Extensis Portfolio & Fusion?

[digitaldean]

Anyone use Extensis Portfolio or Fusion apps?

Working with a friend to set up a publishing company. Ultimately want to set up an asset mgmt. scheme to take elements from previous ads to make new ones, reuse in marketing materials, etc. Plan on storing materials on XServe RAID setup.

From what I've seen on their site, the NetPublish version looks pretty cool. Especially for allow customers to proof their ads online.

Any thoughts?

 

[Glenn Wolsey]

I know iGary uses Extensis Portfolio for his clients images, so he's the person you want to talk to.

 

[bousozoku]

I really dislike Portfolio after having it for about a year. I don't have the NetPublish server and have never tried it.

Portfolio has a user interface that looks good and makes sense but the operations that happen in the background don't seem to match.

Operational errors seem to be the norm. e.g., I renamed a folder and suddenly, Portfolio was unable to locate the files in the collection and requested that I select all 200+ individually rather than let me select the folder.

I'm sure Suitcase Fusion is much better now that the Suitcase back end is gone. It seemed to work acceptably well for many, including me, but didn't always activate/de-activate font files as it should have.

 

[mdudek1]

Portfolio gripe

I have a major beef with Extensis.
Portfolio has been a bread and butter application for the Art Department I support. Portfolio worked beautifully up until version 5.1. All subsequent version have a problem.

We have 30,000 images that reside on network. The artist search the Portfolio image catalog by doing keyword or file name searches. When they search for file names that don't exist in the library, it takes 2 to 3 minutes for Portfolio to return a blank gallery. All versions 5.1 and earlier return a blank gallery in about a second. The artist find this 2 to 3 minute search time unacceptable. I agree.

I emailed Extensis support and they never responded. When I got a courtesy call from my account manager I gave her an ear full. She transferred me to their support technician. After talking to him for about a half hour, I decided that I knew more about the application than he did. Their final recommendation was to purchase Portfolio server. Thanks a lot. I had just spent $1,500 on the Portfolio 6 upgrade and installed it on all of the user desktops. It took me 2 days to create a new catalog (much pain) and they were recommending that I turn around and buy the $3,500 the server version.

The problems with Portfolio is a major reason I haven't been able to upgrade my user to OS X. I downloaded and tested every version of Portfolio since version 6 and they have all had the same problem. I am now backed into a corner. We are upgrading our hardware and my choices are to run Portfolio 5.1 in Classic or live with the problems that Portfolio has.
I just downloaded Portfolio 8 demo and the server version. I'll be testing both next week. If the results are acceptable, I'll retract my Portfolio diatribe. Otherwise, does anyone have a DAM recommendation? Canto Cumulus is not Apple scriptable, so it is not a consideration.

 

[spitfirejd]

Portfolio

I've been using Portfolio for over a year. I originally bought it because I liked the fact that you can setup your own directory structure and your pictures can easily be found whether you open Portfolio or not (if your structure is setup properly). I don't care for iPhoto because of the way it moves your photos into directories that are not intuitive, forcing you to use iPhoto to retrieve them. Having said that, I find myself grabbing photos directly from the finder most of the time and not waiting for Portfolio to open. In the end, I have found it of little value. However, it greatly depends on how many photos you have. I have probably a few thousand that can mostly be organized logically with little need for the powerful searching capabilities of Portfolio. If you have 30,000 like mdudek1, you need something else. I recently starting playing with Apple's Aperture on a friends computer and in spite of the wierd directory structure you're forced to use, I really like it. I'm going to play with it a bit more before deciding whether to buy it. The RAW support and non-destructive editing make it attractive.

mdudek1: You might want to take a good look at Aperture. It sounds like it would be the solution you need.