Best server solution for advertising agency and Adobe Indesign

[philippp97736410]

Hello! We are a small (about 20 people) advertising agency from Austria. We are currently looking for a new server solution, as we are dissatisfied with our current IT.

- We work with MacOSX and Adobe CC, mainly Indesign.
- We need a server for data storage, but also to work directly on it. Sometimes several designers and editors work on the same document, if everyone worked locally we would regularly overwrite/lose data.

Which server solutions do you use? What can you recommend?
At the moment we work on a Windows server, but we can't search on it with our Macs (because SMB).

Thank you very much for your help!
Best regards, Philipp

[Chad Chelius]

This is a wide-open question which could inspire a wide variety of responses. I'd find a local computer shop, Ideally a Mac shop but not required. I've worked off of Windows servers in the past with no problem. You just want someone who's familiar with working with graphic designers and not just business document users. You have higher needs than most users so you want someone familiar with your environment. Apple doesn't make dedicated servers anymore but pretty much any Mac can be configured as a server with plenty of storage connected. I know I'm not answering your question directly but hopefully it gives you some direction. 

[philippp97736410]

Thanks for your response. We are dependent on a big IT-Company, but they mainly support Windows. The say the do not want any Mac-Servers (MacMini-Server or similar) because the AFP-Protocoll is not beeing updated/supported anymore. Thats why we are using a WIN-Server at the moment - where we as Mac-users cannot do any searching on, so we have to know the location of every file on it by heart ;-D
Their latest suggestion was to use the Shared Folders from AdobeCC, but that are only the personal ones, not one big Storage that everybody uses, also Adobe itself says thats nothing to replace a Server with.
So our IT Partner asked if we had any references, how other Agencys work with similar requirements.

[Jeffrey_Smith]

I would suggest using a NAS (Network Attached Storage) instead of a dedicated server.

The benefits of a NAS device are many:

- does not require a workstation

- low cost, high capacity storage

- remote vpn access

- back up to various devices including cloud backup

- synchronization to Onedrive, Azure, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

- many protocols including AFP, SMB, FTP, HTTP, etc.

- user management of groups, permission, shares, etc.

[Test Screen Name]

"Sometimes several designers and editors work on the same document, if everyone worked locally we would regularly overwrite/lose data." Are you sure a server will make this better? Seems to me, it may make things much worse. Adobe do NOT recommend working with files on a server.

[Jeffrey_Smith]

"Adobe do NOT recommend working with files on a server...

The word recommend should be "support".

Any group more than 1, that does not work directly from a server (including NAS), IMO, is crazy.

[Chad Chelius]

Exactly. Adobe doesn't officially support it because they don't want to have to troubleshoot every user's server configuration when they have issues. That being said, if you work in a team environment, you HAVE TO work on a server.