North Plains releases new version of its TeleScope Digital Asset Management System

North Plains, LLC, today announced version 9 of their market leading Digital Asset Management (DAM) system TeleScope™, a release focused on helping companies build and manage the digital asset ecosystems that are essential to marketing and communication today. TeleScope 9 securely connects everyone who needs to work on, distribute, or use digital content no matter where they are. This in turn enables marketers in any industry to deliver higher quality rich media messages to market faster and at less cost, addressing the critical demands of today’s marketing teams.

A recent report by the Custom Content Council showed that 84 percent of its Chief Marketing Officer respondents see custom content as the future of marketing. The findings in this report, combined with the pervasive proliferation of video, is creating a real-time challenge for marketing teams – managing and delivering the growing volume of rich media in order to take advantage of the unique opportunity to  deliver a rich, customized experience to customers.

As creative work is often done with partners, the way to effectively manage this content is with a solution that links a company to its creative and distribution partners in a digital asset ecosystem.

North Plains has strengthened its TeleScope platform to make it easier for distributed marketing teams in industries including automotive, banking, pharmaceutical, high technology, manufacturing, retail, publishing and entertainment to collaborate by making digital assets available seamlessly and securely to all internal and external team members.

The major enhancements to TeleScope 9 to achieve this include:

• A new, highly responsive HTML5 user interface that’s easily usable by anyone, at any point in the digital asset lifecycle
• Seamless “drag and drop” of files accessed in TeleScope via a browser directly into desktop applications, simplifying and speeding critical manual editorial or distribution tasks
• TeleScope Orchestration, North Plains’ new user-friendly visual workflow engine for coordinating collaboration and streamlining review, approval, and multi-channel publishing processes
• Multi-lingual enhancements to fully support left-to-right and right-to-left language presentations, as well as the ability to see asset metadata in two or more languages side-by-side for international distributed teams

“As digital assets form a more critical piece of companies marketing and branding, DAM systems need to support a wider range of users across organizations without burdening them with complex interfaces and tools,” said Bill Trippe, VP and Lead Analyst for Outsell's Gilbane Services. “We are very impressed with what we see in TeleScope 9. By creating flexible, easy to use interfaces, as well as workflow services, North Plains is helping marketers, their partners and corporate DAM users tackle the common tasks quickly, efficiently, and with the quality that creative work requires.”

Available as either software-as-a-service (SaaS) or installed on premise, TeleScope brings order to the chaos created by the rich media content – the images, video, audio and graphics – that now defines marketing programs and campaigns. Throughout the entire digital asset lifecycle – from creation to distribution – TeleScope enables people to rapidly find, manage, reuse and collaborate on the rich media that is the content of corporate brands, marketing campaigns, or published print or digital works.

In TeleScope 9, users can now automate processes to deliver the right assets, in the right formats, to the right people for increased productivity and collaboration. Additional features in today’s release include:

• Smart Catalogs that dynamically find matching assets and are always up-to-date
• User Defined Portlets for easily adding favorite websites and applications
• Threaded Notes that capture critical context in discussions around digital assets and catalogs
• Image Markup for multi-user commenting on images to enable enhanced image collaboration
• “QuickDrops” providing drag and drop predefined automated file conversion and distribution workflows

“For over a decade, North Plains has invested in TeleScope to make it the most comprehensive and scalable DAM solution to meet the growing needs of the most demanding and geographically dispersed Fortune 100 customers,” said Arun Chandra, CEO of North Plains. “This version of Telescope puts our competitors even further behind North Plains. Our vision to be the number one digital asset management company continues to be realized based on the innovation of our products, our marquee customers base, and the backing of Accel-KKR.”

With this major release and the substantive investment by Accel-KKR, North Plains continues to solidify its’ leadership position in the DAM market. In 2011 alone the company has expanded its presence in Europe, deepened its partner program, broadened its SaaS and managed service offerings, and added multiple well-known brands, publishers, automotive companies, and ad agencies as clients.

Utilizing an open architecture that allows for deep partner application and product integrations, the TeleScope platform powers hundreds of customers, including Fortune 100 companies, to  easily create, manage and rapidly deliver the rich media assets needed to create multi-channel campaigns that stand out and reach today’s consumers.  TeleScope 9 will be generally available in July, and as an upgrade to all customers on active maintenance.

About North Plains, LLC
North Plains is the world leader in managing the digital assets and publishing processes that create the vast majority of digital and print communications.  By providing software and services that enable companies to shift from content management to digital supply chains and multi-channel publishing processes, North Plains helps companies manage their brand, expand their rich media communications across multiple channels, and deliver higher quality content faster, at lower cost.  For more information visit www.northplains.com.