 customer attendees turned out for seminars on the upcoming WebNative Suite version 17 release. The seminars were taught in small groups by Xinet engineers and focused on the technical changes and new features that will affect developers. In addition, Xinet engineers received feedback from developers about changes that will make custom developments easier to deploy and support.
The overall feedback was very positive and many developers stated that the training would allow them to prepare their products prior to the version 17 release. The sessions wrapped up with a discussion on changes planned for version 18 and how developers can prepare for those as well.
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From September 27-30, NAPC, Inc. hosted its first-ever NAPC Cram Sessions, an exciting Web-based training event exclusively for NAPC clients. Designed for all the administrators out there who are simply too time-pressured for traditional training, NAPC Cram Sessions delivered a wide array of essential Xinet know-how, all in highly condensed, information-packed courses. Sessions covered XMP custom panels, online annotations, remote and trigger workflow, Asset Timer, FlashNet disaster recovery and more. With over 100 attendees each day, fantastic feedback and a very excited user base, NAPC Cram Sessions was a huge success for both NAPC and the Xinet community.
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On September 28th, Abbeycomp IT Solutions hosted an event in London called CompleteFlow Technologies. CompleteFlow is Abbeycomp's term for a group of software products which simplify the communication and project management phases within the advertising, design, publishing and printing industries. These products bind together many IT workflow elements (MIS, DAM, Online Approval) for businesses to deliver an end-to-end solution. Abbeycomp has worked closely with customers and business partners to promote a true JDF integration in between Axiom, Xinet, Dalim and Vio software. Sponsored by Apple and Xerox, the event was a success as attendees were inspired to review their current working practices and processes. Abbeycomp IT Solutions provided the audience with an in-depth look at how to improve efficiency and productivity by using the latest workflow technologies available in the market.
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In September, IO Integration exhibited at Createasphere: Digital Asset Management for Entertainment and Media in New York City. This was Createasphere's first show on the East Coast and brought a wide array of visitors from the entertainment industry. This conference gave IO Integration the opportunity to introduce themselves to a new market and demonstrate all of the latest Xinet offerings to the entertainment and media community.
IO Integration also recently launched a new website in October to better serve their clients and visitors. Please visit www.iointegration.com and see the new site.
Ask the Expert
Q. I'd like a button interface for a trigger, rather than having to change metadata. How can I do that?
A. Some metadata triggers clearly have a metadata value associated with them. For example, setting a boolean "Approved" field to "true" may trigger an e-mail action. In that case, it is useful to keep track of the "Approved" value and search for files that have a particular status.
Other metadata triggers don't need such a value. Imagine a boolean metadata checkbox that triggers a file to be copied to a public downloads area. Here, the value of the boolean field (checked or unchecked) is not important. A button is a more intuitive interface.
WebNative Portal provides a simple interface for trigger buttons.There are only three steps:
1) Choose an icon for your button.
2) Add a line to the configuration file to define the icon in your WebNative Portal site.
3) Choose a browse or imageinfo template in which to place the pre-defined tag for the button.
More detailed instructions may be found in the WebNative Portal 3.04 Admin Guide, pages 91-92. Please note you must be logged in to access this link.
*Please send us your question for the expert. It could be featured in the next Xing!
Customer Spotlight
Skin care company Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. regularly stores more than 600,000 files on its server, ranging from photo images to InDesign and QuarkXPress layout files and videos. As these files were being accessed by an average of 75 people a week—a number that increases whenever Nu Skin holds its distributor conventions—the company struggled to find a way to provide controlled access to their assets. WebNative Suite turned out to be the answer.
 Founded in 1984, Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. develops innovative anti-aging skin care and nutrition products. Based in the United States, Nu Skin is a global direct selling company, operating in 50 markets throughout Asia, the Americas, and Europe with more than 760,000 independent sales representatives.
Due to the multitude of sales representatives selling in so many different markets worldwide, Nu Skin’s design, photography, marketing, events, science, and regulatory departments regularly need access to multiple types of digital assets. With WebNative Suite, Nu Skin is now able to control access to certain types of files and customize what users see when they log into the system.
“Overall, WebNative Suite is an invaluable piece of our workflow, and we’re not even using it to its full potential yet. I can confidently say that it is indispensable. Without WebNative Suite, it would require so much more work and so many more man-hours to do the same things. We had looked at other solutions and none of them gave us the features that we really wanted. WebNative was the best fit for our needs,” says Pete Stott, Digital Imaging Manager.
*Read the full Nu Skin case study.
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