Extensis Reviews & Product Details

Extensis was implemented prior to my arrival, and the account team was very good at providing resources to me and my team to learn how our integration worked and to manage the application on our own. It is also pretty intuitive once you understand the basics and we are able to allow departments to manage their assets on their own with little assistance from IT.

A few users have complained about search parameters, but we have seen that improve in the product over the last couple of upgrades

We had the same image stored hundreds of places on our network. With tens of thousands of images, it meant we were wasting 4-5 TB's of storage. With Extensis, we have improved workflow and accessibility for our web, ecomm and marketing teams.

The abilty to control access to images so that different groups of people can see what they need but not what they don't.

Gallerys and folders can confuse those uploading material.

I used to store my images all of over the place. This helped me sort out the mess but also put a system into place that assured future image finding happiness.

A easy way to organise your images that can be shared easily with your colleagues.

Can take a bit of time to set up if you don't know what you are doing.

Being able to share 250,000 images dating back to the 1990's with 100 staff quickly. Removing the need to have complex system of folders and making life easier for me.

The application is fast, has a clean interface and the staff have been extremely accessible during our research and implementation phases. The core functionality of the software is easy to learn and key features are never more than a click or two away. Also find the help menu relevant and useful.

Some elements of the application still use Flash but apparently that is being phased out in the next update to full HTML5. Not much else to dislike about the application.

We were using a clunky install of TRIM asset management that was slowly grinding to a halt. Our business is a mixture of PCs and Macs which all have access to the same 'asset management experience'. We create a lot of project specific assets that need usage, permissions and versions tracked; we now have that covered.

We really like the watch folder and auto ingest/keywording. Also the NetPublish feature is critical for our companies workflow. We also find the ability to add custom fields to really helpful when it comes to first organizing and cataloging our assets and second to the end user searching and finding what they are looking for.

This might seem silly but I don't like how you have to select a range of photos in order to preview them using the next/previous arrow keys. A more intuitive user experience would be if you preview a single photo in an album but then hit the next/previous arrows it would then show you the next or previous photo, without having to previously select them before previewing. This is how the Apple Operating System works when viewing a file/photo in the finder view.

Centralizing, standardizing and sharing thousands of assets with a company that is spread across the nation. We have benefited from great accuracy in image use and less time/hassle spent finding the appropriate image.

We have been so happy with Portfolio's ability to quickly create asset derivatives and to securely share our assets both internally and externally through the use of NetPublish. We are able to implement this tool across most of the departments in our institution to help to solve asset management, discovery, and access issues. Users are typically quick to learn allowing for easy adoption throughout the organization

We often would like to have a work space or gallery that could be access across all the catalogs, but currently galleries are catalog specific. I would also like there to be a more obvious copyright filter on the previews or in the metadata. If copyright notices could show up in red or if there could be some easy way for individuals to know at a quick glance which images were approved images for publication or reproduction, it would reduce a lot of confusion.

We are organizing, quality checking, and creating all of our derivative for our assets across the institution using this one tool. It has allowed multiple departments to jump on board with learning and using one tool to making it much easier and more streamlined process for employees searching for assets, or providing access for publication.

Integration of all EXIF, IPTC and Adobe metadata. Integration with LDAP server for password security.

Scrolling via a trackpad is too sensitive.

We have opened the vault on images across campus, this has freed up my time to make images not search for them for clients.

It's easy to use from both the librarian's perspective and the user's perspective. Administration is pretty easy and the GUI to do this is very nice.

Sometimes when the metadata import fails the error messages aren't enough information to figure out why it failed. Another frustration is that when we import metadata we no longer have the option to apply metadata only to items in an isolated location, it applies the imported metadata to the entire catalog by default. This can result in some unintentional metadata overwrites.

Centralization of assets in an easily accessible location. We no longer have to pull CDs off the shelf, or sort through poorly organized folders on multiple file shares to find our assets.

The ability to search specific folders, the keyword search and also file formats etc. It's awesome to find what you need on a large server.

Using the web version it is disappointing you can't open a file from there, but at least you can see the server path.

Our marketing requestors can find PDFs and artwork on their own without having to bother graphic designers. It saves a lot of time to do actual work and not waste time looking for a photo or file.

Portfolio is an easy to use, full featured application that has been around for many years. it is a very good, affordable workgroup solution, and a very good, budget-minded enterprise solution. It has all the basic features you would expect of a DAM without a lot of bells and whistles.

Portfolio recently changed from offering the option of connection to an external database like MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server for their top end solution to an internal only database, which they claim will be as robust and is better optimized. As this is still a new offering I cannot attest to these claims. I will say that the connection to the external database was always a bit of a kludge in my opinion though it worked. It remains to be seen if this new version is trouble-free. Portfolio is not as robust as other enterprise products when it comes to video or user profile settings.

Looking for a good quality, well-supported DAM solution for the workgroup and budget-minded enterprise customers. This does the job.