Does anyone know of an alternative to Silicon Publishing Connector?

[Stevo5]

I'm looking for an alternative to Silicon Publishing's Connector for linking InDesign and CC with our existing DAM. Has anyone come across alternatives?

[BobLevine]

Not sure exactly what your needs are but check out Truedit from MEI.

[Stevo5]

Thanks but I'm looking for a system that will link CC with our existing DAM (Digital Asset Management) to allow designers to pull down images from the DAM and place in CC, these are then linked so any update to the original file in the DAM is rippled through all connected documents. Silicon Publishing have a connector but I'm looking for a direct (or close) alternative.

[Loic.Aigon]

Well, what if you talk to us about why you are looking for a change ? Is it a price or a feature issue ?

Because there are more and more DAM connection plugins/solutions for InDesign. I won't quote all of them here but it wouldn't make sense anyway without knowing first where is the itch

Loic

[Stevo5]

Main issue is cost. They seem to have cornered the market, I'm keen to look at others which may be more cost effective to implement. What have you come across?

[Loic.Aigon]

Ok. Just for the info, one that I can think of is Elvis from Woodwing. It can be linked to indesign and even EasyCatalog plugin :

https://www.woodwing.com/en/indesign-elvis-dam-contact-form​

Elvis DAM & EasyCatalog integration - YouTube

Loic

[Stevo5]

Thanks, I did see that one but when I dug into their site it's a connector for their DAM system. We already have a DAM so I'm looking for a third party (like Silicon) who has already developed a connector and we can partner with them. We found one in Italy but they decided not develop their version further as they felt it had limited commercial prospects.

[Loic.Aigon]

Hi,

In that case, I may have a solution to propose. I am getting in touch with you privately.

Loic

[Max Dunn]

I am curious which DAM you have and what sort of cost you would think this sort of solution should be priced at. We have different pricing with different DAMs. The reason you won't find many others doing this is that we kind of inherited the InDesign engineers who understand the internals, and our InDesign linking is very direct and powerful, it is done the right way at a very low level. We did not intend to fleece the designers out there or cost too much: if you look at the hours saved per designer per year, our pricing is not that bad for most end users. Rather we felt this feature should have come from Adobe and been made available to DAMs directly: since that is not the case we want to make it available to all DAMs. We have to sustain some serious developers, support, etc., and we take responsibility for new versions of InDesign as well as new versions of CC Extension technology, which is quite a responsibility (witness the 7.1 release which broke InDesign for most third parties).

[Stevo5]

It's not one of the big DAM systems and on your site I don't see an option for it. Is there such a thing as a generic connector or do they have to be customised? I think ours is built on Linux and PHP. I'd like to know an indicative price so I can compare with others.

[Max Dunn]

There is a generic connector underneath (including with) all of them, but it hasn't had a ton of use. Here is what we do with a typical DAM:

1. Manage Authentication (if you aren't authenticating, the base connector just works). oAuth2, Token-based, different DAMs have different approaches.

2. Manage State Updating - the base connector follows normal HTTP methods, so if you don't do something special, this just works as well.

3. Manage high-res/low-res versions of the assets.

This is assuming you are dragging and dropping from your DAM. Note that on the DAM side, there is some work to make drag and drop work in an appropriate way (for example if you drag a thumbnail of a PDF you want the PDF url, not that of the thumbnail).

You can work with almost any trial of any connector (Box is an easy one to try) and if you install, say, Silicon Connector for Box, drag and drop from your interface into InDesign (with a browser that supports it: Chrome requires some javascript), you would instantiate a URL-based link to the asset on the clipboard because our base C++ Connector is there.

I am not aware of others who offer this. 

We are flexible on pricing based on the organization and it would depend on our level of effort but you can reach us at sales@siliconpublishing.com or (925) 935-3899.

[Stevo5]

Thanks Max, useful response. Let me look at this over the next couple of weeks as workload allows.

[andreasm95398435]

Hello Steve05,

I do not know where my post from last week is gone?

So here again. If you are still looking for a Plugin to the Adobe CC "world" to connect to the leading Cloud Storage and DAM/MAM and PIM Systems then take a look at http://www.ci-hub.com. You can Beta test the System if you request it. This system is very powerful and will extend fast. And it comes with a very attractive price point. Connect to them to see your self. Andy

[jack55555]

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