Daminion Software Release 0.9.7b

One of our featured DAM vendors, Daminion Software have released version 0.9.7b of their flagship DAM system.  Apart from wining the award for more obscure product version number of the week (and they’re not even open source!) the update contains a variety of new features:

• Import Office documents like Word, PowerPoint etc (2003 and newer 2007 types)
• Add/remove tags from search queries
• Batch update operations to all asset files in searches
• Silent update of DAM clients from a central server
• Thumbnail information display changes
• Support for  importing ACDSee tags
• Improved support for PDF files
• Improved rendering of WMF/EMF files

“Daminion 0.9.7b allows you to import Microsoft Office documents, including Office 2007 formats (files with extensions: .doc, .xls, .ppt, .docx, .xlsx, .pptx). Daminion Server customers can now update Daminion Clients automatically from the server computer in silent mode. Batch tag assignment and file removal operations can now be applied to all items in the query and are no longer limited by page size only.” [Read More]

It should be noted that Daminion is a client/server rather than web application, which may or may not be an advantage.  Although many DAM systems have migrated to being fully web based, that does come at some additional deployment complexity in terms of the server installation, even if the client element is obviously more straightforward.   How long vendors are going to be able to continue to use that delivery method remains to be seen.  As discussed last week, however, it does seem that on mobile platforms, apps as thick-clients seem to be gaining in popularity so those who have not gone web based might still be able to bypass it – although they will need to implement a different client for iOs, Android and now Windows 8 too.

Daminion highlight the low cost of their system as a key selling point of their application compared with others – the 3 user server edition is about $350 (US) per user – so $1,050 for a small team.  I don’t have a vast amount of direct experience with it, but noting their new feature to import ACDSee tags there appears to be a growing market for low-cost DAM that are a few steps above a conventional desktop image browser, such as ACDSee (which I do have experience of).  This seems like a competitive trend in the DAM industry right now.  The level of functionality these products offer, while still not as extensive as many larger or more advanced competitors, is getting better and they are starting to be able to handle tasks which until recently were considered hallmarks of a more advanced product (with a price tag to match).  I would have to wonder how many users might think something like this would be good enough for their needs rather than a more expensive alternative?

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