Extensis headquartered in Portland, Oregon offers Portfolio, their digital asset management (DAM) platform.
$9
per month
WoodWing Assets
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Elvis DAM is a scalable digital asset management (DAM) solution, offering Filtered Search, Collaboration features, Image Editing, Metadata management, Approval Process control, Version control and Asset Sharing.
Extensis Portfolio is perfect for organizing photos as long as everything is keyworded correctly. If it is not part of a group's workflow to add a description or keywords to your photos, then you'd be dumping your photos into a pool with no way to search for them. Extensis Portfolio is best utilized when you give it the ability to help you search (by keywords yourself).
WoodWing Assets work exceptionally well in companies where they have a large number of digital files, that they need to manage and search. Media, advertising and marketing companies benefit significantly when using Assets to manage their digital images, video and content as the most approved as well as latest versions are automatically kept of every digital file. Companies that have a small number of digital files, with probably less than 10 staff, probably don't need a system to manage their actual digital files, provided they are in a structured folder base, that everyone can access.
Watch folders: Extensis allows for multiple watch folders to be commissioned on a variety of network connected data shares--NAS, direct connect external HDs, etc.. We have our workflow such that each photographer can upload their job into their own folder, and Portfolio automatically injests the image assets.
Metadata injecting: a key component of our archiving needs are met with Portfolio's fully- customizatable and automatic metadata injection. This allows us to set standard fields across all the assets, while also allowing for custom variations in categories, keywords, and tags. Absolutely key to our workflow.
Integration with Adobe CC is seamless through the built-in connector.
Finally, the support team is OUTSTANDING! We absolutely LOVE our support engineer. We are a small org compared to the rest of his portfolio, but he always puts in the extra effort and takes the time to allow us to feel like we are totally supported.
Learning curve. It can be very intimidating and difficult to learn for people who are not experienced with similar software.
Ease of adding new users. It's currently a long process to bring anyone new onto the platform. We have to go through our DAM manager and only they have the ability to add or remove people.
Thumbnail previews sometimes blank. Sometimes the thumbnails for photos don't load or need to be refreshed manually, which can be frustrating when needing to search through multiple folders and photos.
It is incredibly easy. For an idea on the onboarding or training of a basic user, this is the only system we know of that training takes literally 1 hour, and the basic user is fully up to speed. Very intuitive user experience. Easy ability to share files (simply right click). Easy ability to search for all digital files, and even content within the digital files, if you cant remember what the file name was - just this feature alone saved us hours everyday
Because our organization tends to run software on older equipment, finding someone to support our particular configuration was a challenge. Additionally, trying to explain to someone In tech support about our issues was difficult because a lot of the issues were quirks within the software that had to be seen to be understood.
WoodWing support has been good, they do feedback quickly when reporting an issue and do keep you up to date with where they are in the process of resolving the support issue. The support team is knowledgeable and take the time to fully understand the issue. I do feel they should have an online support ability to assist with basic user issues, as opposed to having to log a ticket every time, but that would be the only reason I have not given them a 10.
We have been with Extensis for many years-- so the comparisons are outdated at this point. Companies like WebDAM, Adobe's Lightroom, mediavalet, and others, just don't have the robust catalogue management Portfolio does. There is a solidness and assurance of functionality we experience when using Portfolio-- nothing clunky or web-cloud shaky
Overall Elvis DAM is a great product although when you compare the solution to other providers of similiar asset CDNs such as Amazon's AWS, Rackspace CDN or Cloudinary it can get quite expensive. This is especially true if you have a team that is at the larger enterprise level in which case you are charged by the user.
