Updates to the SDVI Rally platform in the last two quarters of 2021 reflect ongoing enhancement of the platform, and Rally Core in particular, for greater ease of use and to provide even more value in media supply chain optimization. Improvements across the platform give users more control in managing their supply chains and extend their monitoring capabilities, improving visibility and delivering more insights. Updates related to AWS cloud access reflect SDVI’s continued commitment to the highest standard in cloud security, while new additions to the Rally Application Services Market mean Rally users have access to the broadest selection of best-in-class tools.
Control Enhancements
By giving users more control over all aspects of supply chain management, recent updates to Rally enable even more intuitive operation for individual operators and greater optimization across the entire media supply chain.
Decision Engine
Building on recent asset delete enhancements, SDVI has enhanced the Rally Decision Engine to support “forced_delete” as a file deletion mechanism. Users can remove files from assets and ensure they are also deleted from the storage location (e.g., for contractual reasons) even if they are also registered in other assets.
Rally supply chain engineers now can schedule future supply chains from within Decision Engine, a capability useful for tasks such as scheduling content delivery based on an availability window and scheduling cleanup of content or metadata that is no longer needed.
Further Decision Engine Enhancements:
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- Support for generation and sharing of AWS presigned URLs with third-party services within a Rally-managed supply chain
- Access to input file information of previous jobs allowing the supply chain to dynamically react to error conditions, triggering replacement jobs automatically
- A new “cancel_job” function that allows a specific job to be canceled from within Decision Engine (not just by external changes or triggers)
Asset Deadline Change Improvement
Changes to the deadline of an asset now automatically change the deadlines of all running jobs and supply chains, saving the supply chain engineer time and work while facilitating dynamic prioritization of job handling.
Support for Service API Token
Rally now supports generation of independent API tokens that enable services outside the platform to communicate with Rally. No specific user association is necessary; the token is assigned a unique name and takes its permission from one or multiple roles assigned to it.
Workorder Widget: User Assignment Enhancement
Rally Gateway will now determine if the Gateway user is working on an active workorder assigned to them. If those conditions aren’t met, the widget will inform the user that they may not complete the workorder for that reason.
Rally Access Panel for Adobe Premiere Pro
When operators create a marker, the playhead now stays on the last frame instead of moving to the first frame of the newly created event. Work can continue right where it left off.
Admins now can configure the Rally workorder with multiple “catch-all” rules for locally contributed media, allowing Access users to upload any data needed in the edit sessions while enabling better management of those files in the asset inventory.
SDVI Mover
SDVI Mover now allows the transfer of whole directories, enabled by folder-based transfers rather than single-file transfers, for much greater speed and efficiency in moving large numbers of files. Because SDVI Mover’s Task log now includes information about file size and transfer time, users can more easily identify any infrastructure bottlenecks when transferring files between cloud regions or between on-premise storage and cloud storage.
Monitoring Enhancements
New monitoring capabilities give Rally users enhanced visibility into job, asset, and system status, as well as more robust options for examining those elements, organizing and viewing critical information, and troubleshooting any issues.
Job Details Monitoring
If a job cannot be dispatched because no matching provider can be found, Rally displays an updated queueing icon and a message detailing job status. A “copy to clipboard” button simplifies sharing of that information with other support staff, either internal or external. A “copy support information” button allows information to be copied straight into the SDVI support ticketing system message to accelerate resolution of the issue.
Further Job Details Enhancements:
- The supply chain step name now is shown next to the preset name along with a link to the initial supply chain rule.
- Job artifacts now can be investigated in an expandable window that makes it easier to work with bigger data loads.
- Released jobs in Rally now show when the jobs were released, supporting forensics and troubleshooting during investigation of past supply chain runs.
Asset Inventory
When inventory items are stored in multiple places, some instances differ in their status. To help operators identify files needing further investigation, Rally now displays a different icon and a “multiple” status text for such items at the top level.
Rally Core users can now preview files from the Asset inventory directly, without downloading the files, if the file type can be opened by the browser. (Gateway already offers this functionality.)
Provider Page: Show Elastic Provider Info
Because the Provider page in Rally Core now shows the count of configured elastic providers in the system, supply chain engineers can quickly verify the overall configured job capacity of the system.
Gateway Dark Mode
Rally Gateway now supports dark mode. When admins enable this feature, users can manually switch to either light or dark mode, or set the mode to follow the OS settings, as it does in Rally Core.
Asset Picker Widget
The Asset Picker Widget now can be sorted by user, as well as the full list of sorting metrics available within the filter panel. This enables Gateway operators to be more efficient in finding the assets they need. If an administrator has set up a default filter and the operator adds a filter, the result will be an AND-connected preconfigured and user-entered query.
Key Metadata Enhancement
To eliminate display and scrolling issues, the Asset list page now displays as much of the metadata value as possible followed by ellipsis, with the full metadata value being available on the Asset Details page. Because storing lists in metadata values can be useful for various purposes, such as finding content based on a list of external IDs, Rally Core and Gateway now show the list-entries in the key metadata overview.
Preview Widget: Preview Multiple Files
The Rally Gateway Preview Widget can now be configured to preview not only a single file label, but also multiple file labels, which can be configured as a list of exact file label matches or as partial matches. As a result, operators can more efficiently preview multiple files without adding a File Inventory Widget to the Gateway page.
Workorder Attribute Display Configuration
Rally now supports display of the supply chain step in workorders along with attributes such as the dates they were queued or started, user and groups, and preset information. The visibility and order of these attributes can be configured to enable prioritization of the information operators need to identify the task they need to work on.
Accurate.Video Validate: Custom Marker Support, Audio Monitoring Improvements
Accurate.Video Validate now supports custom metadata fields in markers. Because different marker types in the manual QC section can be configured with different metadata schemas, operators can enter different data types to address different use cases, even within the same work order.
An update to the audio monitoring section in Rally supports routing as well as muting/soloing directly in the monitoring panel. Additional audio and subtitle tracks can be enabled by default when operators open a work order.
Security Enhancements
AWS IAM External ID and SNS/SQS Changes
Rally now automatically creates an external ID for each Rally organization that is used when assuming AWS roles to access AWS resources such as S3 or ParameterStore. This is a more secure approach than allowing users to enter their own external ID. SDVI implemented this change in response to the AWS recommendation and certification process to address the “confused deputy” problem. More information is available here.
In another update that improves security, Rally Core also now supports assuming an AWS IAM role when subscribing or sending messages to SNS topics or SQS queues.
Application Services Market
Because SDVI is continually expanding its extensive ecosystem of application services, Rally users enjoy access to the right tool for any job. Two new application services were added to this ecosystem, along with support for Aspera Faspex in SDVI Mover and support for unar from The Unarchiver.
Vobile
Vobile services include video fingerprinting that enables automatic detection of customer material on platforms such as YouTube, thereby preventing uploads of unauthorized copies and protecting customers’ IP as they execute digital video strategies. Rally now support the Vobile Command Line tool that allows the fingerprint to be generated and submitted to the Vobile databases.
Telestream Cloud Qualify
Rally customers can use the new Telestream Cloud Qualify service to automate quality analysis for file-based media.
Aspera Faspex Support
Aspera Faspex is now supported by SDVI Mover, and this allows Rally-managed supply chains to create and send packages to a connected Aspera Faspex server, where these packages can then be downloaded by the recipient.
unar CLD from The Unarchiver
Rally customers now can use unar, an open-source command line that allows compressing and uncompressing data including formats such as sit and sitx.
Contact us to learn more about any of these features or have us walk you through a demo.
