ECF G5 Asset Management Subsystem

A Quick Summary

A recent business survey conducted last month involving participants from 347 retailers, manufacturers, agencies and high-tech companies worldwide revealed that quite a good number of companies are looking to enhance their customer’s online web experience in 2008. Findings showed that more than 50 percent plan to deploy new features and rich internet enhancements – including enhanced imagery, personalization and user-generated content – to their sites within the next six months and 93 percent say they will deploy these within the year. According to the survey, the greatest growth areas for planned features are mobile commerce, URL/widget sharing, personalized messaging and user ratings.

When dealing with an online sales presence, one major key is the company’s ability to differentiate itself from the rest of the pack. Respondents indicated that one of the most highly-effective features for online businesses is a 360-degree spin, which the survey found to be not yet widely deployed. Other top-ranking features and functionalities identified by respondents include: alternate views, user ratings, videos, blogs, product tours, online catalogs, personalized messaging, quick looks and personalized stores.

One-third of the respondents said they incorporated zoom and alternate view functionality in their sites. Twenty-five percent of the respondents said they have deployed the following features and functionalities: microsites, videos, online catalogs, personalized stores, blogs, color swatching, quick looks, RSS and product tours.

So What’s New?

Aware of this trend toward personalization and optimizing customer experience, Mediachase’s ECF G5 Asset Management subsystem is our attempt to provide a robust architecture on which to build unique personalization and other types of customizations that suit your uinque business needs.

The Asset Management subsystem is designed to support a variety of different types of binary data. This subsystem will be included as part of our G5 Enterprise version (ECF G5) and its conception was driven by years and years of customer feedback to have a unified way to store various types of data including: images, videos, software downloads, PDFs or whatever you need.

But ours is not an asset library in your traditional sense where things are mapped in a one-to-one relationship. Digital assets in our G5 subsystem can, for example, be used by other subsystems to associate a set of images with a particular category or product.

The Asset Management subsystem is built using technology from our Instant Business Network product, or IBN, called "Business Application Foundation," or BAF. This architecture is what allows for the flexible configuration of custom fields to an unlimited combination of associations to various types of binary data.

For example, let’s say you want to have width and height for an image and you want to record these attributes seamlessly. With BAF technology, you can create handlers so that these properties are auto-populated at the file metadata level and fields created in the database whenever an image file is uploaded.

High Level Feature List

• Provider-based storage
  • You can decide how and where the files are stored based on file meta type, location of the folder assets, the size of the file, and other attributes
  • By default, the file system and database storage providers are included
• Provider-based downloads
  • You can decide how the downloads are handled
  • By default, there are three providers: IIS, an http module and an http handler
• Provider-based security
  • You can intercept requests for downloads and enforce some security checks
  • This is especially useful for implementations that are based on subscriptions

For more info, please visit our Wiki.