DAM Publishing with Canto & Priint
Interview with Thomas Mockenhaupt from Canto
The priint:suite publishing system by WERK II and Cumulus, the DAM system by Canto, now work together better than ever before - thanks to newly developed integration. Thomas Mockenhaupt, Managing Director at Canto, explains in an interview why WERK II and Canto co-developed a solution, where its strengths lie, and how our common customers can profit from the interface between the two systems.
Please explain briefly your enterprise and your role within it
Canto is the leading provider of Digital Asset Management software for businesses that have to organize their contents and workflows according to their individual needs. As Managing Director and CSO at Canto, I am responsible for sales and marketing for our enterprise DAM system, Cumulus. I ensure that our customers’ use cases are the focus of all our development efforts. Our Professional Services Team, who has over 20 years of project experience in the DAM field, and has compiled a wide variety of use cases, supports me in this endeavor with all their know-how. This is why leading enterprises in many industries rely on Canto Cumulus and Canto Professional Services.
How did the collaboration with WERK II come to be?
It’s a pretty simple story – Horst Huber, CEO at WERK II, and I noticed that, together, we could offer a very good solution for a problem shared by many businesses, and which, therefore, makes sense for many of our customers. In practice, data is commonly managed redundantly across multiple systems. However, retaining data without redundancy is essential, considering the increasing number of channels to be served; on one hand, in order to avoid additional cost and to keep the overview, and on the other hand, to offer a functional, easy-to-use environment to our end users.
Even after our first meeting, we were certain we speak the same technological language, and that an integration – a “mini PIM” solution – would be very possible. Some pilot projects already integrate the two systems. The cooperation with WERKII shapes up to be very solution-oriented – a great fit for us!
How do Cumulus and priint:comet complement each other?
In the past, automatically generating catalogs, tariff lists and the like, required complex PIMs or in-house solutions. Our solution cannot claim to have the same features as a full PIM system, but it does represent an alternative for customers whose workload does not economically justify such a system. With priint:comet and Cumulus, businesses have a bulk-free standard solution available, that can even handle complex publications in multiple languages. And all that comes at a fraction of the cost of a traditional PIM system!
What are the concrete advantages? How do customers profit, other than from the price?
Cumulus works seamlessly with the modular priint:comet software for systematized print publishing by WERK II. The bidirectional interface developed by WERKII connects the two products perfectly. With this new solution, our customers can significantly optimize their print publishing processes, because editorial content in publications with both product data and illustrations can be combined in just one system. With content and asset workflows from Cumulus and the publishing functionality of priint:comet, flyers, tariff lists and catalogs can be generated automatically. At the same time, a where-used list is maintained in the asset meta-data, resulting in a clean archive of published content.
How does the solution function technically?
We decided to integrate Cumulus into priint's publishing:hub component as a data and asset source. Product assets and metadata are accessed live via RESTful web services. The access to Cumulus takes place in the background. Cumulus is used to define workflows and administrate data while publishing:hub gathers assets and related information, displays print previews, and prepares publications for release.
What about additional data sources and output channels?
The bidirectional interface facilitates and accelerates the creation and publication of content, as well as the management of print publications, products and related metadata.
Other third-party systems (such as ERP and Content Management Systems, etc.) can be integrated as well, of course, since both systems are designed to seamlessly work with a variety of data sources. Information from third-party systems can easily be aggregated using the public interfaces of both systems, allowing personalized project and process adjustments.