Thursday 5 June 2008

Another Two Hundred Holiday Snaps

It used to be just the Japanese tourists who went everywhere with their cameras hanging around their necks, but now all of us seem to carry some kind of image recording device to capture those "magic" moments. Mobile phones now come with in-built cameras as standard that even store video. So every part of our lives and every vaguely interesting view we see can be recorded. Returning from holiday no longer means a trip to the chemist and then a week wait to see if our twenty-four exposes an adequate quality. Instead we just bluetooth our two hundred plus pictures from our phone to our PC. Then take our laptop around to our friend's house and bore them rigid with our on-screen slide show that contains several pictures of the same scene from slightly different blurred angles. It is not just at home that the avalanche of digital photographs has occurred because many companies and organisations are finding their networks getting filled up by photographs and videos are varying sizes. Not all of these are employee's holiday snaps or embarrassing pictures of the office Christmas Party, but they are actually quite useful pictures that could one day be used in marketing materials or on company websites. The problem is how will they ever find the slightly useful ones again. It isn't like an email or Word document they can just search for with a word from the text. A picture might contain several people and different items that could be of interest in the background. SharePoint has become the great Information Storer and Manager for many companies, but even SharePoint shakes it head at the thought of storing the thousands of images that many companies have. So the photographs are stored in user's personal drives (often more than once) or lost for good. Added to the photographs there are videos and even audios (many companies have to legally record telephone conversations with customers). So what is the answer ! Very few software products over the years have made me go wow, but that happened last year when I first tried out Media Rich for Sharepoint . It was just so impressive because it used all the function of SharePoint that I was used to but gave me all the digital media features to allow me to store thousands of images and use them in so many different ways. I could zoom in on tiny sections of pictures, change between many different image formats, rotate, change to black and white and all without leaving SharePoint. I could certainly have fun with my latest holiday snaps and even zoom in on that blonde topless sunbather in the top left hand corner. So impressed was I with Media Rich for Sharepoint (as well as the blonde sunbather) that I convinced my bosses at officetalk to become the main UK reseller. For Councils, Advertising Agencies and Media groups the benefits of Media Rich for Sharepoint are vast saving them both time and money. They can now finally have real Digital Asset Management and really use their SharePoint investment. Now to search my Media Rich for Sharepoint library of Villa goals for that 1996 strike by Dwight Yorke goal against Leeds in the Coca Cola Cup Final.

No comments: