Enterprise Edition

Features

File Server Module

The Enterprise Edition can be used as a File Server as well as a DAM application. You can mount your Third Light server on your Mac or PC, open, edit and save documents from any application (with no special plugins) and still keep track of your content inside the rich DAM features of our product.

The File Server Module offers you the ability to:

• Store files in one, central DAM server
• Access the files through your web browser
• Access the files as a Windows network drive
• Access the files from MacOS X as a network volume

For example, if you have an InDesign project with dozens of linked assets, you can store it in Third Light from the start. Throughout the project, your whole team can access the InDesign files on a shared network drive provided by Third Light, and at the end it is already in your DAM server (with a complete revision history). The storage, folders and permissions are all completely unified by Third Light in the centre of your project.

Workflow and business modules

To succeed in an enterprise environment, Third Light is much more than just a storage solution. It also helps you govern how files move in and out of your server and helps you capture metadata descriptions in an unobtrusive, streamlined workflow.

For example, when files are added to your server, you can request that the user categorizes their file before passing it to an administrator for approval, or do the same with downloads when a guest-user requests a particular file. Instead of being a complex and daunting process, in IMS we use a friendly and reassuring step-by-step process with a chat window to ask administrators for help.

Supports your users during uploads and downloads

Users don't need to be trained to use Third Light because at each step your server sends helpful prompts or alerts you with emails - intervening or helping you at just the right moment. For example, your IMS server can catch duplicates before they reach your site. It notices duplicates at the moment they are uploaded and alerts the user immediately (even if the files are different).

Resize and repurpose a wide range of file formats, including video

IMS helps your staff repurpose images and videos into different formats and sizes, such as reducing a high-resolution TIFF file down to a web sized JPEG. It takes care of all of the technical decisions without complexity.

The Enterprise edition includes support for images and documents, and makes working with video far easier than heavy-weight studio software. No waiting, no plugins and no unsupported file formats to worry about. Simply upload an image, document, audio clip or video in any common format, and your Third Light server will produce previews for you to browse, watch or listen and download.

Rebrand, resell, and refine your system

The Enterprise edition gives you unparalleled access to customize the product. For example, you can add multiple theme packs and languages to your site, or set the search engine to show or hide metadata depending on the role of the user. Additionally, you can install multiple instances of IMS on a single server, offering even greater flexibility and cost savings.

Prices

The Enterprise edition is available as a core product with a range of optional services. Start with a primary server license and add licenses only for the extras you feel you need.

Required Components

Popular Options

Training and Handover

Capacity Planning^*

We can help you choose an appropriate server or cloud solution for your project, including specifying the server equipment you need. We commonly deal with capacities between 500GB and 80TB. We're able to host your server and offer multi-site hosting for critical systems - please ask for details.

Case Studies

Scion Research, New Zealand

Scion is a Crown Research Institute, based in Rotorua. Scion is dedicated to improving the international competitiveness of New Zealand's forest industries and building a stronger biobased economy for New Zealand. Scion's vision is to advance the widespread utilisation of renewable materials and products derived from plants for economic, environmental, cultural and social returns.

Scion uses a Third Light Enterprise Edition to store and manage New Zealand's largest forestry-related image collection, including an extensive stock of digital and analogue media. These files need to be searched and retrieved by marketing, communications and scientific staff at short notice from any of the four offices, with a total of approximately 350 staff accessing the system.

Bringing these assets together in an electronic image library has allowed Scion to save time and gain additional benefit from its ongoing investment in images. The enhancements provided by Third Light have extended the image library to be a powerful digital hub, particularly through the highly configurable metadata support - essential for correctly indexing scientific material - and the overall convenience afforded by the intuitive user interface. Files in a wide range of different formats, including scans from slides, can be easily downloaded in the desired format with no specialist tools and only a standard web browser to access the site.
These benefits have made IMS a valuable day-to-day tool for the organisation, as Gerard Rooijakkers explains:

"Scion's images and videos of forestry and biomaterials research were strewn over multiple repositories. Since the implementation of Third Light's IMS we are creating a central repository of all digital images and videos and are retrospectively digitising our hardcopy photographs and slides as part of our image preservation plan."

"Our scientists are impressed and enthusiastic users of the Third Light IMS library, thanks to its simple and intuitive format. The next step will be building an e-business portal so customers are able to access and purchase images."

Gerard Rooijakkers, Knowledge Centre Manager, Scion

Scion Case Study

▼ Read more…

The Pittsburgh Penguins

The Pittsburgh Penguins are a professional ice hockey team based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They are members of the Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). In 2011, the marketing team at the Pittsburgh Penguins deployed a Third Light Enterprise server to centralise their media storage and streamline digital brand activities through a single, definitive media bank.

