A few feature suggestions, including permissions, audit logs

DEVONthink Feedback
1

I have several people working on the database in parallel, some of them are required to make changes to a limited set of groups each day, others should only use it as read-only.

For the read-only mode, I have to use the web interface, which is the only way to provide read-only. This is good enough, but offering a read-only mode for the native application would be better.

For the people bringing changes in parallel, the risks of damage to the database (mistakes such group move or deletion) are doubled, which brings me to these feature suggestions:
— record a log of all changes brought by a user (group/file rename/move/copy/replicate/modify/create so that I can search for potential mistakes after a day’s work and revert to previous backups before they are overwritten)
— and/or display the changes when launching the database synchronisation (in order to allow canceling it and fixing any mistake before retrying)
— also, allow a permissions system on the database so that an administrator would be able to define in which parts of the database a specific user is able to change and/or create and/or move and/or rename groups/files (even though inheritance would likely be hard to define because of replicant groups)

Some nice additional features would be:
— being able to undo a file/group rename
— apparently in some cases rotating JPGs lowers the quality because the resulting file size is half of the original file, so for now I have to do that externally in the Preview application, so what would be great would be a lossless JPG rotation based on the orientation metadata

2

I don’t know if DEVONthink will ever become a true multi-user / simulteneous-user database application, though I would guess “no”. But that’s for the company to comment on.

Meanwhile – since you need to have collaborators on various documents – have you considered putting those shared documents in a cloud folder hierarchy and then indexing that hierarchy in DEVONthink? There would be less risk of database damage that way. Multiple users can have their own DEVONthink database – even one that is synced – and if each instance of that database has groups that are indexed Dropbox or Box (or other) folder then that can be a workable solution.

3

Thank you for your suggestion.
I cannot really use the cloud on indexed files as I already have my whole database in a managed rather than indexed mode, and it would not be useful to my use case since most changes that need to be done in parallel are not changes to the file contents but changes to the database (replicates, renames, moves).
As I’m manually syncing all the computers in a specific order, I have no problem with the database sync causing corruption (I only had this problem once). The main problem I need to avoid is an involuntary change from a junior user because of a slip of the mouse (moving instead of selecting) and keys not pressed (moving or duplicating instead of replicating).