Blog

Fröhliche Grüße von den DC-Weihnachtselfen zum Jahresausklang 2017!

It’s actually not that easy to write an article about a colleague who always shows modest restraint, prefers working from home and hardly ever participates in corporate events*. One day, he only said “Hi” and “Bye-bye” to the person he’s sharing the office with. During the hours in between, he looked at his screen in […]

Every year at “Girls’Day”, German schoolgirls get the chance to try out professions normally practiced by boys, or rather men. The IT sector is a good example, as DC’s staff structure clearly illustrates: Only two out of our 19 employees are women and none of them works in the Development or Support department. That didn’t […]

In April this year, we kicked off our DC Lab and set out to plan and build a new DC-X user interface, and to learn a lot on the way. Ole Olsen, Pascal Rohde, Carsten Schütte, an external designer and I worked on the visual design together. After a few months, we had beautiful design drafts of […]

Our team took up the Mannequin Challenge during our Christmas cooking & dinner party. Check it out!

In our “DC Lab”, we’re working on a new user interface for our DC-X Digital Asset Management system. Here’s a quick walkthrough of the first prototype built in October 2016. No release date yet, and everything subject to change 🙂

Digitale Publikationen verlegen: Das wollten Dennis, Thies und ich, die Gründer von DC, machen. Im Jahr 2016 ist das sicher nichts Aufregendes. Der Handelsregistereintrag mit diesem Firmenzweck stammt aber von 1991. Sowohl unsere Eltern als auch der Mann von der Handelskammer und Herr V. von unserer Hausbank verstanden nur Bahnhof –  bis DC 1993 das […]

Celebrating our company’s 25th anniversary has been a wonderful journey with amazing people and a lot of magic moments. We will keep very good memories of this trip… and a looooot of photos! Here comes a very small selection. Thanks to Björn Quoos and his event agency for helping us organizing this trip and thank […]

At Digital Collections (DC), we’re having a good run, with many customer projects currently going on. In the ”enterprise software“ space we’re operating in, many customers mean lots of manual work to do – consulting, data migration, configuration, custom features, integration and roll-out. But like other permanently-busy software developers, we find that short-term project requirements […]

Necat Kutlar and Thomas Wülfken aka Wülle are DC’s most senior employees aside from CEO Ole Olsen. They started working for the company in 1995 and 1996. In a recent chat with marketing manager Nina Drewes, they talked about their memories of the past 20 years. You have both been working at Digital Collections for […]

Our software developer Tim Strehle is one of three speakers in a webinar organized by the DAM Guru program. Wednesday, December 9, 10 am PT / 6 pm UCT Register HERE to participate and/or to receive a link to the recording. This DAM Guru Program member webinar provides DAM metadata geeks and techies with an […]

This year’s WAN-IFRA World Publishing Expo took place from October 5 to 7 in Digital Collections’ hometown Hamburg. At booth 1.415, the DC and Teknograd team met with customers and those interested in our Digital Asset Management system DC-X.

Ole Olsen im Interview mit Netzwirtschaft.net, dem Fachmagazin für Digitalschaffende. Wer ist Ole Olsen? Bitte stell Dich doch mal kurz vor. Eigentlich wollte ich Popstar werden. Sicherheitshalber habe ich aber parallel BWL studiert und durch einen Studentenjob bei der MOPO und beim NDR bin ich zum Journalismus geraten. Heute habe ich selber einen Verlag, der […]

Digital Asset Management systems are not much fun on their own – their real value is in helping data flow between all content-related systems with ease. Many of our customers are using our DC-X DAM product as the central content hub, in conjunction with Web Content Management systems, editorial systems, mobile apps, accounting systems and others. To […]

The DC team had a very special company outing this summer: cycling along the seaside, playing volleyball at the beach and having a really nice dinner with ocean view! Here are some impressions.

