Extensis Reviews & Product Details

The ability to create and manage multiple Catalogues and associated user-access has been very useful in partitioning specific content within the University, allowing a broad user-base without worrying about incorrect or unauthorized use.

NETPublish is very underwhelming. Although it does simplify the task of creating web-galleries for stakeholder use it lacks the abilities I really need such as: • significant branding options or • an ability to self-build a theme such as say WordPress which would enable say a Brand platform; • allowing the download of vectors. Currently vectors download the Jpg preview Portfolio creates to show in the page • Allowing a choice in what sizes/options can be downloaded - a simple option to choose a size or variation allowed for download would be great. This might b a simple Catalogue batch resize to create variations and then choose that target path as the download, when a smaller verion might be used as the web-page thumbnails. In the Portfolio app itself: • differentiating file types, so when disallowing originals to be downloaded, items like PDFs can't be downloaded, currently if originals are not allowed the PDFs download the jpg preview. • A real issue has been that certain libraries within Portfolio need updating and present a security concern, so we can't give access to the app to outside stakeholders, so we can only give them access to web galleries which doesn't work very well. • Being flash-based is a concern.

Our University uses the DAM for the following: • Image gallery for the whole of University, with some users having access to the Portfolio image gallery Catalogue and some users just getting access to a NETPublished gallery. • Within the Marketing Department we store campaign assets for resourcing and referencing. This includes: images, video, copy, audio, pdf advertising. • As a subset of Marketing the Graphic design team have a Catalogue for design and brand assets. • Social now use a Catalogue for PSD templates and instructional videos.

I'm no longer spending hours to find the relevant digital assets i need. It has also become so much faster to share and deliver files. The usability is high enough that i trust my colleagues and the many volunteers at our festival to use the system with only very limited training.

My experience with the support has not been very good. This is however under elucidation by Extensis, and I trust that it will be sorted out.

File-sharing has been made much easier. Also, we spent much less time finding the assets we need. We have a gallery platform to show off our assets, which was very needed before.

The new interface of the web client has gained much in aesthetics and relative ease of use.

I sorely miss the standalone Desktop client of earlier versions with infinite scrolling and drag and drop capabilities.

Collaboration is greatly improved in the current version, sharing assets across an internal team has greatly improved our overall workflow.

I like overall storage capacity as we have several hundred thousand images that need to be stored. I also like the ability for end-users to create public galleries and the presets options for downloads. There are several other new features that make overall maintenance easier, but really too many to write out here.

The biggest issues that I have are: - Not being able to see more items in the grid view (thumbnails are too large) - Not being able to create presets that would work for both horizontal and vertical images (ie, I would like to be able to create one preset that downsizes to a fixed height but has the images maintain the aspect ratio for the width. Currently, a hard height and width must be provided).

We have been able to make images available to more groups based on security access. Presets allow the users to resize images without the assistance of media/IT.

The server portion installs easy enough, it was a bit of a resource hog in our VMware environment. The client portion works well enough. Our main issue was in getting the end users to be consistent about tagging photos. Our biggest problem was that it uploading images always falls to an intern.

Expensive, would have liked to see a better non profit discount.

DAM. It helped us organize our images in a way we can use other products if needed.

The simple interface with most desired uses already configured.

I would like if the platform was built using a more open system so we could do in-house development to add onto this already great platform.

Organizing hundreds of thousands of company media assets that get lost in folder trees on a shared server into a simple organized and hosted solution that we can access/organize and tag to make finding relevant assets very fast.

Metadata-based searching within catalogs and simplicity of the user interface are top of the list. The multiple catalog databases provides control over content, permitting allowed users the ability to view, download or contribute. Previewing and downloading are extremely easy.

With simplicity comes gaps. Within our workflow, we need more than just photo management but need the ability to apply asset-level securities. Our goal is to have a DAM that's the base for numerous business processes, whether they come with the DAM or integrate to other applications - and right now Portfolio is limited to extending or building out those processes.

Collaboration and approvals workflow and work order management are the big ones on my list. DAM needs to be central to initiating these processes.

