Despite the rapid growth of online shopping and buying, print catalogs are still an important marketing tool for many companies. In the US alone, over 20 billion catalogs were mailed in 2010. Even companies that sell primarily online can benefit from using print catalogs. Research commissioned by the United States Postal Service has shown that catalog recipients are more likely to make a purchase than shoppers who don’t receive them, and catalog recipients typically buy more items and spend more money.

Nevertheless, marketers are facing growing pressures to make print catalogs more cost effective. Shorter product cycles, new product releases, and changing market conditions can require more frequent catalog updates to keep the information fresh and accurate. And, frequent revisions will obviously increase the costs of using print catalogs.

Most of the costs associated with print catalogs fall into one of three broad categories.

In a previous post we talked about adding a custom PIM Studio action to the context menu of the category tree. The action did what is was supposed to do, but had one major downside. It executed immediately after the context menu was clicked. That's ok you might think, but what if the user ment to click the menu item above or below our custom action. The user wouldn't be very happy because all of his products would have been moved.

In this post we will see how to avoid executing the action immediately and let the user confirm the action (s)he clicked.

Actually it's not that at all hard to do. Take the code from our previous post. Notice that the UnclassifyChildProductsAction inherits from Action. Change Action to ConfirmableAction. All we have to do now is add the code for the confirmation. In fact we don't even have to do that, we only need to tell the ConfirmableAction what the title and the message of the confirmation box need to be. For that purpose there is a InitializeConfirmUIElement you can override.

In today's blog post, we consider the following request from one of our partners:

When ingesting InDesign documents into ADAM, we use the InDesign Server media engine that comes with DocMaker to automatically create JPEG previews for all pages. InDesign itself however also allows you to export a document as a PDF or as an SWF movie. These file formats offer a different user experience, e.g. an SWF movie allows you to zoom in while a JPEG does not. Is there a way to create and save such previews as additional files when you catalog a document in ADAM?

To create custom file previews with the ADAM provider framework, you typically write a MediaEngine which executes one or more MediaActions. In this process, you can use the DocMaker API to address InDesign Server and create the actual previews. In what follows we outline the implementation of a custom InDesign preview engine, the corresponding media actions, and a preview player to view the generated SWF previews within AssetStudio.

In ADAM 4.7 we introduced a seemingly small but incredibly important feature: sequential globally unique identifiers (sequential GUIDs).
Prior to ADAM 4.7, almost any primary key in the ADAM database was a uniqueidentifier column. At first sight, this choice makes nothing but sense (well, it did to me): You're absolutely one hundred percent sure that when you generate a new key, it will be unique not only in that table, not only in your entire database, but basically across the world. (I know, I know, you're not "absolutely" sure, but to give you an idea: For a 1% chance of collision, you'd need to generate about 2,600,000,000,000,000,000 GUIDs, so I think it's safe to say it's pretty darn unique).

However, from a SQL perspective, there is a major disadvantage to this design choice: index fragmentation!
Because the primary keys are so random, each time SQL server needs to insert a new record, it needs to calculate where exactly it needs to be located in the table. With an identity-based primary key, this is easy: its added to the back of the table, since the generated primary key is always greater than the largest key present in the table. For uniqueidentifier-based columns this is far from true. Rather quite the opposite: if you have a table with for instance 10k records, you'll be lucky if the primary key column has a fragmentation below 95%.
Now, index fragmentation will not affect query performance a lot on small environments, but on enterprise level systems it can have dramatic impact. That's why we decided to look for an alternative primary key strategy: Sequential GUIDs.

Sequential GUIDs

A sequential GUID is a GUID that is greater than any GUID previously generated. It still guarantees "absolute" uniqueness, but it also guarantees that is "greater" than previously generated sequential GUIDs.

As some readers already know, I recently participated in a Tweet Jam hosted by CMSWire that discussed the evolving role of digital asset management (DAM) in customer experience management (CXM). You can read CMSWire’s summary of the Tweet Jam here .

In my last post , I reviewed the first three discussion questions that were addressed in the Tweet Jam. In this post, I’ll provide my take on the issues covered by the final three discussion questions.

Question 4: “How do DAM and CXM and WEM currently relate?”

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a Tweet Jam hosted by CMSWire that discussed the evolving role of digital asset management (DAM) in customer experience management (CXM). The participants included DAM/CXM industry thought leaders, marketing professionals, and representatives of several leading marketing technology providers. You can read CMSWire’s summary of the Tweet Jam here .

The Tweet Jam focused on six important questions, and the discussion produced many valuable insights. Given the limitations of Twitter, however, it was almost impossible to give these questions the treatment they deserve. So in this post, I’ll provide my take on the issues addressed in the first three discussion questions, and I’ll cover the final three questions in my next post.

“Question 1: Given how digital we are, what is your current definition of DAM?”

Marketing software applications have become mission critical technologies for most global enterprises. The proliferation of marketing channels and the growing need for greater customization of marketing messages and materials have made it all but impossible for large organizations to manage marketing effectively without technology.

Choosing the right marketing software is, therefore, a major strategic decision, and one important aspect of the decision is whether to opt for software that is installed on in-house servers (on-premises software) or software that is hosted externally and accessed via the Internet (a cloud-based solution). Both delivery models have advantages and disadvantages, and the choice ultimately depends on which model is the best fit for your business. Here are four issues to consider when making the decision.

Ease of Implementation

Last week we released a new version of our automatic catalog publishing software: PageBuilder 4.1.

Many new and improved features make this a highly anticipated release:

• Exciting new options added to the Update Catalog wizard: it's now possible to translate contents, update field and classification labels and even update images.
• Build UI for Catalogs and ItemGroups are reworked to give a better user experience. Also new features like presets, choose output filename and classification, etc have been added.
• Templates UI have been improved. It's now possible to apply master templates to all siblings at once.
• Maintenance history page added. PageBuilder maintenance jobs can easily be viewed, retried and changed before restarting.
• Several small changes and bugfixes to enhance custom development and user experience.

As always we are looking forward for your feedback and also keep an eye on our blogs cause we keep on adding interesting custom development cases regularly.

Today’s marketing technology landscape is filled with confusing terms and three-letter acronyms. Over the past two decades, the number of marketing technologies has grown dramatically, and companies have attempted to create competitive differentiation by using distinctive terms to describe their solutions. The result is an array of marketing technology terms and acronyms that provide little help to marketers who are looking for solutions to important business challenges. Below are my “definitions” of five important marketing technologies and their acronyms.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) —A software system that enables companies to efficiently catalog, store, retrieve, and repurpose content assets that exist in the form of computer files. The core feature of a DAM system is a centralized repository, or library, containing an organization’s content assets that have been cataloged in a way to facilitate search and retrieval. DAM systems will also typically enable the automation of workflows relating to the creation, approval, and versioning of content assets.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)—The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) defines enterprise content management as, “the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.” On the surface, therefore, ECM sounds a lot like DAM, but there are significant differences.

PageBuilder 4 allows you to update previously built catalogs, i.e. refresh the data while preserving the original lay-out. Because the lay-out does not need to be recalculated, updating a catalog is much faster than rebuilding that same catalog from scratch.

Item groups or data sheets for individual products are typically always rebuilt from scratch, because they contain much less data than full catalogs and the lay-out can be calculated quickly.

There may however be cases where you want to refresh existing item groups while preserving the lay-out, e.g. when you have applied manual post-processing to your product data sheets in InDesign.