The article Challenge of Scale Part 7 – Digital Asset Management by Real Story Group’s Theresa Regli reminds me that our DAM software DC-X is quite good at “scalability”. What does that mean? The article lists many challenges, here’s some notes on three aspects: The article talks of “hundreds of thousands or millions of digital […]

Since the change from Oracle Text to Apache Solr/Lucene 1.4 in DC-X, time has passed and Solr 1.4 is now considered “old” software. (To be fair, it is a very stable version, running successfully on our customer’s DC-X systems.) Solr 1.4 has been succeeded by the 3.x branch. The current release 3.6 contains a lot […]

My brother, an ambitious hobby photographer, asked me to set up a website for him showcasing his photography. He had already bought XML Photography Template, a Flash app configured through (usually static) XML files. (No, I’m not a friend of Flash-only websites, I hope we can fix this later…) Photos are best handled by our […]

Using DC-X as blog software is not exactly what we had in mind when we built it (since it’s an enterprise-grade DAM system). But it’s a nice experiment that helps me test new DC-X releases, and it works well enough: My personal link weblog has been powered by DC-X for a few weeks now. Here’s […]

There is a new DC-X virtual machine on our WebDAV Server. It replaces the existing virtual machine that is based on Debian 4.0. Two thirds of our existing DC-X customers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the remaining installations use SUSE Enterprise Linux, Debian / Ubuntu is not being used on production systems afaik) – and […]

It’s an exception, but sometimes we do add a tiny feature to DC-X without a customer having asked for it, just for exploration… In that spirit, I have integrated a simple QR code display action that you can use to “beam” a DC-X document onto your smartphone. We’re using the Google Chart API to generate […]

In Hamburg findet heute zum zweiten Mal das scoopcamp statt. Organisiert und veranstaltet wird die Konferenz, die sich im weitesten Sinne mit Journalismus und dem Social Web beschäftigt, von Hamburg@Work und der dpa. Nach der erfolgreichen Premiere im letzten Jahr, gibt’s 2010 die Neuauflage des Journalisten-Events für die Online-Welt. Hier erfahren Sie alles über die […]

Usage rights for images – and other types of assets like video – are a tricky, but important part of Digital Asset Management. Am I allowed to use this image for my publication, under which conditions, and will I have to pay for it? Are there any restrictions? A DAM system must help answer these […]

Being a few months into a medium-sized DC-X installation, I’d like to share a few real-world numbers regarding image and text import speed. During mass import runs, the system had a relatively high load but was still usable. I’m quite happy with the performance so far: 50,000 images imported per hour (off-the-shelf DC-X importer); includes […]

I was excited when Apple anounced the new Mac mini Server, and was allowed to buy one for the company to install DC-X on it. It’s a beautiful computer, and very small, of course! The mini makes no noise at all and doesn’t require a keyboard, mouse or display after the initial installation. The perfect […]

This DC-X command line made me smile today (I’m doing batch data imports at a customer site): xsltproc custom_xml_to_dcx.xslt input.xml | php /opt/dcx/bin/dcx_import.php –app default – | php /opt/dcx/bin/dcx_export.php –app default -t document – -r ‘$job = new DCX_Job($obj->app); $job->setWorkflow(“recreate_previews”); $job->setStatus(DCX_Job::STATUS_TODO); $job->addDocument($obj->getId(), “input”); $job->save(); echo $obj->getId() . ” => ” . $job->getId() . “n”;’ It […]

Building the DC-X client as a “pure” web application (only HTML, CSS, JavaScript, no Flash, Silverlight or Java) has its advantages. But uploading files through the web browser sucks: Often no progress bars, no drag & drop of files to upload, tiresome selection of multiple files… (Back in another age, we played with the Windows […]

A typical DC-X system receives data from lots of different sources: News agencies, editorial systems, files in hotfolders, e-mails, RSS feeds. So there is a lot of code that deals with parsing various data formats and inserting content, metadata and files into DC-X. In DC4, all of that code was written in PHP and doing […]

I just returned from installing a basic DC-X system at a customer site in Northern Germany. My position at Digital Collections is not project manager – I work as software developer and architect – but since we’re just starting to roll out DC-X and it’s still in beta we decided to let developers participate in […]

