I’m considering Devonthink pro as a business tool for my small graphic design company (two person firm) and experimenting with a demo. While I can see the practicality of Devonthink to replace paper records like receipts, correspondence, etc. with digital ones, I can’t quite determine the practicality of it for organizing graphic files.
For example, our primary graphic software is Adobe CS5. As an experiment, I tried organizing a Devonthink folder for some InDesign files. I opened one of the sample files, made a small edited and chose “Save as” (the file was an older CS3 file and I wanted to save it in our current CS5 format). Because I chose “Save as” the finder opened but I couldn’t figure out where to save the new file to? Eventually, I decided to save the file to my desktop and drag it back to the correct Devonthink folder. Normally, the new file would replace the older file since they share the same name; however, it simply created a new file. The old CS3 file had to be manually trashed.
This cumbersome save process made me reconsider Devonthink’s usefulness as a tool for organizing active graphic design files – it may be OK for archived projects but not active ones. I suppose I could index active graphic files? However, constantly synchronizing Devonthink seems like more hassle than help and a potential recipe for disaster if forgotten?
Tips or suggestions from anyone successfully using Devonthink in a graphic design or similar workflow business would be appreciated.