MIMS - Moving Image Management System
Overview
Moving images are all about films and videos. Traditional library information systems often hold information about films and videos, but they are basically only for the simplest information capture and retrieval. With the proliferation of digital media, a new category of systems called Digital Asset Management (DAM) pops up, but they only offer generic digital media capture, storage, retrieval, and media-specific services. What is missing from these systems is a solution that can
- Capture many aspects of information about films and videos (good in traditional library systems and weak in DAM)
- Capture equally rich information about people involved in creation and distribution of moving images (very weak in traditional library systems and missing in DAM)
- Provide effective categorization and search of both moving images and involved people for deeper understanding of the industry, particular content area, and system inventory (weak in both traditional library systems and DAM)
- Provide business model and process support from storing information to program or project development and management (missing in both traditional library systems and DAM)
- Provide various handy and collaboration features to facilitate operations in media-rich businesses or units (very weak or missing in both traditional library systems and DAM)
MIMS (Moving Image Management System) is such a business application dedicated for the above goals. In addition to general use for information storing and retrieval, it also targets researchers and program or festival planners and managers and is an ideal tool for businesses with lot of film and video activities. MIMS has a slew of innovative features and is built with the goal of being intuitive, handy, and effective. MIMS is built with the best JEE technologies for enterprise use and has great flexibility for expansion, modification, or customization.
It is especially worth mentioning that the People-Artifact-Activity model MIMS employs has a wide range of applications, which further makes MIMS readily adaptable to solve problems in many other business areas. For example, it can be easily adapted to address the needs of managing government proposals and evaluation of vendor responses. Besides, the style and design of MIMS can be a model for other great applications.
Enterprise Application
MIMS is built for enterprise use. It supports transactions to ensure sure data integrity. It provides various mechanisms to ensure protection at both the system and data levels. It supports simultaneous users working in the system and gracefully handles conflicting edits made by concurrent users. MIMS supports server clustering for system availability and scalability to ensure business continuity. MIMS can work with multiple databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, etc.
Rich Features
Here is a glimpse of MIMS' capabilities:
- Works: managing work (such as Titanic, Shrek, etc.) records creation, search, listing, and association
- Items: managing specific media items (such as Titanic on a DVD disc or VHS tape) related to work as well as item check-in and checkout
- Segments: allowing finer description of different time periods within a work
- Compilations: covering situations in which multiple works co-exist on the same media. This is a common situation for digital media.
- Contributors: managing various types of people involved in creation and distribution of moving images, which makes MIMS also a database for people; managing contributor-related credits, recognitions, etc.
- Programs (festivals): managing the life cycle of a program and related activities such as screening, participants, candidate works, ratings, events, work groups, etc.
- Various types of reports for works, contributors, and programs
In addition, MIMS uses role-based security to flexibly protect the system and content. Furthermore, it offers various features such as hot links, record notes, document attachment, reminder/alert, dashboard, intra-system messaging, work sets and system announcement. It is truly an intuitive, handy, effective, and powerful application!
Strong Security
Data and application security are of paramount importance in web applications. Various security mechanisms have been built into MIMS:
- Access to modules is controlled by user roles.
- What a user can view or perform is controlled by his or her roles.
- All web URLs are protected based on user roles.
- Each data record or form has two views: read-only view and edit view for users with proper rights.
- Each data record has fields for tracking who created it at what time and who made the last change at what time.
- Automatic logoff of users after a period of inactivity.
Depth of Engineering
We at INFORMATED are users of various software products too, and we certainly understand the significance of an effective tool. In fact, we have gone great lengths to ensure that MIMS is intuitive, easy-to-use, handy, and effective to our customers. The following shows a glimpse of what has been done to this end:
- A large number of data fields are searchable.
- For search, multiple-field sorting is available and a user has complete control of the order of sorted fields.
- Free-text and sound-alike search is available.
- Data validation is implemented in both front-end interface and back-end system processing to ensure data quality.
- Data can be exported in the formats of XML, CVS, and Excel.
- For data listing, users can sort records by clicking on any column heading.
- Users can write unlimited number of notes about records.
- Users can attach unlimited number of files to records.
- A system admin can make system-wide announcements.
- Users can collaborate by using reminders, alerts, work sets, etc.
MIMS is an effective solution to supporting operations in creative, forward-thinking, productivity-minded, and management-focused media organizations (studios, film and video centers, culture centers, university departments, etc.) that focus on information, repository, programs (festivals), collaboration, and research.
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