Recently I had a new Blackberry and although my chubby fingers are slightly too wide for the qwerty keyboard I am getting use to it. Especially as I now know you don’t have to have it so it bleeps all night long every time a message arrives. With the add-on apps like Google Maps and mobile Facebook added it is sadly becoming a big part of my life. I can even view my SharePoint sites on there. Of course as is the norm these days every mobile device has to have an inbuilt camera. I mean I am typing away at the moment on my laptop and if I accidently press the wrong function key I will hear a clicking noise and an unflattering picture of the top of my head will appear on the screen. When I follow the boys in claret and blue to Wembley in February my Blackberry will probably end up videoing my walk to my £70 seat or taking a photograph of the Wembley arch in the dark. The world is becoming full of digital images and videos. So how can SharePoint handle all this digital images?
If you hear the term DAM SharePoint it isn’t always a bad thing as DAM can be Digital Asset Management. This is how you manage your Digital Assets. If you have SharePoint (either WSS or full MOSS) then there is a terrific application for you called ‘MediaRich for SharePoint’. MediaRich does really have the wow factor and brings SharePoint to life. For media people it finally gives them a reason to use SharePoint even on their precious Macs. It adds a couple of extra webparts that makes the out of the box SharePoint Picture Library look as exciting as a conversation between Steve Davis and Nigel Mansell on the subject of stamp collecting. It allows you to zoom in close on images, crop sections, change formats, turn to trendy black and white, sharpen quality, flip upside down and even email as a zip file to your commercial printers. Even if you haven’t got thousands of images or videos the automatic thumbnailing of all types of files including Office Documents makes it worth trying. Throw in the enhanced Search capabilities and suddenly your SharePoint has come to life. Who needs 3D TV when MediaRich can make your SharePoint this dynamic and you don’t even need to put on any cardboard glasses. Oh and I haven’t even mentioned that you can set all these image changes to run as an overnight batch job.
If you have SharePoint I recommend you take time to watch the MediaRich Demonstration video now because it might make you rethink the way you use SharePoint. Just Click Here and I think you will be impressed.
So now I need to send all my photographs, videos and audio recordings from my Blackberry to my SharePoint. Many of them taken at the recent Villa semi-final game. I need to make room for pictures of Villa lifting cup against Manchester United on 28th Feb.
