Signiant introduced new functionality in version 8.2 of their content distribution management software, including Multi-Manager Peering and enhancements to Media Exchange. Multi-Manager Peering allows job components running on agents to be viewed and controlled from multiple managers, improving collaboration. Media Exchange now integrates more tightly with centralized workflows. A new Media Publish Point adds web portal functionality, allowing flexible content submittal and consumption. These updates aim to better enable secure B2B ecosystems at enterprise scale through more interactive and automated end-to-end content distribution and management.
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Signiant Technical Webinar on Version 8.2
1. Signiant Introduces New Functionality: Learn What’s New in 8.2 Developed for B2B Collaboration Rick Clarkson, Senior Director of Product Management, Signiant
Hello My name is Rick Clarkson and I am the Senior Director of Product Management here at Signiant. I’d like to thank you for taking some time today to learn a little about Signiant’s newest release of software. Whether you’re a current customer, or if you’ve been following our product announcements and/or visited our booth at NAB or IBC, you understand that Signiant has a platform that provides centrally managed file transfer automation in a enterprise environment. During today’s 30 minute presentation We’ll do a quick product recap of the product line. I will tell you about the latest features in Version 8.2 which will be available in December. I’ll show you the product and how some of the features are configured and how they operate We’ll discuss some of the business benefits of these new features And then take some questions So let’s get started
Signiant’s worldwide customers have been telling us through out 2009 about their business initiatives beginning with cost reduction and the ability to be more efficient with their content distribution. The ability to monetize their existing content faster and more efficiently with their growing distribution eco-system Distribution and Aggregation of content on an international basis and not rely on the global shipping companies like DHL and FedEx. Finally to outsource certain business functions and collaborate with their partners more effectively and securely.
A Quick Product Review Signiant gives you all the tools you need to manage the movement of your content, to determine how fast it needs to move, to secure it, and to help you automate your workflows. Signiant puts you in charge of your digital media network giving you total control in one, unified solution. There are 3 main components to the Signiant Product Suite and they include the Central Media Manager, Media Agents and Media Exchange Through the Central Media Manager Signiant provides a dashboard, which presents a view of all the points of interest in your digital media supply chain. This dashboard enables you to configure and control all the transfers, between any points anywhere in the world, at any time of day, across any IP-based network infrastructure. The Central Media Manager uses an adaptive policy engine to tie business rules and policies to the movement of content between a distributed set of media agents and media applications in your ecosystem The Media Agents dispersed throughout a customer network perform the bulk of the heavy lifting. With Signiant’s patented file acceleration technology, the Media Agents move the rich media files through-out the network and to various business partners based on the business policies and rules set up by the Central Media Manager. Media Exchange is the interactive web based customer facing application that is used as the ingest and distribution mechanism for moving files in and out of the system. Media Exchange provides a secure, automated and accelerated method for connecting user generated or any external content with the digital media workflow in the central media manager.
There are many new features in Version 8.2 but at a high level they fall in the areas of Multi-Manager Peering and the ability to quickly and securely connect Signiant systems from 2 or more organizations and control workflows and file transfers from multiple vantage points. Media Exchange – which include many new features in it for the end users as well as the Central Media Manager in terms of reporting and workflow integration Media Publish point allows our customers to build a web portal experience enabling users to upload or download content to and from specific categories like sports, weather, news etc. Users are then given access to these categories to the can either publish of browse/download selected content on to their desktop.
The first area we’ll look at is Multi-Manager Peering. I’ll explain what it is and why it’s useful.
One of the main benefits of the new release of Signiant’s software is that it allows two or more organizations with Signiant installations to easily cross trust and connect their Agents With the Multi-Manager Peering Module, Central Media Managers can monitor and control transport jobs with Agents located in different companies or organizations. By exchanging the Agent security certificates through the Central Media Managers jobs initiated from one organization can be monitored and or controlled from another organization. The level of control can be very customized to include file systems, user names, workflow access etc.
Let’s talk about some of the business benefits. What’s important to note is Multi-Manager Peering enables Automated Business initiatives like the ones listed here. The key point about the term “automated” is Signiant will pick up digital packages and based on the business policies set forth in the Central Media Manager move the content to various Agents in other organizations giving business partners visibility and in some cases control of the transfers and workflow jobs interacting with their servers. TARA: Rick can you give an example? Sure. Let’s say a broadcaster is moving content throughout their own network. Maybe the content is moving an and out of Transcoders or automated QC software or watermarking applications etc. All of this content movement is controlled by a single Signiant Manager. However, some of the content needs to be automatically pushed to a business partner like an affiliate, or playout center or web partner for consumer consumption. If these partners are Signiant enabled, they can now monitor or control the digital packages that were sourced at the broadcaster. They can allocate more or less bandwidth for various jobs that are more critical. By doing a certificate exchange any Signiant customer can now access any other Signiant customer and control file transport in a collaborative but secure manner.
Let’s take a look at the Central Media Manager and show how a certificate exchange is done. Remember this is the administration interface for the system. To set up a cross trust relationship, administrators go into the section of the interface which lists the trusts. It lists other managers that this manager knows about. I can create an export of system 1 (NAME) by clicking on the export local manager link. When I do the export, it asks me which agents installed off my system I want to include in the export for exposure to the other organization. Once I’ve selected those, it will save the export file for me and I can email this export file to the other organization to import.
Looking at the second Manager (NAME 2). I go into the administration trusts manager section, and I import the export that I just created form (NAME 1)and begin the import process.
Here it prompts me to accept the set of agents that have been exported from the system 1 (NAME 1)
The Agent import is successful.
Next, it will ask me which agents installed off System 2 (Name 2) I want to allow to trust content transfers from those agents. So I select an agent installed off my system (Name 2).
It will ask me which level of trust I want to provide between these two agents.
And the final step is to apply the trusts.
The authorization levels are customizable. If I want to change the level of authorization that I’ve given to the external agent, I can go into my system and configure it with a different level of authorization. I can go in and select that remote agent and see that they are currently given access to run jobs as a particular user. I can restrict that further to a different user ID, I can restrict them to running jobs within specific folders, or I can restrict them to running specific job template components.
Now let’s take a look at Media Exchange and Media Publish Point. Media Exchange and Media Publish Point provide interfaces designed for an end user interacting with the system. The Web interface is intended for use by a wide variety of personnel uploading and downloading content into the system. The key difference here is it’s an interactive client experience.
This slide may look similar to one you saw earlier in the presentation but what’s important to note is Media Exchange and Media Publish Point provide an interactive method for users to interface with the system. For instance a person logging into the Media Exchange web page and selecting content to upload. Managers and Agents provide Automation where the systems looks for files or directories on a server. In some cases these products enable similar business models, they are just implemented in a slightly different way depending upon our customers needs. TARA: Rick I think we’ll need another example. Sure. The first 2 business enablement categories are similar to the earlier examples but with Media Exchange the interface is interactive and driven by a person and not an automated process. Let’s look at Remote Contribution, specifically Electronic News Gathering. Lets say two individuals or a small group need to exchange content regularly. The files are too big for email, FTP is too complex for the average user and users want to accelerate file movement. Media Exchange, which we have been offering for almost 2 years, is a perfect application for this. We have added a number of new features to media exchange in this release which we’ll discuss in a moment. Now let’s say news editors want to upload content to a specific workflow running on the Manager. Human interest content may need to be transcoded into a specific format before going to editors while sports content may require watermarking. Both are different workflows. With V8.2 Media Exchange end users submitting content can now be integrated with pre-built workflows running on the Central Manager. But our customers want even more. They want to be able to upload packages to a portal making it available to pre-defined users. Personnel doing electronic news gathering may want to upload content using Media Publish Point and allow news editors to browse the content and determine which packages to download. In this section of the presentation we’ll focus on Media Exchange and Media Publish Point.
