XINET'S EASY-TO-USE DAM SYSTEM MAKES IT THE OBVIOUS CHOICE FOR FRESH MEDIA GROUP

The award-winning Fresh Media Group has become a leading force in the UK for design, conception, production and delivery of online and offline media.

Ramesh Patel
Fresh Media Group

Subsidiary companies within Fresh Media Group include Ceros Media, the UK’s most popular online magazine format; Size Creative, a specialist retouching and photography studio; BigKid, a cross-platform digital and video production agency; Fresh Vision, a design and production agency; and Colour Systems, the UK’s largest independent prepress services provider for top publishing companies such as Hachette Filipacchi UK. Fresh Media produces about 3,000 PDFs a day; 60,000 PDFs a month, and has about six jobs going on at any one time.

Prior to Xinet^®, Fresh Media Group had an OPI system but never a digital asset management (DAM) system. After doing initial research into other DAM systems, the company chose Xinet because of its robust, reliable, easy-to-use system.
“The simplicity is the most important aspect of Xinet’s system; you can actually use it. It’s not going to cause you any major problems—creating users is really easy, setting up and distributing assets is really easy, and the administrative side is easy,” said Ramesh Patel, group technical director of Fresh Media Group.

The two most significant ways Fresh Media Group utilizes the Xinet system are downloading FPOs, and archiving and retrieving assets. Fresh Media Group’s clients produce a large number of files, so having the ability to download low-resolution photos is important. Additionally, many clients have syndicated columns in other countries and need to syndicate and disperse their assets globally.

For example, Autocar magazine is syndicated in Japan and India. A publisher in India who paid a license fee for the brand may be allowed to download the master files off the server so that they

can localize the content. Downloads can be initiated globally and instantaneously – to such an extent that users of the Fresh Media Group DAM system regularly download two terabytes every month.

It is also vital that Fresh Media Group be able to search through archived data to find images. With a 450-page library, they are able to hold content for clients for up to two years so that clients can access images they want to re-use.
“It would have been near impossible to do this without Xinet because you would have to look through hundreds of CDs. I think on average there’s about two hundred gigabytes of changes a day on the server, tracking that level of data manually is simply unthinkable.” said Patel.
Concerning Fresh Media Group’s Xinet system, Patel continued, “A lot of other DAM systems are very complicated, and that complication causes all sorts of issues.Rolling out WebNative^® was easy because its elegant engineering made it easy to administer - and that is its brilliance.”