It gives us great pleasure to finally make Razuna 1.4 available in a general Preview Release. This release is meant for testing and it shouldn’t be long before a final release. We kindly ask everyone to download and test this release. You can also upgrade your current Razuna 1.3.5 installation with this release.
Read on, what major features are available in Razuna 1.4 (we have over 100 changes for 1.4. Some of the highlights are below).
Option to catalog folders and assets on your server and from public URLs
The option to catalog folders and assets from your local server and from publicly accessible URLs is the one feature that we are most excited about and will turn your Razuna server into a cataloging server with a web front end. In order to understand this feature in full, we are giving here some examples;
- Catalog your File Server and share assets
Say you run an internal file server (be it Windows, Linux or MacOS X) and you want that your team and even clients have access to the same assets (always the same version of course) over the web. Something that would involve many different tools, plus a very skilled system admin will be an easy task with Razuna. Simply install Razuna on your network, point Razuna to your file server and it will recreate all the folders within Razuna, index all the assets and will make them available over a web front-end to your team and outside clients. All this with the same ease of use of Razuna, meaning you got permissions, folders & collections, sharing and collaboration and last but not least the option to convert your assets to different formats available. - Add assets from outside your network into Razuna
Another option this new feature allows is to include assets from publicly available URL’s to Razuna. Say you see an image on Flickr or Facebook and want to share it in a project. All you have to do is to simply copy & paste the URL to the image to Razuna and it wil behave just like any other image. The same goes for videos. You can include videos from Google Video, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Furthermore, you can include the whole embedded player in Razuna as well.
Search Improvement
Finding your valuable assets is one of the most important tasks of Razuna. We can say that we are able to index just about every asset you bring into Razuna and thus we have given the search & find function some more love in Razuna 1.4. You will now have the option to refine your search. That means, you can either search within the search results or conduct a new search again. Additionally you will see the description and the keywords with the option to click on the keywords itself to narrow down the search even further.
Extended Metadata reading and writing for all assets
Razuna was/is already capable of reading and writing metadata to JPEG images. We have extended this, so that Razuna will read metadata from all images (GIF, PNG, TIFF, EPS, PSD, AI, etc.) and will also write back to those image formats. Moreover, Razuna will read metadata of videos and documents and index and display them as well. Additionally, descriptions and keywords of PDF files will be written back to the PDF. Also, all converted images will inherit the metadata of the original file.
Backup & Restore
With 1.4 you have the option to backup your complete Razuna server and also restore it. Furthermore, you can backup your complete Razuna Server with all the available hosts or only backup/restore a single host (with it being available in the Administration of the DAM part). Moreover, this feature allows you to migrate from one server to another and also migrate between databases (say you want to go from the embedded one to MySQL, or MySQL to MS SQL or Oracle).
Rebuilding the search index
Rebuilding the search index allows you to keep your database, search index and assets in sync. Mostly, this is not needed, but if things go wrong or you feel like something is not included it is a nice option to have.
Administration overhaul
The main Administration of Razuna got some overhaul as that you don’t need to select your host upfront anymore and will have the option to select it within the sections. Additionally, we made some design changes, which will ease the use of the Administration even more.
General
As mentioned there are over 100 changes in Razuna 1.4 and those above are the ones we thought are worth mentioning. Thus here is a short list of those “other” enhancements;
- Upgraded to JQuery 1.4
- Upgraded to Tomcat 6.0.24
- Upgraded to OpenBD 1.3
- Reorganized complete Database model for much better performance
- Many speed improvements could be gained from code streamlining
- All images are converted to RGB color space for Internet Explorer compatibility
- Rewrote the basket download for better handling of large assets
I hope you enjoy using Razuna as much as we have making it. Go grab your copy now over at http://razuna.org or sign up for a free hosted account over at http://razuna.com.
