Inmagic® Presto
A web-based enterprise application for accessing, sharing and managing research information assets
Inmagic Presto is a web-based enterprise application designed for organisations where managing multiple collections of information in diverse formats and locations is of strategic importance. Information-intensive organisations that use Presto typically have high-value, dynamic content that needs to be centrally managed and made available 24 hours a day for efficient research by a wide audience. Presto enables you to organise the information that is important to your organisation into one centralised solution on your web or intranet site.
The role of the information professional is evolving into that of a facilitator and strategist – someone who not only provides access to information but actively cultivates knowledge in the organisation. Presto supports this evolution by facilitating knowledge management and maximising the value and use of both dynamic and archival information assets.
Research Asset Management
Whether you're part of a pharmaceutical company disseminating information from R&D to medical affairs, building a product development archive to support research, creating a photo and image archive, or creating a collection of articles from external news feeds, Presto allows you to easily create and maintain collections of information assets while enabling your end users to efficiently research and share those assets. Content can be aggregated from disparate internal and external sources and deployed in intranet, extranet or web environments.
Because Presto captures content characteristics as metadata, content in many formats can be searched by a specific collection or across all the collections managed by Presto. In addition, through Inmagic's partnership with WebFeat, Presto users can conduct federated searches across virtually unlimited external sources. Since end users may not know exactly what they are seeking, Presto also allows them to browse. End users can define alerts and access them via email, portlet or RSS subscription.
"Content Types"
Selected content types are available for immediate use in Presto, or you can build your own. For each content type, you can specify metadata fields, content-specific search and display screens, and customise these to suit your own needs via the friendly, web-based design tools. For example, an engineering consultancy might set up content types for:
- Proposals
- Internal reports
- Library materials
- Drawings
- Project photographs
- Useful web sites
On the other hand, a pharmaceutical company might prefer content types for:
- Published papers
- Patents
- Regulatory submissions
Or a resources company's content types could include:
- Consultant reports
- RSS feeds of relevant international news stories
- Digitised maps and charts
- Internal reports
You can search across all of your content types at once, or you can limit your search to just one specific content type. Depending on your needs, the content types can be either internal information in whichever file formats you need (e.g. PDF, Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, images, videos, ...) or links to external content such as web sites, subscription services, or RSS feeds.
"Content Collections"
Presto can also segment your resources into topics or content collections that mirror the way you work and the way your organisation tends to categorise objects and concepts. For example, you might choose to have collections for each of your products in a manufacturing company, collections by project or by client in a consultancy, collections by geographic location in a resources firm, and so on.
In line with the very best of modern web useability, each of these collections can be browsed in a directory/tree-style folder structure. And of course you can increase the robustness of your users' search and browse capabilities by adding additional metadata for subject terms from a taxonomy or corporate classification.
The following image shows a sample screen from Presto... The user has browsed into a content collection named "Resource Types" and has drilled down through the taxonomy to find a number of assets that have been categorised under the term "Uranium". The results include a web-based news item, a full-text PDF file, and a podcast mp3 file:
Taxonomy and Presto
In addition to a number of very powerful and user-friendly search options, Presto gives you the opportunity to make extensive use of your own taxonomies in categorising your assets. Recent usability studies have shown just how important to your end-users' experience it is to offer them both searching and taxonomy-based browsing options. Maximising your users' ability to find precisely what they want can lead to quite surprising increases in speed and productivity. As Marti Hearst (School of Information Management and Systems at University of California, Berkeley) and others found in their usability studies:
[...] users preferred a browsing-oriented interface for a browsing task, and a direct search interface when they knew precisely what they wanted.http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/papers/cacm02.pdf
Likewise, Susan Dumais and Edward Cutrell (Microsoft Research) and Hao Chen (Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley) found that:
[...] all Category interfaces were more effective than List interfaces even when lists were augmented with category names for each result. The best category performance was obtained when both category names and individual page titles were presented.
And this article in Image and Data Manager makes it clear that taxonomies are a:
[...] very necessary addition to search, they need to compliment each other.
http://www.idm.net.au/story.asp?id=8774
Search and Display
Presto provides a fast and powerful search across the full text of documents and any additional assigned metadata. Your users can search using a very simple keyword search; or they can user more advanced search screens that you tailor for them using metadata options for each content type:
Retrieved content can be displayed using a variety of different screen styles depending on the content type. You can easily design your own screens. For example: library materials can be shown in a "traditional" bibliographic display, while images can be presented in a thumbnail gallery across and down the screen, as the following Presto screen shot illustrates:
Managing Access to Presto
Presto's home page is a key component of the application and can be configured to provide different information depending on who is logged in. As a Presto administrator, you can easily add users, assign them to certain roles, and give them the relevant privileges, including their own default Presto home page. If required, Presto can even integrate with your Active Directory.
For example, you may wish to configure Presto such that your "general" users can see only one or two content types, while other more confidential content types are reserved for only those users to whom you have assigned higher privileges. You can also set Presto privileges to ensure that only you and your immediate team can add or edit metadata, while most users can retrieve information but not actually change it.
Would you like more information?
Click here to read the latest Presto product brochure, which includes some excellent screens shots that illustrate the power of Presto as well as the great job that Inmagic's designers have achieved!
Or read the Top Ten Reasons why Presto version 2 is being chosen by increasing numbers of organisations.
White Papers on Presto
Inmagic: tools to make sense of complex information environments 
by Melissa Webster and Susan Feldman
Be ready: best practices for managing critical information assets