Release summary 2022.1

Download the Release Summary 2022.1 as PDF

New Features and Functions for censhare

Earlier this year we’ve re-launched our brand. Our new corporate identity is clear, modern, fresh and communicates well what censhare stands for: An Omnichannel Content Platform that enables you to master your content. And with censhare 2022.1, the new brand has found its way into the rebranded client. See it on page 8. But we’ve added a lot of functionality, too.

Improved: censhare WP

We introduced censhare WP – censhare with Webpack technology – last year. It downloads JavaScript files and static dependencies as compressed ‘Webpack bundles’, reducing bandwidth consumption and latency issues. It also offers authentication through Keycloak, enabling Single-Sign-On, LDAP, and many more methods. Now we‘ve further tweaked the performance of censhare WP for a stellar censhare experience at all times.

PIM takes automatic action

Product managers and marketers will be delighted to hear that updating already published product data has become even easier with this release. Now censhare can alert and notify users of any change along the product structure and data. Effectively, users can utilize a complex product structure with multiple asset types and relations without experiencing the complexity behind the structure. Everything is seen and treated as “one product”, which significantly eases updating affected products in the channels as needed. Read all about this in chapter PIM – Asset Structure Change Detection .

censhare gets even easier

We constantly look for innovative ways to make censhare as intuitive to use as possible. In this respect, 2022.1 offers you three key improvements:

Firstly, as search is one of the very strong features of censhare, we‘ve improved managing and accessing stored searches, a common request by users. – Please jump down to Structured Stored Searches .

Secondly, the collaboration capabilities from the web client are now also available to users of the desktop client. This enables seamless communication between users of these clients. More in chapter Improved Collaboration Across Clients .

Finally, we‘ve improved censhare‘s capabilities in the area of video transcoding. Now videos can be transcoded using AWS Media Convert, a powerful and fast media converter. This, and more in our chapter about Further Enhancements .

Stay tuned!

PIM – Asset Structure Change Detection

Let censhare do the heavy lifting when updating product information

Every day, product managers and marketers face the task of keeping all their data up to date across all their communication channels. This is especially challenging for updating information that has already been published. The most important use case here is to correct errors that have already been published. With this feature you can detect all places where updates have happened across your entire product portfolio. 

A common challenge, for example, is the replacement of a product image. This usually raises two questions: 1) Where has original image been used. and 2) how can it be updated quickly, with as little effort as possible?

censhare will now notify users of any change along the product structure and its data. Because everything is treated as “one product” you do not need to understand the complexity of the structure and how to work with it. Instead, you can use that product structure with multiple asset types and relations without being exposed to its complexity.

Once you have applied all required changes in censhare, the data can be automatically transformed for and syndicated to the channels where that information has been published. This can be, for example, an ecommerce platform or the product page of a corporate website. If an image is updated in the DAM you will be notified in the PIM.

Basically, the mechanism sets a flag once the product data has been changed by the user and the correct action can be taken. This is quite similar to the mechanism censhare already offers for print publishing.

Here’s a bit of technical background: This capability is achieved by looking at changes of asset structures. You know, censhare stores data not just in the asset itself but in child assets that are related to the root asset through specific asset relations. This asset structure can now be considered as one single asset, enabling a holistic view to detect, aggregate and propagate the changes from the bottom of a structure up to the root level.

It can be configured for any type of child/parent assets and asset relation types, and to any depth.

Structured Stored Searches

Managing searches for the entire organization has become even easier

censhare enables you to centrally prepare, store and share common search scenarios that are relevant for your entire organization. This is highly efficient for queries that are commonly used, for example, to find specific asset types or to apply filters right away so you don’t have to apply them manually every time you use that search.

Consequently, users tend to have long lists of stored search queries. As your list of searches grows over time, it can be challenging to keep the overview as you scroll through long lists of searches.

Now we’re providing you a new asset type called “Search Group”. Administrators can assign such stored searches as well as search groups to such a search group asset.

What’s more, the administrator can setup a search group hierarchy in the system workspace. These hierarchies can be shared across users and user groups, roles or domains.

