Product Reviews

Extensis - once famed for its Photoshop and QuarkXPress plug-ins - has slowly transformed into a company dedicated to font and asset management. This is the first big upgrade to the workgroup version of Portfolio, its flagship digital asset management program, for well over a year, but the wait - at least for Adobe CS3 users - appears to have been worthwhile.

Portfolio Server 8.5 has no interface and works entirely in the background on a server machine. It does include a launcher program, but you control the server from the client version of Portfolio.

The big news with this version is that it boasts integration with Adobe CS3 through Portfolio Server's new Project Sync module. Once Project Sync is set up, connected users can browse a Portfolio catalog through Adobe Bridge, Creative Suite's built-in asset manager.

Getting things up and running requires some patience. As Project Sync acts as a plug-in for Adobe's Version Cue 2, you'll need to install the latter first (although it needn't be on the same machine), and a further small hurdle is that Version Cue access is restricted to AutoSync watched folders - those that are automatically updated on the server.

Once set up, though, the watched folder behaves like any other volume accessed through Bridge. To get to Portfolio-based images, you just select the Version Cue server as a Folder from Adobe Bridge and browse the assets - you can also search based on Portfolio metadata. As Portfolio will have already created asset thumbnails, this can be faster than browsing non-catalog media.

Project Sync isn't a complete replacement

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for Version Cue - it doesn't offer Version Cue's versioning features - but it's an ideal storage medium for completed projects. Rather than filing finished projects as Version Cue 2 projects, which limits access to CS3 users, they can now be stored as assets in the Portfolio catalog, so anyone without the latest Creative Suite can get to them too.

In fact, Project Sync opens up any catalog objects edited in Creative Suite to other Portfolio client users, even if Creative Suite isn't installed on their Mac or PC Another potential benefit for users of NetPublish, the add-on Portfolio module for web publishing, is that Project Sync effectively lets Creative Suite users update a web gallery from inside Creative Suite.

The other notable change in Portfolio Server - aside from an update to the SQL Connect module to work with the latest versions of various SQL databases - is the arrival of a new Administrator option that lets you apply default values to specific fields of incoming assets if they are otherwise empty. Viewing and editing the settings through a single window is simple and it works well.

The client, or standalone, version of Extensis has been upgraded too, offering better CS3 compatibility. When you create a new catalog you're now offered a choice of catalog types, pre-populated with fields optimised for the type of assets used. For example, the Project Sync-optimised catalog contains custom fields that can be searched from Adobe Bridge or edited in Photoshop's File Info panel. If you're fairly sure of your catalog content, this could be a real timesaver.

A new Presets palette lets you assign multiple data fields using presets, such as keywords, description and custom field values. In previous versions you could only apply presets as assets were imported, but now you can drag the Preset directly onto the assets to update them.

At about £3,000 - and that's excluding client licenses - Portfolio Server 8.5 hardly qualifies as cheap, and you may have installation headaches. But Version Cue-based organisations will benefit from the ability to simplify asset management and share their library easily. For those users, Portfolio Server is good value.