Some of the new features on Media Exchange include: Central Management and reporting of all Media Exchange uploads and download. Workflow integration allowing end users to initiate content uploads for specific workflows. MPP Includes portal upload, browse and download functionality
First let’s quickly look at the Central Media Manager interface. Remember this is the administration interface for the system What’s new in this release is you can see how Media Exchange jobs can now be monitored but also adjusted just like our Agent to Agent transfers. If you are familiar with our Agent Transport, the Media Exchange Management functionality should look familiar to you.
In the Central Media Manager we have also added the ability to set-up end user profiles. For example, I can create a new transfer profile called throttle 1 megabit per second and I can apply a transfer limit of 1 megabit per second to this and make sure that all media exchange users have access to this particular profile. Then I can set that as the system default profile for downloading content. Now that I’ve created this transfer profile, when an end user initiates a download of content that transfer profile is going to be applied to that download.
Now let’s take a look at Media Exchange and Media Publish Point end user interface. This interface is designed for the novice user or the power user. Anyone who needs to move content in or out of the system.
Looking at the end user media exchange interface. I actually have a couple of different views on this slide. The media exchange interface supports a number of different mechanisms for end users to interact. There’s a simple e-mail like interface where users can submit new packages to the system and receive packages from the system. And then there is a more web portal like experience where users can be given access to content in a set of categories and they can browse through that content and select different content for download. What capabilities a user has access to is defined by their access control rights in the Central Media Manager. So you can define the users that only have the right to browse content categories, only have the right to create packages, or only have the rights to receive packages.
This particular user has been given to right to submit new content to the system. They do that by clicking on the new package link at the top of the dialog. A package is a collection of files and some descriptive metadata. And the first thing a user is prompted for when they click on the new package link is to specify the descriptive metadata and files. I can create a new episode of the Signiant show to be published in a published content category. I can tag one of the files in the package as metadata. In addition, I have the ability to specify package options like availability window and whether or not this package is allowed to be forwarded by other users and of course there are system level privileges that can be set to determine whether or not users can create fowardable packages, etc.
Once I’ve specified the content of my package, the next thing I’m going to be prompted for is a workflow. Now I’ve noticed, in the background, we’ve initiated a transfer of the content while I’m moving on to the next step of the media exchange interface and the default out of the box media exchange workflow, prompts you for a set of recipients or categories to deliver the content too. So, in this case I’m going to select a content category to put my content in. And I’m going to submit my package to the system. My upload is completed in the background, transparently, and I’m going to click on submit and the package is going to be submitted to that workflow which is going to make available in the content category. In addition to delivering content to categories, I could send it directly to users or I could send it to users that are not registered with the system if I’ve been given rights to allow that just simply by typing in their e-mail address.
I can see the packages that I’ve sent in the system and I can drill in and look at the details of those packages that I’ve sent, including the download history. If I want to see who has downloaded a specific package, I have that information here. And, notice that at this point in time, nobody has downloaded it. Now I’ve published it to season1, so I can go in and look at episode 4, I can initiate a download of this content to my system and when I run that download, the transfer will happen. I can go back and I can look at my sent items information for that download and I can see that the admin user downloaded this package successfully. Of course administrators can also report on package actions from the backend user interface. There’s a whole reporting section for media exchange. Signiant administrative interface you can define new filters that look for certain packages actions and report different package action information. Through the administrative interface I can also set other media exchange administrative properties.
So here is what I would like you to take away from this session. Signiant Central Media Managers and Agents provide Enterprise Level automated File Transfers with customized workflows Adding the Peering Module extends this to your partners enabling powerful B2B content exchange With Media Exchange end users have an interactive web interface to move content in an out of the system Enabling workflows with Media exchange provides Interactive content movement in/out of the system and takes advantage of automation within the system Finally, Media Publish Point provides a user friendly web front end for flexibility and scale to wide audiences
Further information can be found at the following links. Thanks again for your time. Have a great day