M+E Connections

Perforce Gives 2022 Recap, Explores 2023 Roadmap

Perforce continues to add to and refine its suite of digital creation and collaboration tools, company representatives said Jan. 25 during the webinar “Perforce Innovations: Year-End Recap & 2023 Kick-Off.”

In 2022, Perforce released several products and features to help teams innovate and iterate more, allowing them to get higher quality products to their customers faster, according to the company.

During the webinar, the company’s product managers discussed the latest features and performance improvements to Perforce’s Helix Core version control application and its Helix Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution that launched in 2022.

They also provided key updates to Helix Core modules and application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as Perforce’s Hansoft enterprise planning application, and discussed what’s to come this year.

“Some of [the] product themes that drive our decision-making process for our version control portfolio and beyond are things like scale and performance,” cloud enablement and ease of use, according to Brent Schiestl, senior product manager at Perforce Software.

“When it comes to scale and performance, “we’re talking about multiple dimensions of scale here,” he said, explaining: “It could be the number of users you have. It could be the number of files you’re working with. It could be the overall size of the files and the dataset you’re working with. And it could also be the multi-geographic dispersed nature of your team makeup.”

With cloud enablement, meanwhile, “we’re starting to look at how do customers either deploy our products to the cloud when they first get started, and also how do they move existing implementations of our products to the cloud” and how can Perforce help them on their cloud journeys, he said.

“Last but not least is ease of use,” he told viewers, noting “we’re always looking at ways to provide usability enhancements to some of our graphical tools,” including the Helix Visual Client (P4V) desktop app that provides access to versioned files in Helix Core through a graphical interface and Helix Sync desktop client for creatives.

The company released Helix DAM last July, he said, pointing out it connects to Helix Core via an API called P4Ruby.

“We had a lot of product releases” in 2022, including two releases of the Perforce  flagship product, Helix Core, and multiple releases of P4V, he said. There were also multiple releases of its code review tool, Helix Swarm, and a couple of new plug-ins, one for Adobe Photoshop and another for Autodesk Maya, that interact with Helix DAM, he added.

Among the enhancements made to Helix Core in 2022 was new “functionality that we refer to as stream components,” he said. Stream components allow stream client views to include other stream views, according to the company.

“With stream components, what we wanted to do is support … any of our customers that are looking [for] or are already using a component-based development methodology,” Schiestl said. “With component-based development, you have lots of interdependencies between streams or between components and, if you start to manage and map this out as each stream being its own independent component, there are ways now that you can more easily manage these dependencies between these components,” he noted, before demonstrating stream components to viewers.

“The general thing I want to get across is this is an exciting new piece of functionality where, instead of having to manage path dependencies across streams and try to keep them manually in sync, now you can let us do that work for you through just a couple of simple lines in the stream specification itself,” he explained.

Although Helix DAM is a new product, Gerhard Kruger, product manager for Helix Core DAM at Perforce Software, pointed out that it’s “built on top of Helix Core.”

That, he said, “gives us immense power and capability to really bring together our existing user base with new personas. And when we talk about that, we really talk. , uh, designers and artists that also contribute, uh, as an example to games and, and various other, um, products, uh, and components within your environment.

2023 Roadmap

Kruger then turned to this year’s Perforce plans. “If we look at our roadmap for 2023 and beyond, one of the key items that’s part of Helix DAM is something called Helix Search.

Helix Search is “effectively a tool that indexes your Helix Core database … and it gives you the ability to really search on … various options and categories and things of that nature and find the files or multiple files that you might be looking for,” he explained, adding Perforce is enhancing the tool now.

The company, meanwhile, has AI Tagging that it will be expanding on a little to provide artificial intelligence tagging of images, videos and 3D objects inside of the system, he said, adding: “You can use either AWS, you can use Google, or you can use Azure AI tagging and also support deep detect, which we will expand on later this year.”

Perforce is also going to add optical character recognition (OCR), which he said gives the ability … when a file is checked in – let’s say a PDF document or even a handwritten item – for us to read that and make that text searchable.” But it “can also apply to images that might contain text on it in printed form, as an example, or maybe a banner or a logo – something of that nature – to read the text where we can, from that file, and again make that content searchable,” he added.