This reduces “Time to Asset” – the time it takes to find the right asset. A great improvement for everyone in the organization.

Improved Collaboration Across Clients

Desktop client gets nifty communication functions

With the introduction of censhare’s web client, we added a set of tools – consisting of comments and tasks that are related to assets – to foster the seamless collaboration when working with content in censhare.

Upon launch these tools were only available to users of the web client. But customers were excited about these features – especially users who heavily rely on tools like Adobe InDesign – and wanted to use them in their powerful and efficient desktop clients, too.

With this release we close this gap, vastly reducing the need to use both clients at the same time when creating or editing content.

Working with tasks and comments can now be done all within the desktop client as they are always shown in the correct context.

As a result, tasks and projects can be completed faster and with fewer errors, leading to an overall increase of productivity and efficiency.

HCMS 3.0

Several new features for HCMS

Headless CMS 3.0 brings new features that make it easier to define the REST API for both frontend and backend integration.

Web Frontend Integration

• HCMS now provides advanced controls for image caching behavior of the web browser. This also is possible for download links.

• Now it is possible to serve content just in a single language, which is automatically selected from the available ones according to user preferences. This can save a significant amount of data transfer.

• Media variants can now be included directly in the entity JSON, reducing the number of requests.

Backend System Integration (via Server Module)

• Now the asset locking mechanism (check-out/check-in) is supported.

• You now can access the asset history.

These new features further improve the compatibility with the censhare application server and enable additional use cases when using HCMS.

Further Enhancements

Video transcoding: AWS ElementalMedia Convert

censhare is far more than a simple image DAM. It is a sophisticated media DAM that stores and manages countless media formats, for example videos and 3D files.

Now the transcoding of video assets has been vastly improved by utilizing the powerful AWS Elemental Media Convert feature.

This enables cloud customers to take advantage of the incredibly versatile AWS transcoding engine, increases the efficency of transcoding and enables users to pick and choose their preferred transcoder (Amazon Elastic Transcoder or AWS Elemental Media Convert). It should be noted that the new engine is less expensive than Amazon Elastic Transcoder, so it’s definitely worthwhile considering a switch.

CI HUB supports Wordpress and Sharepoint now

As you know, censhare supports CI HUB, a nifty 3rd party integration that enables desktop applications from the Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office, as well as Figma and Sketch, to access and use content stored centrally with censhare.

Now, CI HUB has extended their impressive portfolio of supported third-party applications to include Wordpress and Sharepoint, which both have been commonly requested by censhare users.

Support for latest Microsoft® Mail Services

Microsoft® Exchange Online has recently deprecated Basic Authentication (i.e., sending username and password over SSL) for multiple email protocols. Continuing to use such basic authentication may pose a security risk to the users.

Users should also be aware that basic authentication in Exchange Online does not support Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and won’t be supported by Microsoft going forward. As a result, POP/IMAP (which only support basic authentication) will stop working.

With this release we close the gap by connecting to Exchange Online using the advanced protocol “Microsoft Graph API”.

Support for Adobe InDesign, macOS and Apple hardware

Last autumn, Apple has released macOS Monterey, and we’re happy that censhare release 2022.1 is compatible with this latest operating system.

Same with Adobe InDesign 2022. The latest censhare plugin will work seamlessly with the leading layout software.

For your convenience, we’ve created an overview chart that covers the technology compatibility between censhare, Adobe InDesign, macOS, and processor platforms.

In alignment with Adobe we will support InDesign CC 2018 and higher only in conjunction with our plugin. This affects all censhare versions.

Re-branding

Welcome the new brand in the censhare web client

censhare had seen its last re-branding in 2011, and let’s face it, the world has moved on, and design principles have changed over time. So we thought that it would be good to propel the censhare brand into the 2020s.

The default web client now shows our new logo and colors. The usability of the client has not changed, though, and your user experience will be all the same as before.