Thesauri and lists of keywords are stored by DC-X in its topic map – a set of database tables modeled after the XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0 standard. For an introduction to topic maps, see the wonderful article The TAO of Topic Maps by Steve Pepper. So far we have implemented merely half of the […]

We’re currently working on a redesign of the DC-X user interface – while its backend has been quite stable for a while now, interface design has proven to be difficult and time-consuming. It might be interesting to look at the design approaches that we threw away. Here’s the first draft from the end of 2007: […]

I’m currently at a customer site, and I found that a lot of documents had data in the wrong field (“IPTC02015” instead of “Category”). An excellent opportunity to play with the DC-X command line tools: php /opt/dcx/bin/dcx_textquery.php –app default ‘+IPTC02015:[* TO *]’ -m 1000 | php /opt/dcx/bin/dcx_export.php –app default -t document – | sed ‘s/IPTC02015>/Category>/g’ […]

There’s lots of things that have to be working in order for a DC-X system to do its job. Even though DC-X is very stable, things can still go wrong (a hard disk is full, hardware fails, a process crashes) and you’ll want a monitoring system to tell you about it before users start complaining. […]

Tags are an important element of so-called “Web 2.0”. In addition to changing the metadata of the document itself, DC-X allows the user to add tags to the document – a great way of organizing documents for personal or departmental use (and you don’t need “update permissions” on a document to add tags to it). […]

DC-X offers a comprehensive web service API which is based on the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023) and OpenSearch 1.1 standards – basically XML over HTTP. This means two things: Skipping the browser user interface, you can read and search for DC-X documents (and other information) in any RSS reader (including the RSS readers integrated […]

DC-X is built on a solid foundation – well-established (and mostly open source) software. Here’s a list of the components that form the basis of DC-X: The DC-X source code is written in the open source language PHP. Its web browser user interface and web service API are delivered by the open source Apache web […]

Content is imported (ingested/catalogued) into DC-X using one of these methods: Users or automated processes are dropping files and folders into “hotfolders” monitored by DC-X. Users are manually uploading files using the DC-X browser interface. Users are creating new text documents in the web-based DC-X editor. DC-X is fetching remote data via HTTP in the […]

An unlimited number of publications can be set up in DC-X, along with metadata related to the publication itself (name, short name, platform, aggregation type, publisher, ISSN, eISSN, hierarchical list of sections/subsections or web channels). A document can be assigned any number of publication data records so that you can track how often it has […]

The “assets” (as in “Digital Asset Management”), the main entities of any DAM system, are called “documents” in DC-X: Database records containing text content along with structured metadata, and with zero or more attached files (stored in the filesystem, not in the database). All content is stored in Unicode, encoded as UTF-8, meaning that almost […]

[We’re currently preparing a Technical Whitepaper on our new DC-X product, and will write parts of it on this blog. Feedback is welcome. Please note: While we wouldn’t usually edit regular blog posts, we’ll probably modify the parts of this series regularly to mirror the evolving whitepaper.] This chapter summarizes the most important features and […]

Those who know our products are aware that we’ve partnered with Oracle for a very long time. While in the beginning there was DC3 with its proprietary, but very fast and efficient fulltext search engine, our DC4 and DC5 product lines relied heavily on Oracle Text. (With the exception of a few PostgreSQL-based installations, integrated […]

Gemeinsam mit dem Hamburger Systemintegrator SNAP Innovations starten wir jetzt an der Technischen Universität Dortmund ein sehr interessantes Cross-Media-Projekt. Ab dem kommenden Sommersemester werden die Studierenden im Fachbereich Journalistik mit DC-X als zentralem Newsdesk in den Bereichen Print, Online, TV und Radio arbeiten. Im Februar beginnen wir mit der Installation und bis Mitte April werden […]

[For our English-speaking readers: I’m linking to a German article on central and cross-media news desks.] Die taz schreibt sehr schön über Newsrooms in Redaktionen: Die Mauer musste weg (gefunden über turi2): “An langen Tischreihen, dem Balken, sitzen in schwarzen Anzügen die Chefs vor den 69 Flachbildschirmen und sprechen ab, welche Inhalte wie wann über […]