In the last couple of weeks we have made some major improvement to Razuna, both to the Razuna Hosted Platform, the Razuna Cloud Servers and of course to the Open Source version. Let us outline some of the major changes;
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).
Oh and before we forget, these options are also available for shared folders and collections!
Icon changes
Creating a user interface for an application like Razuna is never an easy task. On one hand, we want to keep it intuitive and not cluttered with “features” but on the other hand, one still needs to make those “features” available. Recently we have overhauled the folder views slightly and recently added icon changes.
The top bar shows now the most used actions in (hopefully) descriptive icons. Additionally the new “view” icons haven been added and we rearranged them a bit to group them. In other words, selecting all assets, reloading a folder and adding a folder should now be more then obvious.
Razuna has the option to show your assets in the thumbnail view (by default), in a list view or in a “combined” one which allows batch editing of filename, description and keywords. In our testing we found out that most users did not even know that, despite using them. Thus, we are now showing the different view options in a prominent place.
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.
Phantom assets
In a recent update, we introduced a placeholder text for assets which are in the progress of adding to the system. But sometimes, it could happen that due to circumstances the asset could not be properly added to the system. Thus you were left with the placeholder text in your folder listing with no way to remove it. Now, this is possible. You will see when you have added the asset and be able to remove the record.
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.
Adding RAW image support
More and more Photographers are using Razuna to manage their library. Many of them use the RAW format for their photos. With the latest updates we added the RAW format in order for Razuna to read and write the metadata and create thumbnails.
When are these new features available?
These new features are already available for our customers on the Razuna Hosted Platform. Our Razuna Cloud Server customers will see them in the coming days. Those with a self hosted version will see them in the Christmas Edition of Razuna (that will be 1.4.1 or more) 
We are already working to bring you even more before the year ends. As always we are always happy to receive any comments or feedback.