We particularly appreciate the ease of searching and previewing (primarily used for image searches) and ease of adding image files to layouts. Prior to creating this database of our royalty-free image assets, we realized we couldn't easily keep track of the images we already owned and found our designers would search online rather than explore our own assets and even repurchase images we had already invested in. We needed to make it as easy to search for RF images we already own as it is to search the entire world-wide web. We also like the feature to embed metadata out into the actual cataloged file. With the advent of other search mechanisms (Adobe Bridge, Spotlight, etc.), this gives us optional ways to search.

When adding metadata, especially keywords, various simple punctuation (such as quotation marks often used in keyword txt files) can cause the database to error out.

Full disclosure, we are not using Portfolio Server for all DAM. We are using Portfolio only for cataloging our royalty-free image library to make it as easy to search for RF images we already own as it is to search the entire world-wide web. It works well for this specific purpose. We were initially frustrated that database keywords are not automatically embedded in the actual image files but we have since used Portfolio's embed-properties function to do that. This has facilitated searching also with Bridge and Spotlight when necessary or convenient.

It is easy to use. I like the folder structure setup. The ability to create galleries is also great.

I didn't have any say in how it was set up and we weren't up to date on upgrades, so some of the downsides of what I experienced were probably due to this, but the search feature was my biggest frustration because there didn't seem to be a way to search within results.

We've now moved to a new product, but Extensis Portfolio allowed us to manage a large variety of digital assets easily.

Embed and extract metadata. Export originals and converted images and metadata in reusable formats. It is reasonably priced.

Flash based. When the took away the desktop client it was much harder to do things you used to do. Also the netpubkish part become harder for non-coders.

Management of faculty media collections for teaching

Extensis Portfolio Standalone has been a great way to manage my thousands of images. I find keywording for multiple images easier to do in this program than on Adobe Bridge.

The Portfolio Standalone is no longer supported by Extensis. Standalone users have to update to Extensis Server to continue being current and have access to tech support. The $2,000 price is a costly deterrent for upgrading. Extensis had made larger companies their target market and forsaken individual entrepreneurs. Other software for digital asset management are Adobe Lightroom and Photo Mechanic. Be aware that in Portfolio, sometimes the paths to files get broken and it takes a while to figure out how to reconnect them. This recently happened to me when I got a new hard drive and it had a different name than my previous hard drive. I had to change the name of the new hard drive to be the same as the previous one to re-establish the paths' connections.

Extensis Portfolio allows me to have a directory of my images in one place. This is greatly helpful when looking for a particular image. The program also allows a person to have folders or collections of images (subsets from the directory) without using additional computer memory.

The user interface isn't too daunting and is really intuitive, almost 'friendly', which gives our staff the confidence to focus on what they need to do rather than being put off by trying to work out 'how' to do what they need. It doesn't tie all staff into having to use it. As a system it can sit parallel to other activity that takes place on our files, so our staff have the nice interface, and our IT teams can still undertake maintenance of the files/servers. We haven't done much with the API, but are looking forward to seeing what we can do with that to help integrate with other workflows/systems.

Out IT team would prefer a Linux version to make it easier for them to maintain. It can sometimes run a bit slow, but that is due to the way we have it setup rather than the software itself, so it's worth spending the time to get the set up right from the start as this can be a burden in hindsight.

It has meant we have a means to assess and organise a huge number of legacy assets, and move our workflows forward to much greater efficiency. This in turn also means we can reach a point were a much wider range of staff can discover and access assets themselves rather than relying on a small team to do it on their behalf.

Extensis portfolio has helped me in arranging all my jumbled bits of file in most of the popular formats in an organised way. It also has perfect syn and find features making things even more effortless

At times while handling proierity formats ,customs formats or the lesser known ones the software would abruptly fail to function. It also doesn't process the hidden files making it more of an hit or go.

Perfect for keeping the files organized and synced across different profiles.

Portfolio is a complete package for any company needing a reliable Asset Management tool, every major update just makes it better and more through without complexity.

I don't really have any dislikes anymore - Extensis keeps ahead of the game for me. It seems every time I find something I don't like its fixed in the next major upgrade. I no longer keep a wishlist.

Giving staff members access to company purchased royalty free assets solved our problem with people just pulling items from the internet that are not licensed. We no longer have to be concerned about the legal issues. We are currently building an in-house corporate video library that will be a huge time saver for the company.

We like its flexibility in configuration options.

It could have more options on the security side of things.

We had a large unwieldy repository of picture and video assets that was difficult to search. We're now able to give users an easy to use interface with which to add and search for these assets.