Index Manager is a full-text search engine that can keep track of millions of digitally archived multimedia files.
As the name implies, Index Manager is an indexing application. It extracts text (XMP and IPTC metadata, file information, the contents of PDF and Office documents, etc.) from files and allows users to search freely within this text. It provides advanced search capabilities combined with extraordinarily fast processing and delivery of search results using FotoStation or FotoWeb clients.
To do this you set up an index folder with a number of attached document folders. Document folders are the folders where your files are stored. These are attached to the index folder, which is where Index Manager stores all the information it extracts from the document folders. The index folder is announced on the network so that FotoStation and FotoWeb clients can connect to it using the FotoWare Protocol on a TCP/IP socket that handles searching and basic file operations on the server.
A search request to the archive is sent to the Index Manager server over IP; Index Manager in turn performs the search and returns the resulting thumbnails to the client. Although the document folders may be located on different volumes - even different servers in the network - Index Manager will return the search results complete with thumbnails and previews.
When a user updates the metadata in a file, it is in fact Index Manager that writes the changes to the file. Whereas in earlier versions of Index Manager users had to have access to the actual files in the document areas to be able to change them (to caption them, for instance), Index Manager 7 uses a TCP/IP socket for communications with the client and handles search processing, caching of thumbnails and previews and the writing of metadata changes back to the files in the archive. This, coupled with much improved user administration, means that Index Manager is well-suited for high-security environments where access needs to be limited to only certain user groups.
Index Manager version 7.0 also has built-in PDF processing licensed from Adobe. This implies that it can process and create thumbnails and multi-page previews for all PDF's, and index document content, without requiring additional 3rd party software.