Technical Architecture

Asset Bank is a proven, fully scalable digital asset manager, capable of storing high volumes of assets and dealing with many concurrently logged in users.

It can be installed on most servers, for example on Windows, Linux, Unix or Mac – or any other operating system that supports the required software.

Web Server

Tomcat contains a built-in HTTP server, and so can be configured to listen at port 80. However, for most installations we recommend using a web server such as Apache or IIS.

If you intend to install Asset Bank on a server that already runs a web server, e.g. for other applications or intranets, then you can configure your existing web server to work with Asset Bank.

Application Server

Asset Bank is written in Java (which is why it will run on most operating systems!), and runs on a J2EE-compliant application server or servlet engine such as Tomcat. It requires the Java (JDK), any version from 5 and above.

Database

Asset Bank will work with all recent versions of any of the following databases: MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. If you don’t already have a license for SQL Server or Oracle then we would recommend MySQL as it’s free. The database does not necessarily need to be installed on the same server as Asset Bank – the application connects to the database via a port.

Data and File Storage

Asset Bank stores metadata in a relational database. The files are stored in one or more ‘repository’ directories, which do not necessarily have to be on the same server as Asset Bank (although of course Asset Bank needs to be able to read from them and write to them) - for example they can be on NAS or SAN devices.

Asset Bank can be configured to store the asset files in the database (as binary objects) although for a standard set up we recommend using a file system.

User Authentication and Single Sign-on

Asset Bank can be configured to integrate with an LDAP server, such as Active Directory or Novell) so that users can log in using their standard network usernames/passwords. To do this it needs to be able to access the LDAP server via HTTP or HTTPS. If you are running Active Directory then IIS can be configured to use Windows Integrated Authentication so that Windows users are logged in automatically.

Asset Bank can also integrate with other SSO (Single Sign-On) technologies, such as OpenID, Crowd and Sage Passport. Its authentication architecture enables us to write ‘plug ins’ for new SSO technologies relatively easily, so please contact us if you use a different one.