Brandworkz Announce Release 8.2.1

DAM vendor Brandworkz,  have recently announced the release of a new version of their brand management platform.  Their last release, back in December 2017, saw an improvement in asset visibility with numerous tweaks to the user interface, including a long overdue shift to a responsive layout, improved asset usage statistics and reporting, and a number of minor bug fixes.

Being a minor release, there’s very little in terms of new functionality here, with the majority of improvements focusing on usability and look and feel, primarily on the search results interface.  The first of these improvements introduces full-screen asset previews (which was also presented as a new feature in the last version):

“Users can now access the asset preview screen without losing the context of their current search. Clicking on an asset in the search will no longer take the user to the asset detail page within the folder. Closing the window will reveal the search results again. There is also an option to go to the folder which contains the asset if the user still wishes to.”  [Read More]

Although I’m sure this is a welcome addition for their users, the concept of previewing assets whilst remaining on the search results page is now common practice and I’m surprised it hasn’t been implemented before – navigating back and forth (or alternatively opening multiple tabs) can quickly become annoying and lead to click fatigue, but better late than never.

“We have introduced additional actions for admins in the search results page too including; downloading, editing and moving assets. We have also introduced a streamlined UI for the Share and Albums functionality which will be rolled out everywhere in the next versions.”  [Read More]

The following improvements all pertain to the search results page:

• An asset action bar to perform more actions on selected assets (see Search Result Asset Actions) which also snaps to the top of the screen, allowing for actions to be performed without having to scroll up and down the page.
• Introduction of drag-select and keyboard multi-select to replace checkboxes.
• An updated responsive layout, so what you see on your screen will vary depending on your screen’s size.
• A wider default layout to allow for more search results per row.
• If you have the Web-to-Publish module, the unique artworks that end users generate are also included in the search results.
• Updated iconography to make navigation and use easier and more uniform across the system.
• Previous and next pagination quick links added to the top of the results.
• Improved search tabs look and feel.
• Additional filetype info displayed on the thumbnails.
• Indexing of asset shortcuts/aliases.
• Boosting importance of asset title and metadata compared to document full text, for better ranking of document results – i.e. matches in title and entered metadata will now show at the top.
• Serving of search thumbnails over CDN for better responsiveness.

One small gripe with these release notes is the promise of various features in future releases; perhaps a better approach would be to wait until the features are actually ready, and then roll them up into a major release.

Additional minor improvements include transcoding to Photoshop’s PSB (big file format, that allows image sizes up to 30,000 pixels), the ability to include analytics and JavaScript on a system-wide level, and improved colour rendering of PDF previews.

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