Testing and have a few questions

[anhomi]

Hello,

I'm testing iMatch and iMatch Anywhere to use in my company. We are a nonprofit organization and we really need some DAM for our photos. It really seems to provide the functionality we need while still preserving some of the file structure and even the older Lightroom tags that had been used in the past.

I want to be able to have our development director access the database from her home with IMA.

I'm trying to figure out if I can install IMA to one our Windows Server 2012r2 servers with iMatch on a workstation and have this work in our environment. Is this possible? I think it is, if I use a \\workstation_name\...\imatch database path in the IMA configuration, but I'd like to have this confirmed before installing IMA to a server. I currently have it installed to the workstation where iMatch trial is also installed.

Is there a particular kind of server this should NOT be installed on? It would not go on either of our domain controllers, but we do have different servers, including one that uses web services for a network management console that we access via browser. Is it ok to install it there or should there be another server that doesn't have any web services installed? We do not host our website, so this is solely for purposes of allowing people from outside the work network to access IMA.

Our current plan is to have iMatch installed to a workstation and IMA installed to a server. 1 user would use iMatch on the workstation as the primary iMatch tagging person. 2-3 other users to be able to edit the database/tagging through IMA, and 5-7 users to have view only access through IMA. IMA users would be both in and outside our domain network and it's extremely unlikely that all of them would be on at the same time. I would like to change the port for security reasons, and I can also make a port forward rule in our NG firewall. 

Is it possible to make the permissions so that only 1 user at a time can edit the database and tag new photos?

Are there any reasons why the live database should not be used in this scenario? We want one database for our entire organization, which is spread out over several cities. So we need more than 1 person to be able to work on tagging photos. We can work out a slightly different plan, but this would be ideal for us.

Thank you for your help.

[Mario]

IMatch and IMatch Anywhere are agnostic to the actual location of files or the database. Standard drive letter paths work as well as mapped drives or UNC shares. Naturally, accessing a database on a remote network server is slower than accessing the database on the same system.

IMatch Anywhere does not require a specific hardware or Windows version (W7 with platform update 1 is the minimum). IMatch Anywhere users run it on anything, from an Intel Stick PC to Windows server editions. IMatch Anywhere runs fine even on slower hardware.

Is it possible to make the permissions so that only 1 user at a time can edit the database and tag new photos?

This is how IMatch for Windows operates. IMatch databases can be shared by multiple users in read-only mode. If changes to the database need to be made, one user must open the database in writable mode, locking out all other users. See "Sharing Databases" in the IMatch help for details.

IMatch Anywhere does currently not allow users to change database contents, and it opens the database in exclusive mode, preventing users from opening it with IMatch while IMWS is running.

I plan to enhance IMatch Anyhwere to allow multi-user editing in future versions. For IMatch 2017, IMatch WebServices have been extended to support modifications to the database. I will roll this out into IMatch Anywhere over the next releases. In the end, users will be able to edit metadata in their browser, "upload" files into IMatch on the server etc.

[anhomi]

Thank you so much Mario.
That was a very thorough answer and one that I needed.
I look forward to the future IMA features.

Thanks again.

[johnstambaugh]

I plan to enhance IMatch Anyhwere to allow multi-user editing in future versions. For IMatch 2017, IMatch WebServices have been extended to support modifications to the database. I will roll this out into IMatch Anywhere over the next releases. In the end, users will be able to edit metadata in their browser, "upload" files into IMatch on the server etc.

"In the end, users will be able to edit metadata in their browser, 'upload" files into IMatch on the server etc."

Yes.  Fully concurrent multi-user mode.

This is what I am waiting for to use IMatch in my business.

John