The Zen of Extensis: All of your Digital Assets Collected, Organized, and Accessible in Portfolio
November 29, 2018
The Zen of Extensis: All of your Digital Assets Collected, Organized, and Accessible in Portfolio
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Extensis Portfolio
We currently utilize Extensis Portfolio for storing our organization's media assets, namely the still images produced by our photography team organization-wide. We have 2.2M assets under management. Extensis allows us to catalogue, tag, store, and redistribute the assets both internally and externally via an easily navigable web interface. Being able to safely archive the decades of content is paramount to the organization's institutional memory. Extensis does an excellent job of allowing us to deftly manage our media assets.
- Watch folders: Extensis allows for multiple watch folders to be commissioned on a variety of network connected data shares--NAS, direct connect external HDs, etc.. We have our workflow such that each photographer can upload their job into their own folder, and Portfolio automatically injests the image assets.
- Metadata injecting: a key component of our archiving needs are met with Portfolio's fully- customizatable and automatic metadata injection. This allows us to set standard fields across all the assets, while also allowing for custom variations in categories, keywords, and tags. Absolutely key to our workflow.
- Integration with Adobe CC is seamless through the built-in connector.
- Finally, the support team is OUTSTANDING! We absolutely LOVE our support engineer. We are a small org compared to the rest of his portfolio, but he always puts in the extra effort and takes the time to allow us to feel like we are totally supported.
- Portfolio supports a ton of asset types. Photos, videos, audio, documents, and large graphic files are all stored on the system. The image management is a mature feature with Portfolio. We are looking for them to continue to improve the video management tools beyond just thumbnail, preview, and playback for various formats.
- The customization of the out-of-the-box features in Portfolio provides organizations with flexibility to design to spec. However, expect to plan well in advance for customization--this is not particularly a negative, but be prepared to engage specialized persons to assist with the desired feature enhancement.
- Saves time-- automation features save time, freeing up personnel time, saving money.
- Assures us that the assets are catalogued, stored, and retrieved with minimal effort by any level of user.
- Easy to manage from an IT standpoint. Extremely stable on-prem platform. Updates are well thought out and applied on a schedule which works with our business model.
- Support is key for us-- we are a three-person IT operation with 100s of clients. Portfolio support is top-notch, dedicated pros.
We have been with Extensis for many years-- so the comparisons are outdated at this point. Companies like WebDAM, Adobe's Lightroom, mediavalet, and others, just don't have the robust catalogue management Portfolio does. There is a solidness and assurance of functionality we experience when using Portfolio-- nothing clunky or web-cloud shaky.