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How FotoWeb archives relate to Index Manager's indexes

How do FotoWeb archives relate to Index Manager's indexes?

At the heart of most advanced Fotoware DAM systems will be FotoWeb. It provides an interface to your asset collections and lets users contribute content through uploads, share content with each other or external users without an account on the system and reuse assets, for example by placing them in an Office document or an InDesign layout, or by putting them to use on their CMS system.

 

Index Manager is set up independently of FotoWeb. Depending on the software level, a single Index Manager instance can index up to 3 million assets. It may be configured on the same server as the one that runs FotoWeb, but often they will be split on different hardware for performance reasons and to facilitate fault tolerance schemes.

On the Index Manager server you set up indexes; each index can have up to 32 document folders added to it - these are the folders that contain the assets you want to make available to your users.

Users are given access to archives through FotoWeb. A FotoWeb archive connects to an index and can optionally filter the content of that index using a search so that different sets of users see different content in the archives.

In fact, you can filter content both on the archive level and in the archive's access list for truly fine-grained control of the content users have access to.

Connecting FotoWeb to Index Manager

When creating a FotoWeb archive, you connect it to the Index Manager server using the server's hostname or IP address. The default communications port is 7000, but this can be changed in the Operations Center if it interferes with other systems that run in your network. Connections can also be configured to use SSL for increased security.

One index - several archives

You can in fact create several archives that all point to the same index (we recommend using the Clone archive function to make this a little easier) and control the content that users see in each archive by using what we call an autosearch, a predefined search string that filters the content in the index to display only the content that's relevant for that archive. Subsequent searches performed by the user will be made within the scope of the inital autosearch.

This way the content of a single index can form the basis of several archives, all showing different content and having different access permissions, download rights etc. applied.

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