North Plains Systems in Toronto now offers and supports Xinet, a digital asset management platform with an emphasis on collaboration and sharing. The California company Xinet, the platform's original developer, was acquired by North Plains Systems in 2012.
As a legacy DAM system, Xinet is great. But historically they have been slow to develop new features and they have allowed their competitors to take the lead with more modern features like video and digital/social support and more intuitive interfaces. It seems that most DAM companies have a cloud-first view on their storage, while Xinet, which emerged from on-premises servers, has only recently begun to move into that space. That said, Xinet is a niche product perfect for anyone needing to manage large, still photoshoots and rights-managed assets, and then share them with large teams since it is not based on a per-user pricing structure.
Xinet is intuitive to use. It is perhaps the only DAM that features a traditional mounted volume, so anyone working in an environment with local servers will love it. Search is accurate and faceted searches allow users to narrow search results. Setup requires a lot of training if you want to leverage all of its complex workflow capabilities.
Support is handled by third-party server integrators. Our partner, NAPC, has always been there when we've needed them and also develops unique plugins to expand XInet's capabilities.
We selected Xinet based on having a large number of potential users and wanted unlimited web seats. Paying a one time software fee versus a monthly seat payment was a big draw. Telescope was four to five times more expensive and was not feasible at the time. We liked Basecamp but we needed a local solution for storage, not hosted.
Xinet is a great platform to build off of. We use it in combination with Enfocus Switch which has greatly improved the automation capabilities and we use Xinet as the portal for external users. Our internal users very rarely interact with the Xinet GUI.
