From Ricky Patten - CEO of Databasics Pty Limited
Now that Cumulus InDesign Companion has been released (with v8.1.1) and Cumulus now supports InDesign CS5 (v8.1.2), it is probably timely to tell you more about how Cumulus can help you... If your organisation uses InDesign and Cumulus, you've got some built-in functionality at your disposal that can definitely save you time and streamline your workflow.
So there are a number of ways to use Cumulus with InDesign.
The first is standard out-of-the-box Cumulus: Cumulus Palette mode puts Cumulus right inside InDesign, offering you access to your entire asset collection without ever taking your eyes off your layout.
Using the Cumulus Palette mode is easy. Just select View>Palette Mode. The Cumulus window 'shrinks' into a special mode that floats above other application windows. Just drag and orient it into place where you need it. To get back to the full Cumulus display, turn Palette Mode off in the View menu. As a shortcut, you can type Ctrl-Shift-P to toggle the Palette mode on and off.
The InDesign Extended Pack and InDesign Companion are add-on products (and a separate purchase) that provide extra functionality to really streamline your workflow.
The InDesign Extended Pack has been available for a while and basically allows you to catalog InDesign documents page by page into Cumulus and extract metadata from them. In addition to creating a record for the entire InDesign document, it creates records for each page of the InDesign document. It provides full support for Adobe's XMP metadata standard, which enables Cumulus to capture 'File Info' information from Creative Suite files, and even write it back into many file formats.
The new InDesign Companion is a Cumulus Option that really ups the ante of integration by adding a menu as well as a palette inside InDesign, so designers can find what they need, without ever leaving InDesign. This means productivity goes up, because designers stay in the program they know. No more hunting for images on file servers that don't provide previews or useful information.
Designers can drag-n-drop Cumulus cataloged images right into InDesign documents. Completed documents can be cataloged into Cumulus directly, and you can even have Cumulus create a PDF version of the document on the fly.
Databasics is the distributor of a range of leading products in Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia specialising in business solutions for pre-press, networking, internet and workflow productivity.
Canto Cumulus is a powerful digital asset management system for all organisations where effective workflow management and rich media asset control is paramount.
Creative Folks is a Canto Certified Systems Integrator.
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