Release summary 2021.2

Download the Release Summary 2021.2 as PDF

censhare, the Integratable Omnichannel Platform

This second update for censhare in 2021 focuses on exciting integrations that provide you several new features and functions that make censhare even more versatile.

Let’s start with the applications of the Adobe Creative Cloud. These are very popular with professional creatives today, just like Microsoft Office applications are the de-facto standard for business users. And many of you were asking for a more seamless interaction between censhare and these applications.

To address this requirement we now integrated censhare with CI HUB, a smart connector that makes content managed in your censhare system available to applications from the Adobe Creative Cloud as well as Microsoft Office. It is perfect for lightweight publishing use cases but won’t replace our industry-leading InDesign integration. More food for thoughts here .

With this release, we also offer new ways to flexibly extend your censhare system to external SaaS solutions: the censhare Content Picker. It is based on Headless CMS and enables you to find and pick content from censhare for use in the respective solution. More in the elaboration about HCMS Contentpicker .

But there’s more in this release. We’re proud to announce the switch towards censhare WP. This significantly speeds up page delivery in the censhare web client. Please turn to the section below for the details.

The extreme flexibility of censhare also shines through our ecosphere Solutions program that enables our partners to present their solutions for censhare. These extend the capabilities of censhare with specific features and functions or even entire new solutions based on censhare.

Therefore, starting with this Release Summary, we’re going to take a look at selected partner solutions in lose order to inspire you how censhare can address concrete use cases. This time, we’re taking a look at:

• DeepL Connector – here

• Workfront Connector – here

Our development team also addressed bugs and issues that were present in previous releases of censhare.

We expect the next release in January 2022.

Stay tuned!

CI HUB Connector for censhare

Seamlessly use your assets with the Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office.

The CI HUB connector for censhare has been created for creatives who use Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, or Microsoft Office – Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or Outlook, including the Online versions of Microsoft Products – and who want to edit or use assets from censhare DAM.

Typically, you’d download the asset to your computer, edit or import it to the application. Once processed, you’d upload the new asset back into censhare. This can be a time consuming process and carries the risk of human errors, e.g. accidentally picking the wrong document when manually importing it into the application.

The new CI HUB Connector for censhare streamlines this process. It connects brand assets living within various repositories to native creative Integrationapps from the Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office and helps ensuring access and consistent use of all your brand assets throughout the organization.

Specifically, you can:

• Work with the following asset types:

  • Design layouts and creative projects

  • Media assets such as pictures, videos, audio and 3D-models

  • Document assets such as documents, presentations and spreadsheets

• Search assets by name, ID, type, groups

• Navigate through predefined folder structures

• Up- and download an asset

• Open, edit, and save an asset

• Display and place asset properties

• Customize your solution to reflect own types, relations and properties

The CI HUB Connector respects permissions and domains, so the user will only see assets available for him or her.

Finally, previews for each assets make finding the right content easy and intuitive.

Please note that the CI HUB Connector for censhare opens up censhare for lightweight publishing use cases as described. For sophisticated use cases in the area of print production management we recommend to consider our industry leading Adobe InDesign integration.

Content Picker based on HCMS

censhare is known as the integratable content platform. In our twenty-year history we’ve connected to many external applications, systems and solutions. 

In 2018 we launched of Headless Content Management System (HCMS), unlocking many use cases.

The latest example is the Content Picker, a user interface based on HCMS that can be embedded as a plug-in into the frontend of a third-party web application.

With the Content Picker, users can search, explore and use media assets stored in censhare without direct access to the censhare system itself.

Users stay in the third-party web application and explore the content via the plug-in, seeing only the assets and information that have been made available to the plug-in. So you remain in full control over which application can find and access which content.

The Content Picker supports full-text search with previews, intuitive sorting and filtering, and displays further information, for example metadata.

Once the user has found one or more content assets, he simply selects the respective files and processes them within the third party application.

At this point, the control is handed back to the third-party application which can download the content or use an URL to reference the asset in censhare. This can be useful, for example, when using an image in an email newsletter or in your Web CMS.

censhare WP

Users are always hungry for speed and performance. After all, who wants to wait longer than absolutely necessary?

But Web-based clients can suffer from the number of calls to the (remote) server that are triggered by the HTML code of the web page that shall be displayed. A connection needs to be established for each requested resource. While this works very fast in modern networks, it can still take a while if you have many calls to make.

The censhare web interface builds on TypeScript, a JavaScript based scripting language, and the open source Angular framework. Thousands of JavaScript files are transferred upon request for execution in the Web Browser. But the HTTP protocol only allows a few simultaneous requests, creating a huge overhead that costs time and consumes bandwidth. It slows down the communication between the censhare Server and the web browser and, ultimately, the user.

censhare WP fixes this. It improves the performance by downloading the JavaScript files just once at the beginning of the communication and then storing these files. Whenever a JavaScript file is needed, it is already present in the user’s browser and can be executed immediately and without any further network activity. 

censhare WP uses Webpack as format for the download. All JavaScript files and all static dependencies are combined into ‘Webpack bundles’. These bundled files are then compressed by various techniques such as removing white space, etc.

With censhare release 2021.2 we switch to using censhare WP as delivery method for static resources.

What’s more, censhare WP delegates all activities concerning authentication to Keycloak. This is a major change in the way we do authentication and provides many advantages over our traditional means of authentication.

Importantly, Keycloak provides you the industry standard for user authentication and login-page customization, enabling:

• Single Sign-On (SSO). Use one username/password combination across all applications belonging to the same realm .

• LDAP integration. Verify login information through LDAP.

