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.