It gives us great pleasure to announce the immediate release of Razuna 1.6 Beta 1 today. Though, labeled as “Beta 1″ this version has been in production with many of our customers for the last couple of months. We are releasing this as “Beta” in order for you to give the new features a whirl. Many of the new features have been sponsored by some of our customers. No wonder, that Razuna 1.6 comes with major enhancements.
Here is a short list of the main enhancements for Razuna 1.6:
Workflow
The new Workflow plugin is a huge production boost for your media management. Some of our early adapters love how easy it is to put together a workflow and assign actions to it. With the workflow you can, for example, apply actions to files being uploaded such as; notify a group or user, move the uploaded file(s) to another folder, assign labels and metadata (also custom metadata) to the file or even call an external URL to let your other systems in the workflow know about the new additions. Additionally, you can execute Rendition Templates within a workflow. The Workflow plugin is now available and is a plugin which you can obtain from Razuna for a price.
White-Label Razuna
Ever wanted to have your own DAM system? With the new White-Labeling option you can now embed Razuna into your own system and customize Razuna like you want. The White-Labeling option gives you all the tools needed to tweak each link, change the look and feel, add your own news and many more branding options to Razuna.
Akamai Support
Another addition to our ever expanding cloud and streaming options is the new Akamai support. With it, you can now integrate Razuna with Akamai and keep files in sync between Razuna and Akamai’s NetStorage allowing you to use Akamai’s CDN as your content store (just like with the existing Amazon S3, Nirvanix and Eucalyptus options).
Rendition Templates
Many of our customers love the “Rendition Templates”. This comes as no surprise, as it is an easy way to automatically convert any file to another format. Naturally, we expanded on this. In Razuna 1.6 the additional option to convert by DPI and multiple conversions per file type is available!
Moreover, Rendition Templates can now be assigned within Scheduled Tasks and within FTP uploads, also.
Metadata Form after uploading
Do you need your users to fill out required metadata fields after uploading a file? With the new Metadata Form you can now do that within Razuna.
Watermarks
In Razuna 1.6 you have the option to watermark images. Not only can you watermark each image, but you also have the option to create watermark templates. Watermark templates can be applied to renditions and to the rendition templates as well. In other words, you can stamp each image, according to size or format, with another watermark.
A watermark can be created from either an image or from text. Additionally, you can configure the alignment of the watermark within the image. Furthermore, transparency, font type, size and color can be chosen as well.
Custom Metadata Fields
We have written about the usability of custom fields in the past and as our customers use custom fields within their projects, we are happy to bring two new features to custom fields. First is the option to order the custom fields (yeah, hard to believe that we did not have this before) and secondly, we have created a way to secure the editing of a custom field by a group and user (in order to make sure that only certain people can edit those field values that you hold so dear).
Developer Love
Many organizations adopt Razuna because it has one of the most versatile API’s available for a Digital Asset Management System. For Razuna 1.6 we have extended the API with many new methods. Additionally, you can include certain aspects of the Razuna UI in your application. In other words, simply call a dedicated page with your API key and Razuna will render the UI to you and your customers right within your application.
Moreover, Razuna 1.6 comes with a complete Plugin API. The new Razuna Plugin API will allow developers to build plugins and thus enhance Razuna in many ways. As an example our new Workflow and Akamai plugin have been completely built with the Razuna Plugin API. There are “hooks” and “events” available for you to create your own plugin.
We are very excited to open up Razuna in this way to the developer community. We are still working on documentation and examples and will publish them once ready.
Existing customers
Existing customers will be happy to know that we have continued to enhance existing features so that they can now convert images with DPI values, have multiple renditions created with Upload Templates (yes, also with DPI values), have the ability to import custom fields from XLS or CVS, have dedicated metadata fields available for renditions, within the customization tab you can set default values for shared folders/collections, included a “download metadata” for shared folders/collections, included the folder name in the search index, support for ProRes and Avid encoded videos, option to replace or append values in a batch operation and many more new options.
All in all, we’ve tackled over 240 issues in Razuna 1.6! Many that have been requested by our community and sponsored by our customers.
How to get Razuna
Razuna is available over at http://razuna.org. You have the option to use our preconfigured Razuna Virtual Server, download the dedicated Razuna Standalone Server or deploy to your own J2EE-Server with our Razuna WAR/EAR distribution.
Razuna is also available as a Hosted Solution over at http://razuna.com. For teams and organizations we also offer a dedicated Razuna Server option.
