Friday, September 26th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Southpaw Technology ships five new Tactic apps

Southpaw Technology has launched five new apps for Tactic, its open-source asset-management system, including dedicated tools for VFX facilities and marketing teams, and more general utilities.

Tactic | VFX and Tactic | Brand Manager
Announced at Siggraph earlier this year, Tactic | VFX collects “all the features a visual effects studio might expect” in an asset-management system into a clean UI.

Based on “learned best practices in the VFX market”, it supports standard naming conventions and versioning, and includes scheduling and analytics tools, plus the option to associate assets to shots or sequences.

Of the other apps, the new Tactic | Brand Manager is a similarly task-specific tool, aimed at marketing teams.

Tools for managing multi-site workflows and central content repositories
The other three apps provide less market-specific utilities. Tactic | aSync, announced at Siggraph, is designed to address the needs of companies working across multiple location and time zones.

Tactic | ServerAssist, also announced at Siggraph, is designed to improve file management in large shared content repositories and “turbo charges OS searches by up to 4000% within TACTIC”.

Finally, the new Tactic | Media Library does what its name suggests, acting as “a central, searchable and secure repository for every asset a company creates”, with search, metadata and tagging functionality.

Pricing and availability
Tactic | VFX is avaialble free; the other apps are priced on enquiry. Read the Siggraph announcements here, and the news release about the two newest apps below.

PRESS RELEASE (Excerpts)
Southpaw Technology, the developer of the open source digital asset and workflow management platform TACTIC, announced today that it has just launched all of the apps announced at Siggraph 2014 — TACTIC | VFX, TACTIC | aSync, TACTIC | Server Assist — and that it has included a fourth and fifth product in the new launch line up: TACTIC | Media Library and TACTIC | Brand Manager.

The TACTIC | Media Library

Built on the TACTIC digital asset management platform, TACTIC | Media Library is a central, searchable and secure repository for every asset a company creates. The solution lets users easily ingest, organize, manage and distribute assets across their company or across the globe.

  • Central and Secure – Go to one location to find any file, including audio files, documents, art files and more.
  • Powerful Search – Find assets in seconds.
  • Administration Controls – Control which people, groups or departments have access to which assets.
  • Meta Data and Tagging – Tag media and add searchable meta data for easier sorting and searching
  • Customizable – The interface is completely customizable, allowing organizations to brand the experience or to create interfaces with only the features certain users need.

The TACTIC | Brand Manager

Southpaw Technology has also announced the launch of TACTIC | Brand Manager.

TACTIC | Brand Manager has been built on the TACTIC digital asset management platform. The app provides marketing teams with a powerful, cross-platform solution for managing brand, image and content across campaigns, from any location.

  • Campaign Management – Create campaigns around assets and set due dates, tasks and owners to them.
  • Dashboard – See all campaigns and assets associated with them, as well as the status of those assets, who is working on what, and where in the creative process campaigns stand.
  • Project Tracking – The TACTIC platform includes a jobs module, task management and GANTT charts to help teams plan and track their assets through the marketing process.
  • Create Asset Pipelines – TACTIC | Brand Manager will ship with a default pipeline, or set of steps, to move assets through the approval process; however, the pipeline is completely customizable.
  • API – TACTIC | Brand Manager has the ability to integrate with some of the marketing industry’s leading tools, such as Salesforce.

Pricing and Availability

TACTIC | VFX, TACTIC | Media Library and TACTIC | Brand Manager will all be available in two options — hosted on the AWS cloud or on premise — and will be accessible on a range of platforms, including Windows, OS X, iOS, Linux, and Android. TACTIC | aSync and TACTIC | Server Assist are available on premise only. Contact Southpaw Technology for pricing.


Read more about the new apps on Southpaw Technology’s website

View demo videos of the new apps on Southpaw Technology’s YouTube channel