Razuna 1.1.3 released – even more power to the open source digital asset management

It gives us much pleasure to bring Razuna in its latest version 1.1.3 to the world. It is our part to say thank you to the growing community around our open source digital asset management and end the year with this great release.

We are very exited about Razuna 1.1.3, since it brings full support for the MySQL database, includes the final release of the underlining application server (OpenBD) and an administration for the server itself. Also, it includes most of the requests and bug fixes that our community has told us about.

Please find below a short summary of the new features and fixes of this release. For those who are already running Razuna 1.1.2 and want to upgrade to Razuna 1.1.3, should read the Upgrade documentation before doing so.

Razuna and MySQL

A lot of users have asked that we add support for the MySQL database. Thus, we are very happy to finally bring it to Razuna. It was not an easy task to do, since we run into a couple of issues with the SQL syntax itself and how MySQL differs from other databases. We already posted about our findings how MySQL is different to Oracle or H2 (in Oracle mode).

In any case, this is all technical mumbo-jumbo and all you should know is that Razuna runs now perfectly with MySQL (as it does with the embedded and the Oracle database). Support for other databases, will come in future versions and will depend on the demand of the community. You can cast your vote, or add a new feature request and bug report, at the public available Issue Tracker of Razuna.

General improvements

Overall improvements have been made to this release. To list each one, is not the purpose of this post, but rather give you a small summary. Some of the improvements are;

Updated the Flash Player to the latest version, we are now running the embedded database in server mode (thus allowing other connections to the same database), uploading and adding assets is now much faster, we moved the general DAM folder to a global position (thus allowing for greater compatibility for future updates) and finally we resized the pop-up windows to better suit users with smaller screens or lower resolutions.

General Fixes

We pride ourselves with how fast we fix any reported bug. Usually our customers receive a bug fix within 24 hours (usually within hours). For Razuna 1.1.3 we could, with the help of the community, squash some bugs. Here is a summary of some of the most important ones fixed in this release;

Users that have spaces in the executables paths would run into errors (actually, you should never have spaces in your executables paths, but Windows allows you to do so), Descriptions and Keywords sometimes failed while adding assets, Adding many assets from Scheduled Uploads failed, WMV and AVI failed to play in the Flash Player (they still don’t play in the Flash Player, but now we re-added how to play them), and finally adding ZIP archives did not extract the folder structure and added assets correctly.

Razuna and 2009

As already outlined in a previous post, we shared some of the new features of a upcoming Razuna version. In 2009 we will take digital asset management and your assets to the cloud, meaning that you will be able to leverage the Amazon S3 and/or Nirvanix data storage services. Also, we will bring review/preview and workflow to Razuna so that you and your team will have a complete review process right within Razuna. Another high demand request will come in 2009, that is you will get version control for all your assets within Razuna.

There has never been a better time to start managing your assets with Razuna, the open source digital asset management alternative!

As always you can get the latest Version directly from Razuna.com. Razuna is available in a Standalone Server download or as a WAR/EAR download to deploy on a existing J2EE server. Customers who already have Razuna deployed will get a notification within the system that a new version is available.

Razuna is a professional digital asset management/media asset management with an integrated web content management that delivers and makes management of your digital assets a simple task. Razuna is licensed under a dual-license (AGPL and commercial) and can be downloaded at http://www.razuna.org. The Wiki is available at http://wiki.sixsigns.com and the public Issues Tracker at http://issues.sixsigns.com.