"For a professional hockey team, photo management is an essential part of our marketing and brand. We were finding we had too many files to manage and needed to upgrade to a professional DAM solution. We selected Third Light for their easy to use, feature-rich product and helpful team."

"Since we launched, Third Light has really changed the way we manage and share these assets for the better, making our digital media easily searchable and much more engaging for every day tasks like sharing and discussing artwork. We are years ahead of where we were just several months ago."

Erik Watts, Senior Director, Technology - The Pittsburgh Penguins

▼ Read more…

Veolia Water, Australia

Veolia Water is a world leader in managing, operating and providing water and wastewater infrastructure services. It operates treatment plants and networks to provide drinking water, treat wastewater and produce recycled water for reuse. Across Australia and New Zealand, Veolia Water provides water and wastewater services to up to four million people.

Stuart Ford, Graphics Designer at Veolia Water in Pyrmont, New South Wales, explains how Third Light IMS has fitted conveniently into his team's daily routine:

"Third Light IMS has significantly improved the way we manage our digital media. The software has proved to be flexible and robust, and has transformed the way we use these valuable files. IMS allows our users to search, share and track digital files conveniently, and from any location. We are especially pleased with the upload download tools as they fit very well with our existing workflow, greatly enhancing our productivity without requiring us to learn new ways of working."

As with any Digital Asset Management project, adoption of new ideas and technologies requires a partnership between the authors of the software and the end users. Stuart Ford goes on to explain how Third Light has supported and maintained this important relationship:

"The support we've received from the team at Third Light has been consistently excellent. They were always on hand to answer queries as we started using IMS, and they've continued to offer timely and insightful advice as we discover new opportunities for using the software. Their team has been totally committed to our requirements, and I recommend their product and services to anyone considering DAM software."

Stuart Ford, Veolia Water Australia

▼ Read more…

Xstrata, Switzerland

Xstrata is a major global diversified mining group, listed on the London and Swiss stock exchanges, and the fifth largest diversified metals and mining company in the world, with operations and projects in 19 countries on 4 continents and top five market positions in each of its major commodities. The Group is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland and has approximately 24,000 employees world-wide, including contractors.

Xstrata use IMS to manage marketing and public relations materials globally, using their corporate intranet to access a pair of high-performance IMS servers located in the Swiss headquarters in Zug.

Staff can easily access digital media irrespective of location and timezone to efficiently create documents, presentations or populate online media. Best of all, IMS's intelligent download feature ensures the media is prepared in the appropriate size, shape and format for the application.

"Since the IMS library was installed, we have been able to manage our images in a fraction of the time. Our new electronic library allows us to search and track a very wide range of marketing and corporate photography.
"Producing annual reports will be so much easier now that we can track which pictures have been used in the past."

"The Xstrata IMS is 100% reliable: we have been extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the high standards of service Third Light deliver."

Brigitte Mattenberger, Corporate Affairs Xstrata (Schweiz) AG

Xstrata Case Study

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Mortgages Plc

Mortgages plc is a UK residential mortgage lender and a wholly owned subsidiary of Merrill Lynch, one of the largest financial institutions in the world. Founded in 1997, the company has offices in London and Glasgow and a number of regionally based staff.

Mortgages plc uses Third Light Enterprise edition to centrally store and display images for public relations use, including photographs from corporate events and product launches. Using IMS the pictures can be accessed from the London, Glasgow or regional offices of the business, and to share photos with partner companies using the lightbox, IMS's collaboration feature. The service is also used to offer prints from hospitality events to guests.

Peter Beaumont, Sales and Marketing Director, comments:

"Using the Third Light server has given us a way to distribute pictures and keep them centrally managed. We are able to offer galleries after events or launches, which we can share with our guests, PR companies and other relevant contacts. We've got photos from events since 2000, and it's fantastic having that available so easily. We also use IMS to store our stock of marketing images, such as director press photos."

"We've saved time and improved awareness of our brand. Having this picture library generates a positive impression, without being complicated to use. We're delighted to be using this in our marketing team."

Peter Beaumont, Mortgages plc

▼ Read more…

Specifications

The Third Light Enterprise edition is perfect for integrating with your existing business systems, and offers a wide range of technical advantages to IT teams and integrators.

Fast, uncompromising storage

The Enterprise Edition comes with a storage manager that lets you add more space when you need it. Storage can be expanded without disruption – local disks or other storage servers on your network can allow you to grow to unlimited sizes. You can even prioritize your fastest disks for the popular content.

