What's Connecter Suite?

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It's a SaaS product that expands the capabilities of Connecter. Here are the main benefits:

  • No boundaries – the team members don't have to connect to their Workspace through LAN.
  • No user limits – thousands of users can connect simultaneously and are only capped by the subscription plan.
  • Flexibility – the Workspace can be hosted on Design Connected's AAA-grade cloud servers or on-premise. In the latter case, our servers act only as licensing.
  • Advanced permissions – the team admin can enable and disable almost all operations a user can do inside Connecter.
  • Web Catalogs – a web application that allows the teams to showcase the visual side of their libraries to third-party partners or clients.
  • Version Control – take complete control over your asset's content while keeping your whole team in sync with its status. 
  • Custom Properties – expand the library metadata infinitely by defining your own properties and assigning them to the existing assets.

All features are showcased on the Connecter Suite page and are covered in the help center. The current section focuses on the administrative part of the service and will be most useful to admins and managers. The intricated details about the features and systems are in the corresponding sections. 

IMPORTANT:

Even when hosted on Design Connected's cloud servers, the Connecter Suite Workspace doesn't upload anything besides metadata. All library assets remain where they are: on your local network or any other assets sharing setup you use. 

Connecter Suite only manages the metadata (e.g., tags, descriptions, local paths to files, etc.) your team adds to those files in Connecter in order to organize them in a neat assets catalog.

The sharing of the actual assets within the team is up to you. For now, Connecter only works with local assets. Working with local assets leads to one main requirement - no matter which storage solution you use. You must ensure that every machine connecting to the Workspace will reach the assets through the same file path. 

For example, everyone should use the same drive letter for the location where the assets are stored and synchronized using cloud storage solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc. 

There are storage settings in the Team Portal that extend the capabilities of Connecter but aren't a substitute for the storage of the local assets. Basically, through storage settings, you are authorizing that Connecter will have access to a specific folder where it will store: 

So, in short, all of your assets will be in your own storage solution. The data stored in our servers is your library metadata – things like tags, descriptions, etc.