The Iowa-based firm has used this week's MacWorld Conference in Boston to launch Digital Storage Manager (DSM), an intranet-based archive which finds, tags and archives on-line and offline pre-press files.

DSM aims to centralise storage for artwork and production files by assigning metadata tags to each file, including information on the client, job, copyright status, format and location.

Robert Long, MetaCommunications executive vice president, said that the main aim of DSM was to improve file management, which takes up as much as 10% of creative professionals' work time.
"DSM significantly reduces the time, labour and costs required to
manage the ever-growing cache of production files," he said.

It works by using a file database which provides a central view of a network's online and offline production files. The system also features an index of files' uses, metadata tags, file search and retrieval and one-step archiving and backup.

Plug-ins for QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign and Illustrator and Mac OS X Finder are also included with DSM.

UK pricing information and details of a UK reseller have not yet been released, but the product is available direct from MetaCommunications, with prices from 565 ($995) for 100GB of managed storage.

Pricing is also available for 250GB, 1TB, 2.5TB
and 5TB capacities.

Visit www.meta-comm.com/sales for more information.

By Josh Brooks