• Hard drives
• File servers (NAS)
• SAN or iSCSI
• Virtual Server disks
• Mixture of storage

Workflow Processes

With the Enterprise Edition of IMS, a full range of workflow solutions are available, including:

• Inbound and outbound file routing (including FTP)
• Metatdata enforcement at upload
• Capture user text about download events, revisions
• Download approval by administrators
• Upload review by administrators
• Security and access privileges based on users, groups and folders (or LDAP group)

Built for easy maintenance

A Third Light Enterprise server will periodically notify you about new updates. Our product updates keep you completely secure and bring you new features and enhancements at no extra cost as they're included in our annual support and maintenance subscription.

• Secure initial configuration
• 6 software updates per year (seconds to install)
• Unlimited email and telephone support
• No manual security patches or manual administration

Flexible hosting

You can host your site with Third Light, or with Amazon EC2 in the Cloud - and for on-site deployments, you can install the Enterprise edition directly onto your own equipment. Installing IMS locally is ideal for fast, local network access with unlimited bandwidth, or you can totally outsource the system if you need flexibility.

Integrates with your authentication servers

The Enterprise edition is ready to connect to Active Directory or OpenID servers, so that you can instantly provide access to your existing users. Your software comes with with an easy-to-follow user guide showing each step in the installation.

Support for a wide range of file formats

This edition of IMS supports a very wide range of file formats, including numerous proprietary or complex file types.

1. All common image formats
2. Video (including HD)
3. RAW files from over 15 different vendors
4. Adobe PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign files
5. Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) including text search
6. PDFs with support for searching inside the content
7. Read and import any IPTC, EXIF and XMP metadata (including custom metadata)
8. Support for ICC colour profiles, including remapping to RGB, greyscale and CYMK

High-availability mirroring and backups

Never worry about losing your server or data again - not only can the Enterprise edition automatically synchronize to a secondary server (local or remote) it can roll back to a previous version. You can connect IMS to any existing backup service you wish, as the server comes with all administrator passwords.

Developer APIs

We offer a rich and easily accessible restful API as well as SOAP. You can use these interfaces to embed features from your Third Light server into other projects using ready-made example code. We use the same API to power our product, so it's documented and completely ready for you to get creative!

Rock Solid Architecture

Built on Linux with a carefully managed and maintained operating system package that has been through generations of testing and proving in the real world: high uptime, no surprises and no reboots.

Image, Document and Videos Support

GIF (including animated GIFs)
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
PNG (Portable Network Graphic)
BMP (Bitmap Image File)
TIFF (Intel and Motorola, uncompressed, ZIP and LZW)
JPC (JPEG 2000 Code Stream File)
JP2 (JPEG 2000 Core Image File)
EXR (Industrial Light And Magic OpenEXR)
IDD (Adobe InDesign)
WEBP and WEBPLL (Google image format)
TGA (Targa Graphic)
AI (Adobe Illustrator)
PSD (Adobe PhotoShop)
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format)
EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
PS (PostScript)

Raw formats

RAW (Leica and others)
CR2 (Canon)
RAF (Fuji)
DCR (Kodak)
MRW (Motorola)
NEF (Nikon)
ORF (Olympus)
DNG (Adobe)
PEF (Pentax)
SRF (Sony)
X3F (Sigma)
ERF (Epson)
MOS (Mamiya)
RW2 (Panasonic)
FR3 (Hasselblad)
R3D (Red)

Office Documents

TXT (Text, including RTF files and UTF-8 text)
CSV (Comma Separated Values)
DOC and DOCX (Microsoft Word)
XLS and XLSX (Microsoft Excel)
PPT and PPTX (Microsoft Powerpoint)
PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format)
OpenOffice and LibreOffice documents

Other specialist file types

TTF (TrueType fonts)
OTF (OpenType fonts)
ZIP Archives
CD-ROM ISOs
Apple DMG 
Generic file storage (eg. HTML, JS, CSS, proprietary formats)

Video formats

MPEG1 (MPEG-1 Layer 1 Video)
MPEG2 (MPEG Layer II Compressed Video)
WMV (Windows Media Video)
MOV (Apple QuickTime)
AVI (Audio Video Interleave)
MPEG4 (MPEG-4 Video File)
FLV (Flash Video File)
RM (Real Media File)
M4V (iTunes Video File)
H264 / MP4 (H.264 high definition video)
Apple ProRes
Avid QuickTime

Audio Files

MPEG1 (MPEG-1 Layer 1 Audio)
MPEG2 (MPEG Layer II Compressed Audio)
MP3 (MP3 Audio)
WAV (WAVE Audio)
OGG (Ogg Vorbis Audio)
AAC (iTunes Advanced Audio Coding)
WMA (Windows Media Audio)