It was great to mete Pete Brown at MIX10, and the timing of the OData / WinPhone7 release couldn't have been more exciting. Thanks to PeteB for doing the interview!

 

Here's a bit of info about MimeCloud. We're still finalising a few things at the moment and have switched the CodePlex hosting over to Mercurial, so a code refresh on there is still around a fortnight away (mid-April 2010), but if you are like the folks who've contacted us wanting a stable open-source .NET image/asset management system it'll be worth the wait Smiley

 

MimeCloud isn't just for Umbraco, you can actually use it with anything even if it's internal and "offline" - it's essentially a framework that you can integrate with your existing systems or use standalone. We're providing a Silverlight and HTML client out of the box, and it can upload to FTP or cloud hosting - plus you can write your own providers too.

 

Here's the "elevator pitch" - a phrase I only learnt off Pete Brown at the start of the interview!

  • MimeCloud is an open-source media asset library built for lightning speed and scalability
  • You can use MimeCloud to:
    • Manage the images and video on your blog or website (e.g. Wordpress, SubText, Drupal - we're even building a custom section to integrate with Umbraco)
    • Replace the image management module of your website's CMS with something more powerful, extensible, and easier to use
    • Manage usage rights information on your digital media archive
    • Attach metadata in multiple languages to the same image, video or asset
    • Quickly upload 1 or 1000 assets in a batch, with resizing and thumbnail generation on the fly
  • MimeCloud builds against Microsoft .NET 3.5SP1, and has an extensible API in both WCF and RESTful forms exposed using IIS, including OData support
  • Several clients including a full-featured Silverlight batch upload tool, and an ASP.NET MVC2 administration tool for basic upload and library searching
  • Storage of assets can be via FTP, HTTP upload, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure - whatever you prefer
  • The project was founded by Alex Norcliffe, formerly tech lead for Condé Nast International and Peter Miller, currently Head of Tech at Condé Nast Digital Britain. Together we've many years of experience dealing with large amounts of rights-protected image and video media needing a powerful, fast architecture and it's this learning that we bring to the project.
Many thanks for your interest and do let us know what you want out of such a system on the CodePlex project!