Digital Asset Management provider eMotion is formalizing its hosted offering this week as it rolls out a new version of its content storage and retrieval system featuring support for the Mac OS X platform and refinements to its natural language search engine.

Previously, eMotion thought of itself as a software company, even though it had backroom hosting deals with a number of its clients, says Richard Fisher, CEO of the San Francisco-based company. eMotion’s acquisition of Artmachine, an application service provider for marketing extranets and digital asset management, helped spur the company into creating a more formal hosted offering.

“Nine out of 10 times, the actual user of our product is the marketing person,” Fisher says. “These are people as far away from technology and the desire to buy and run technology in organization as you can get.”

Customers access and manage their data, be it images, audio, video or other files, via a Web browser. Administrators can grant access rights by individual or groups of users, even limiting people to a small window of time when they can access the system. There are 88 metadata fields for customers to use to describe and categorize files uploaded and an improved natural language search engine to help find images, important for customers with as many as 950,000 items stored.

The new update to the core digital asset management engine also features an image transformation tool, which can create multiple formats of a given image from a high-resolution master file. Using technology from Equilibrium, eMotion allows customers to setup templates for images that include crop sizes, format and other attributes for processing batches of files.

Shoemaker Birkenstock USA of Novato, Calif., has been using eMotion to manage some 1,500 images of its shoes and marketing materials for about six months. Prior to going to a digital asset management system, production manager Suzy Wiviott had to personally handle all the requests for images from sales people, marketing folks and distributors.

“I was getting no work done around here, it was ‘Suzy can you find this image… I need this image,’” Wiviott says. Her primary job is to help the creative teams create hi-res images for use in print and other areas. Burning images to CDs for people inside the office took more of her time than her actual job.