Digital Asset Management / Sharing System

March 12, 2013 11:45 AM

Looking for suggestions and recommendations for a way to share files with customers, contractors and satellite offices. I inherited an old website from 2007 that is used to post creative assets such as AI and PSD files for download. Posting new items is a manual process, requiring us to make thumbnails and manually adding links to the files.

I need a system, preferably out-of-the box, to replace this.

Requirements:
Must log-in to access.
A web interface for the user to download files.
Categories / Folders.
Automatic file description: name, date, file size, file type.
The ability to add descriptions, independent of the file name.
Read-only permissions for the end-user.
Branding of the website.

Preferences (but not mandatory):
Web interface to allow the team to upload and manage assets, including batch uploading.
The ability to share specific files or category/folders with specific users.
Automatic thumbnail creation for PSD, EPS, AI and PDFs.

I am able and happy to deploy a web application that runs on our servers. I've considered using a web front-end for a traditional FTP server. That would be fine if the GUI and appearance is very professional looking and intuitive for the end-user, but I don't want to go to the trouble of extensively skinning it. Adding a logo and modifying a CSS file is about all I want to do. Alternatively, I can use a PHP/MySQL app, but don't want to stray outside that framework.

I'm also open to using a 3rd party service like Dropbox, Google Drive or Adobe Cloud but would like to keep the cost under $100 / month. I currently have less than ten gigabytes of data and don't expect to exceed two gigabytes of downloads a month.

So, any suggestions? Personal experience with systems you like or hate would be teriffic!

posted by nedpwolf to computers & internet (3 answers total)

box.com enterprise account. everything you need, including branding. pricy i think, but does it. I LOVE BOX.COM and hate dropbox. you can share things with people you invite to your folder, or you can just send them a link. i know from personal experience it creates thumbnails of all your above named files and previews of all of them too. wee!
posted by misanthropicsarah at 12:10 PM on March 12

Google Drive. High security, strong suite of apps, none of the issues of Box or Dropbox in terms of file security. Hits every requirement and preference except for thumbnails (which can be viewed in-browser).
posted by ellF at 12:42 PM on March 12

I represent Widen and we have a web-based Digital Asset Management solution that meets all of your requirements and more. The Widen Media Collective is the SaaS product geared up for mid-to-large companies. http://www.Widen.com.

We also just launched a new much lighter weight image management application - Smartimage (http://smartimage.com).

Both products are a better fit for managing, sharing and repurposing high quality graphic file types as you described compared to box, dropbox and drive.

Happy to assist with any other questions. -Jake at Widen
posted by widen at 8:11 PM on March 12