Portfolio Server 7 is the server edition of Extensis’ Digital Asset Management tool, Portfolio. The server application is a Mac OS X background process. The server comes with a Launch program, but managing the server, adding catalogues, and performing maintenance is all done from the client application. Although Portfolio Server 7 is a powerful DAM tool, I found it requires careful thinking about workflow efficiency, network load, and architecture.

All catalogue handling is done through the client. This means that you can remotely manage all your catalogues without ever having to be near the server machine physically. Creating a new catalogue on the server is done by selecting the Administer Server option, and then creating the new catalogue. If you are not used to server-based digital asset management, Portfolio (and any other DAM tool, I might add) may be a bit confusing at first. For example, you can remotely create a catalogue of images that reside on a client station.

This is pretty useless because the whole idea of having a server-based solution in the first place, is to have a centralized repository of images and catalogues so that for example backing up the whole collection can be done from one central location. The Portfolio client adds to the confusion by allowing you to create watch folders. These folders will be scanned automatically and the asset will be added as soon as an image (or a drawing, or any file that you have defined to be added to a catalogue) is dropped on the folder. Watch folders, however, will typically be created on a user's local station.

The concept behind Portfolio Server 7 is a three-tier architecture: the client accesses the catalogue database, the server serves the catalogues (but not the actual files!), and the files are served by an ordinary server (Windows or Mac). In order for the client to be able to open files, it must have access to the file server. In order to view the catalogues, its Portfolio client application must be able to access the Portfolio server.

Complexity starts indeed when users add watch folders. To catalogue these, the user has to turn them into AutoSync folders. For these folders to be "seen" by the Portfolio server, all network shares that contain such AutoSync folders must be mounted on the server. When adding such a folder from a Windows Portfolio client to a catalogue served by a Mac Portfolio server, the user must navigate to the new folder location starting from the same location that the Mac server has mounted. This is not what I would call elegant.

In fact, I find the obligation to mount all network shares that contain AutoSync folders, somewhat disadvantageous from the perspective of scalability. If your environment has thousands of clients, each with its own often-used AutoSync folder, my guess is that you will have a serious network problem once all of these clients are dropping images in their folders throughout the day, and especially so if the day is a busy one. Still, I could not test this feature because I'm not exactly working in such an environment, and I must admit that Extensis' customer base for Portfolio Server is impressive. One wonders if that would be so if the server would not scale properly...

Nevertheless, for very large environments I think it is advisable to implement a policy of centralisation with respect to assets as well as catalogues. In such environments, images cannot be dropped in a local folder or, if they can, such local folders should probably better not be catalogued by Portfolio until late in the evening, when network activity is at its lowest. Images could then, using scripts, be removed from the client station, and be saved on the file server, where they ultimately belong. In those environments, Portfolio SQL Connect is probably more appropriate than the Server edition.