For you marketing affinicados, here’s the thinking behind the new logo:

• The overall shape resembles the letter ‘c’ – for censhare. The forms have been derived from the shapes forming the previous censhare logo to mark the evolution of our brand.

• The three elements represent our core products PIM, DAM and CMS. They are connected to form the integrated core of censhare. The elements also evoke visualizations of chat and messages to express our openness and willingness to communicate.

• Corporate and contemporary, the new logotype highlights the edges of the individual letters while not losing the modern and familiar look of our previous corporate font.

Partner Solutions

censhare2SAP Commerce Connector by kolb digital

The censhare2SAP Commerce Connector connects the censhare DAM system with the ecommerce solution SAP Commerce. In this scenario, censhare acts as a content hub and leading system for media assets of all kinds, and is able to transfer media to SAP Commerce.

Images, logos and documents can be assigned to products and variants in censhare, and are then automatically transferred to SAP Commerce.

Article numbers can either be maintained as metadata for images, logos and documents, or the assets themselves can be linked to the corresponding products in censhare. Based on this assignment, the images are then transferred to SAP Commerce and linked to the products and variants in SAP Commerce. The image derivatives are also provided by censhare and transferred fully to SAP Commerce as media containers. The transfer to SAP Commerce takes place in real time and the user receives feedback via censhare as to whether the assignment was successful.

Further maintenance of media assets in SAP Commerce is thus no longer necessary, making the enrichment process in SAP Commerce considerably easier.

The connector is configured within the censhare Admin Client where the administrator can maintain the image path, determine the derivative formats and also choose the naming for the derivatives.

We provide an extension for SAP Commerce, which can also be adapted or extended.

Advantages

• Standard interface

• Simple maintenance and assignment in censhare

• No media maintenance in SAP Commerce necessary

• Transformation of derivatives in censhare

• Automatic linking in SAP Commerce

• Easy expandability of the connector

Reference Customer

MEGA e.G., Hamburg

Related Information

Factsheet (Download)

Contact

kolb digital GmbH

info@kolb-digital.de

The Road Ahead

An Update from Product Management

The first half of this year was heavily dominated by addressing your feedback regarding our initial censhare WP release. We’ve taken that feedback very seriously to improve your product experience for the future and hope you enjoy our latest 2022.1 release!

The next release will be censhare 2022.2, which is currently planned for a launch later this year. At the time of writing, it will consist of the following new features and functions

• Support for nested properties in the Properties Editor

• Support for versioning of markers

• Support for Video Clipping in Media Convert

• Support for Java 17

• Usability enhancements

• Xeditor Integration (Available in combination with censhare Hybrid)

At the same time, we are concentrating on our initial release of censhare Hybrid (which is a working title). censhare Hybrid combines the strengths of censhare with modern and versatile cloud-native technologies for system integration, low-code orchestration and cloud-operations. It is aimed at extensibility and significantly simplifying the way you deal with censhare as compared to today.

censhare Community

The new portal landscape will replace former tools like Yammer and the ecosphere. In a clearly structured and consolidated way you will find information on product and partner and the access to our new community tool, documentation, helpdesk, academy portal and our customer knowledge base.

Following the relaunch of the censhare brand, we are pleased and proud to launch our completely revamped community offerings. New digital offerings replace the previous “ecosphere” to better support you and your users as well as our partners. With the release of these new offerings, access to the censhare ecosphere portal and the censhare Yammer community is no longer available for customers or partners.

Our new community offerings consist of three distinct areas:

product.censhare.com

This is our new product portal. It’s a publicly accessible source of information about our product portfolio, release information and service offers.

partner.censhare.com

This is the central platform for our partners. Here, partners can find marketing material, price information and technical information about our demo systems. It also provides direct access to our documentation for partners.

community.censhare.com

A brand new forum for exchange and collaboration. Become part of the community, share knowledge, ask questions and discuss ideas with other customers, partners and censhare employees in a global forum. Please feel free to support the user community by answering questions and sharing your best practices here.

For more detailed information please jump to our latest documentation .

You will find the documentation dedicated to this release, release notes, known issues and the latest system requirements.