Today we officially launched the 3.4.1 release of our .NET Open Source Digital Asset Management System, FocusOPEN Digital Asset Manager.  It’s over 3 months since the last edition (3.3.9.5) and we took the beta updates through several strenuous testing sessions with our development team and volunteers from the FocusOPEN Developer Network.  The reason for the longer than average release cycle has been the volume of new features we’ve added.  We ported a large number of enterprise facilities we have previously implemented as custom solutions for our enterprise and consulting clients and made them part of the core system, out of the box.  The stand-out items include:

• Image Open Studio: enables cropping, flipping, re-sizing and rotating of Image assets so you can avoid the need to spend money on Photoshop licences for end users with basic asset manipulation needs
• Granular permissions: we’ve added a fully hierarchical ‘groups’ system that is structured in a full taxonomy like all our other metadata and users can belong to multiple groups.  Permissions can be set on an asset by asset basis.   There is a batch update to change a group of assets in one go also.
• Physical assets: not many of our newer users and clients are aware we’ve been involved with DAM since the mid-nineties when a lot of the end users were photo libraries who still used analogue assets like transparencies and 35mm slides.  Adding the ability to order physical assets was actually a case of porting functionality we used to have in older editions of our product into the new version.  These days the typical use scenario is ordering marketing merchandise rather than physical assets but the principles have a lot of similarities.
• Authentication Plug-Ins.  We have had Active Directory integration in our product for some time but this was previously implemented on a case by case basis.  We completely overhauled the authentication system in the core and re-implemented AD integration as a plug-in.  It’s possible to use the authentication plug-ins to integrate with other third party login systems also.
• Email broadcasts.  You can now send batch emails out to every users on FocusOPEN (or sub-divisions thereof).
• PDF contact sheets.  It’s now possible to generate a lightbox or order as a PDF.

There are 25 enhancements to FocusOPEN in version 3.4.1 and the open source edition is totally free to download and start using right away (with full source code access).  You can keep up to date with FocusOPEN news and updates with how-to articles on the FocusOPEN blog: http://www.digitalassetmanager.com/blog/