We would like to welcome you to 2011 with a new release of our Open Source Digital Asset Management solution – Razuna.
Thought, Razuna 1.4.1 might sound like a small point release, it is by no means only a bug fix release. We not only fixed issues crawling in after the last 1.4 release but also included many new features to help you manage your images, videos, audios and documents. Some of the most noteworthy new options are outlined below.
(Make sure to read the new upgrade path for Razuna 1.4.1 and how to download Razuna at the end of this post!)
Folder & Collection RSS, Excel and Word view
Getting notified when new items arrive in a folder or collection is important, both for us and for your team. Now, there is a convenient way to stay up-to-date, that is you can subscribe to each folder/collection by RSS. This allows you to add the RSS feed to your browser (Firefox Live Bookmark, Google Reader, etc) and you will get automatically notified of updates. Additionally, you have the option to view the content of the folder/collection in Excel or in Word (with preview images). These options are also available for shared folders and collections!
Work with those RAW image formats
Razuna could already handle RAW images, but we now enhanced it so that Razuna creates a thumbnail of your RAW image and you are also able to convert it to any format right within Razuna. Of course, the original format is being saved and never tempered with. Razuna support the following RAW formats: .3fr, .ari, .arw, .srf, .sr2, .bay, .crw .cr2, .cap, .iiq, .eip, .dcs, .dcr, .drf, .k25, .kdc, .dng, .erf, .fff, .mef, .mos, .mrw, .nef, .nrw, .orf, .ptx, .pef, .pxn, .R3D, .raf, .rw2, .raw, .rwl, .dng, .rwz, .x3f.
In other words, we are supporting the proprietary format of just about the most camera models our there, be it Nikon, Canon, Sony, Hasselbad, etc.
Recreate or upload your own thumbnail
We are always pleased to satisfy customer demands and thus it gives us much happiness to be able to announce that we have included the possibility to recreate thumbnails from existing assets and the option to upload your own thumbnail in this version of Razuna.
Especially customers that host a lot of videos with us, will be able to add their customer thumbnails now with this feature.
Improved error handling
Yes, bugs and errors are inconvenient. While we try to bring you a hassle free experience with your Digital Asset Management, it always can happen that something goes wrong. But now with the new error handling your experience with those pesky errors has just improved. Instead of a big error message, you will only receive a notification that there has been an error. In the back we are saving the error to a database and you or your administration are then able to view them and even send them directly to our tracking system over at http://issues.razuna.com.
Speed, Speed, Speed
In the recent releases we have always improved performance for your Digital Asset Management. Recently, we made some major code changes in loading and showing previews on the Razuna Hosted Platform and for those customers who are running Razuna with Amazon S3, Nirvanix or Eucalyptus.
Now, we made further changes and recently added database caching to it as well. With database caching we could improve performance by 30% and are now seeing load times for large folders with 1000 or more asets in the millisecond range. Of course, your results might be different due to connections, location, bandwidth, etc. But rest assured that from an application level we are doing application caching, database caching and are trimming just about every bit of code for performance.
Import / Export with SQL script
In Razuna 1.4 we introduced the option to Import and Export your records in the XML format. Since XML might be to verbose for a simple import to another Razuna instance we added the option to export to a SQL script file. This gives you the freedom to import within Razuna’s own import function or pass the script on to your database administrator.
How to get Razuna 1.4.1
Razuna 1.4.1 is available as of now and can be downloaded over at http://razuna.org. As usual you can download the Razuna 1.4.1 Standalone package, download the Razuna 1.4.1 WAR-EAR only, or use our most popular Razuna 1.4.1 Virtual Image Server (probably the easiest, fastest way to deploy Razuna to Amazon EC2, VMWare, etc.).
For those customers already running Razuna we are glad to let you know that we have reworked the way you should upgrade from Razuna 1.4 to Razuna 1.4.1 and forth on. We have outlined the upgrade steps in one convenient Wiki page. Please follow this link for updating your copy of Razuna 1.4 to Razuna 1.4.1.
Customers using our Razuna Hosted Platform and our Razuna Cloud Server have already been updated to Razuna 1.4.1.
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