What a fantastic conference! The Adobe CS3 conference was a two day (June 19 and June 20) networking, product immersion and just plain old fun “experience” for only $199; can’t beat that!

That price not only included a bunch of classes and networking opportunities, but also a fantastic dinner on the first day (I mean shrimp, prime rib, Chinese food and even an open hosted bar).

There were plenty of networking opportunities as well, including the lunches and dinners, the get-togethers after the days ended and a bird-of-a-feather meeting.

Pre-conference Sessions
The conference started with a “Pre-Conference Session”. There were 5 sessions to choose from, including Rich Internet Application for Developers, Video, Management/IT, Photographers and Print Service Providers.

Ok. So I have a big ego. My title at my work is “Interactive Media Manager”, so when I saw Microsoft at NAB 2007 introducing their new “Interactive Media Manager” software, I wanted to sue them. But then I realized…oh, it’s just a title. I can’t copyright that. Oh well.

Which makes me think…Will Microsoft now require that I pay royalties to them because my title is their software title? You never know with Microsoft!

Anyhow. Based on SharePoint 2007, Microsoft introduced an extension to SharePoint specifically targeting people in the multimedia industry including film makers, game designers and web site developers.

Interactive Media Manager comes with the following:

Ok, so I have tons of videos, photographs, sound files, Flash files, photoshop files and God knows what other type of files.

I need to organize all of them for easy lookup, so I started researching and found that what I need is a DAM (no kidding) solution. DAM stands for Digital Asset Management system and they range from the simple and cheap (iView Media Pro) to the real expensive ones like Alienware (which are multi-user systems).

After careful research and analysis I came to the conclusion that a one user system was the way to go (ok, so actually my boss made me come to that conclusion by saying that we can’t afford a full multi-user system now).

After exensive research (a.k.a. Google searching) I narrowed my testing to 2 solutions.