Southpaw Launches DAM Solutions Modules

One of our featured Open Source DAM vendors, Canadian company, Southpaw Technology, developers of the TACTIC Open Source DAM system have released Southpaw Solutions.  This appears to be a series of add-ons built on top of their platform.  They include:

• Custom Data Management Solution – allows TACTIC to interpret enterprise data management schema, and to create branded and tailored interfaces to it.
• Ingestion Solution – allows previously untracked files and to be ingested it into TACTIC where they can be searched and organised.
• Sync Solution – enables remotely located teams to access the most current version of a file.
• Creative Brief Solution – allows jobs, tasks and resources to be set up in a custom-designed interface (and to manage, track and automate the implementation of them).
• Custom WIP DAM Solution – Work-in-Progress uses TACTICS’s existing workflow and asset management features to provide custom WIP. All workflow features are connected to the assets residing in the database, keeping tasks, resources, and assets connected.
• Business Intelligence Solution – Allows TACTIC to be integrated with and mine data from internal systems to provide insights that may inform strategic decisions.

There is the de rigueur sales-fluff that accompanies these things, however, they have done a good job of summarising what you actually get and why you might be interested (others, please take note):

“These solutions, which handle common yet critical asset management challenges in many organizations, are built on top of TACTIC’s core architecture, yet can be tailored to each company’s unique IT environment and content creation workflow.” [Read More]

The components Southpaw have added seem to have more than a degree of similarity with ADAM and other production focussed DAM systems.  There are some other open source vendors targeting enterprise users, like Razuna and FocusOPEN (and the latter are .NET also – like ADAM) but from what I have seen, they aren’t as production-oriented as TACTIC who have done a comprehensive job on making their system fully customisable from the ground up.

The former tools look like they are more aimed at marketing departments who want to take something that is fully formed but has an API to keep the IT people happy (although FocusOPEN does have a scripting engine).  TACTIC seems like a more in-depth platform to develop upon and I can foresee some integrators being more interested because of that, although whether many will be so keen on Python rather than Java or .NET might be an issue they will need to assess.

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