A new version of the Picturepark Content Platform will be released.
Version:Picturepark Stockhorn (11.8) will be released on 09-September-2023. Main changes:Guest Portal as well as stability and performance improvements
Stockhorn(2190m) is in the Bernese Alps, overlooking the region of Lake Thun in the Bernese Oberland. It is well known for its incomparable views taking in more than 200 alpine peaks, and an ideal place to get above the autumn fog. The panoramic viewing platform on the north face of the Stockhorn is breathtaking. You can enjoy a 240-degree view that reaches as far as the Black Forest. With our new public access feature, your users can also enjoy a great view of your content.
Release Details
Please note that these are the final release notes.
Video showing how to use the Guest Portal feature
Introducing Guest Portal
With Picturepark's new public access feature you can unleash the true potential of your content management strategy and elevate your brand's reach like never before.
Say goodbye to the hassle of managing third-party portals or microsites! With Picturepark's new Guest Portal feature you can unleash the true potential of your content management strategy and elevate your brand's reach like never before.
The power of an anonymous user is at your fingertips. You determine which content to make available. For example:
Have an important event coming up? Why not create a press kit including logos and key images for journalists to access at their convenience. Use the Picturepark Business Rules and scheduling features to make the content for the event public at the time of your choice.
Keep your audience up to date at all times by giving them access to the latest news and product brochures.
Additionally – you can tailor a unique dashboard for users that access Picturepark anonymously to provide the perfect experience. And for your registered users, logging in is just a click away if you want it to be.
Improvement of CDN Caching
We have investigated and will put into place various measures that will improve the CDN caching when Picturepark is not available due to maintenance/issues.
We have investigated and will put into place various measures that will improve the CDN caching when Picturepark is not available due to maintenance/issues. These include:
Increased availability:
We are now making use of a Fastly-specific mechanism called Shielding which should increase the probability that the embedded content is served from the CDN when the Content Platform is unavailable. It relies on defining a fixed POP (Point of Presence), collecting requests from all the Fastly network. The main advantage of having a shield defined, is a significantly reduced number of requests to the origin server and improved request handling performance.
The CDN cache will no longer be cleared while the customer is temporarily deactivated. Now even if the customer is deactivated, previously cached shares/embeds should be still available.
We have added the possibility to serve stale content while Content Platform is temporarily down or in maintenance.
Increased configurability:
We have enhanced and made the default caching time configurable per customer.
Serving stale content is also configurable per customer.
Azure Migration Complete
We once again encourage you to try out the benefits of Azure AI auto tagging.
As you may be aware the migration to Azure is now complete and we once again encourage you to try out the benefits of Azure AI auto tagging. Please contact your customer service representative for more information.
Image recognition for automatically recognising and adding the correct tags to your content.
Focal point recognition. Use focal points to let other systems know where to crop your image for example to best display it on your website.
Text Recognition for OCR-like text extraction. The image below displays a simple English text, however this will also work for multiple languages, including Chinese characters for example. The Azure API can extract text with mixed languages, including from the same text line.
The content below is only available in English
The content below is only available in English.
🚨 Changes To API & SDKs
We will only introduce minor API changes with the upcoming Picturepark Release “Stockhorn” (v11.8). However, we recommend you review all the changes made if you are responsible for integrations:
Please verify if the changes will affect your integration and adapt it accordingly if necessary. If you use our SDKs or samples like the Content Portal, we recommend updating to the latest version:
If you would like to test your changes in advance, we can provide you with a functionally limited clone running on the latest 11.8 preview code base within our stage environment (free provisioning of such a stage system depends on your subscription plan or partner status).
Further Notable Changes
Stability and performance improvements:
Business Rules performance improvements.
Updates of referencing items will be performed more efficiently. Now the time to update a list item will be independent from how often it is referenced in the system. The key difference from the current version of Picturepark, is that referencing items are not updated right away,but are being updated by a scheduled task that runs in 10 minute intervals. There is one exception to this, which is item deletion/deactivation, where we’ll still remove all the direct references before actually deleting your item.
API call limits. We have optimised the setting of limits on the number of requests that a customer, API client or a combination of these can carry out in a specific interval. This helps avoid API overuse caused by accidental issues with client code or denial of service attacks, which result in the API being overrun with requests.
Media editor bugfix:
Color conversion from CMYK to RGB delivered incorrect color results in some instances.