SharePoint DAM: Versioning Metadata

As we've just released the 2.0 version of our FC.MetadataExtractor product I thought I should catch up with some blog postings on DAM functionality in SharePoint.

One of the great things that come with SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3 is that you can keep track not only of the different versions of an image but also of its metadata. This is extremely helpful as entering metadata in a corporate environment is usually done over multiple rounds and maybe even involves several contributors.

All you need to do to activate versioning of metadata is to enable Versioning in the Site Settings:

Once that is enabled you can either create a new version by uploading a new version of the image which includes new metadata, or by editing the metadata directly in SharePoint.

The Version history is now available via the item's context menu and the metadata trail can be seen in the screenshot below:

This is just one example of the great base-level functionality SharePoint 2007 / WSS 3 include that can be applied in many scenarios, but is especially useful for metadata-heavy applications like DAM.

Published: Dec-23-09 | 0 Comments | Link to this post

FC.MetadataExtractor 2.0 Launch

It's been quite a busy time lately, as we were zeroing in on the 2.0 release of our FC.MetadataExtractor solution, and I have to say that the good old 80/20 rule certainly still applies (the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time).

Just to give a quick overview: The FC. MetadataExtractor reads metadata from images - either on upload, or triggered manually - and stores it in the Sharepoint columns.

As the SharePoint custom document parser interface turned out to not be available for the main image formats we had to use Event Receivers. However, those also turned out to be quite inadequate, e.g. as the ItemUpdated receiver is asynchronous and interferes with the EditForm that comes up when someone uploads a single image. Hristo Pavlov had a good suggestion on how to solve that one problem, but it still leaves a lot of questions on how to wrap all this customization into a single feature, which is to be installed.

And beyond that there were many more individual problems attached to the different ways to upload or move images to a SharePoint library. Some of them are related to IIS and SharePoint settings in general, like for uploading large image files. I'll do a separate post on this once we're through with the release.

At this point I also want to thank our beta testers. They are still the best source of inspiration and guidance!!

Published: Dec-11-09 | 0 Comments | Link to this post