• Support for Kerberos. This common network authentication protocol offers strong authentication and security for users and client/server applications.

• SAML connection of the Java Client. Enables a direct communication between client and webservice.

• Multitenancy per realm. Use the same authentication for various brands.

DeepL Connector by Savotex

Auto-translate your contentin just seconds

With the DeepL Connector from Savotex you can have your content translated automatically from censhare in a matter of seconds – whether it’s product information, thousands of product texts or articles, or even entire Microsoft Office documents. Thanks to its modular system, the DeepL Connector can be easily integrated into existing processes and systems.

How it works

Simply create and manage content in censhare as usual, then translate it automatically, securely and with high performance using one of the leading machine translation systems – DeepL.

censhare’s translation memory system (TMS) can be synchronized and expanded so that additional benefits can be derived from the translations.

Use Cases

Create automated translations for:

• Product texts

• Asset names or asset properties

• Entire Microsoft Office documents, like MS Word or MS Powerpoint

• Image and text content analyzed by Google Cloud AI Services, e.g. image metadata

Benefits

• Enjoy high-end translations thanks to neural networks and Artificial Intelligence

• Translate any text right away without leaving the censhare system

• Translations will be related to the original text asset automatically

• Countless languages supported

• Flexible integration into your workflows

• Automated content translation for regions and target groups

• Highest consistency of translations when combined with censhare’s Translation Memory System

• Maximum data security thanks to state-of-the-art encryption technologies and guaranteed data deletion after translation

USE CASE IN ACTION: hessnatur

This German retailer for organic clothes from ‘fair trade’ businesses around the world planned to enter several new markets. However, they lacked decent translations for product and advertsing content for their more than 200,000 products and associated texts and images.

Solution

• Use DeepL for automated high-quality translations for all their content in censhare

• Re-use translations from the Translation Memory System

• Use translations for print and digital channels

about Savotex

Savotex is a censhare Gold Partner based in Germany with vast experience in planning, implementing, customizing and extending censhare systems.

Learn more about the solution in our ecosphere solutions space .

Workfront Connector by MSP AG

Connect the Industry-Leading Work Management Solution to censhare

Whether you’re managing product information or developing global marketing campaigns, content and project work make up a large part of your daily work. Exchanging information, creating content, structuring processes and workflows - all this should be possible collaboratively and on the basis of a central database. With the censhare Workfront Connector, you can do exactly that.

How it works

This connector supports Workfront users in three areas:

• Project Workflow & Task Sync: Enables you to create projects and tasks in Workfront, which are pushed to censhare. censhare logs hours and comments and pushes this data to Workfront. Users always work in the system that is best suited to their respective tasks, but benefit from the combined strengths of both systems.

• censhare DAM as Workfront storage: Digital assets attached to projects or tasks in Workfront are stored in censhare. These assets are visible in Workfront and can be linked to work. Organizations already using censhare can leverage existing assets in Workfront. censhare again provides capabilities far beyond those of existing DAM integrations in Workfront.

• censhare extended by Workfront Proof: Assets can be sent from censhare to Workfront Proof workflows. Proofing results are directly visible in censhare.

Benefits

• Create and manage your projects

• Review and approve work

• Manage resource utilization

• Link digital assets to projects and tasks

• Project dashboards and reporting

• Provide level of effort

• Create and manage digital assets

• Locate and reuse existing assets

• Receive work assignments

USE CASE IN ACTION: US Publisher

This publisher needed to:

• Organize international print campaigns planned in workfront

• Share assets and images from censhare DAM to Workfront

• Route status information on single tasks between the systems without user intervention

Solution

• Small foot print REST based Interface as addition to the censhare REST environment

• Establish event driven update mechanism using built-in capabilities on both server sides

• Fully customizable feature- and meta data mapping between Workfront and censhare

• Manage data objects in Workfront, e.g. projects, tasks, documents, by existing censhare assets from default configurations to achieve minimal adaptions for an existing censhare DAM solution

about MSP AG

MSP is a censhare Platinum partner based in Germany. The company develops highly specialized software and offers consultancy services as well as IT services.

Learn more about the solution in our ecosphere solutions space .

Roadmap

Here’s our long-term technology roadmap, outlining our mid-term and long-term plans and showing the topics we’re working on. 

• Become ‘cloud native’, not just ‘running in the cloud’.

  Take advantage of the power of the cloud like scalability and cost savings through serverless computing.

• Modular architecture based on mainstream technology.

  Transition our existing technology stack to a modular, micro-service architecture based on mainstream technologies with focus on “API first” and maximize integration capabilities.

• Ensure the continued support of print production offering.

  Professional print production management has always been a key factor for censhare’s future success. We’re going to ensure that our Print Production Management module continues to meet market demand with state-of-the-art capabilities in the future, especially for desktop applications like Adobe InDesign.

• Ensure support and attractiveness for current product offering.

  Future censhare versions will evolve in a non-disruptive way. The different client applications will co-exist in harmony while we are rejuvenating the tech stack of our product.

• Improve PIM and PIM syndication capabilities

  As Product Information Management is getting more important for providing a holistic customer experience, we’re going to further shape our PIM capabilities, including stronger syndication of content and data.

• Improve our Analytics capabilities

  A thorough analysis of content use and customer reactions is essential for refining and planning content production and campaigns. Hence, we look into extending censhare capabilities through powerful external BI and analytics solutions as well as improve censhare proprietary capabilities.

For more detailed information please jump to our latest documentation .

You can find dedicated information about included features, release notes, known issues, deprecations and system requirements.