[thelist] Canto Cumulus?

Sam sam at sam-i-am.com
Thu Aug 21 16:57:25 CDT 2003


hi Tom,
we use it here at work for (internal) asset management. We've got an 
archive of scans, images, pdf, docs etc going back 30+ years that our 2 
librarians maintain. Mostly their interface with it is the database tool 
  - adding data and metadata.
We also used their web add-on to make the archive available on the 
intranet. I did most of that work originally, they've since taken it on.

It does some nice things like on-demand generation of various 
resolutions of the (graphic) assets. And it has a shopping cart like 
functionality for acummulating a set of assets for download.

We had some difficulty with it intially but their tech support was 
fairly responsive. I didn't do any of the comparitive purchasing 
research so I can't tell you if its better or worse than productX. I can 
say it was sufficiently non-intuitive to warrant 3 weeks of developer 
(me) time to I can get a workable, attractive web interface on it.. The 
templating is a little funky and limited, but we ultimately got done 
what we wanted done.
Technically speaking there's a database component - with a windows 
client for data entry, management. For the web functionality there's a 
cgi (compiled .exe) that allows querying of the database and does the 
templating. We use it with IIS. As a cgi it probably works with all 
kinds of servers though.

If you have specific questions, feel free to contact me offlist (or on 
even).

Sam

Tom Dell'Aringa wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a job opportunity in front of me that might include dealing
> with a large image database that is stored in a Cumulus database,
> which a company called Canto is the maker of.
> 
> This is the only thing that I am not familiar with that has to do
> with the job. I've take a brief look at thier website but its a lot
> of marketing speak. Does anyone know anything about this that could
> give some insight? Is it good, bad, or indifferent? How is it to work
> with - or is it some kind of standalone system?
> 



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