The highest edition of DEVONthink is the Server edition, designed with a built-in web server component to broadcast a database on a network. With DEVONthink 4, we added new features to the web server, updated the interface, and made several technical improvements. Here are some of the highlights.
We redesigned the web interface to feel more contemporary, like iCloud online. This also means an improved, and user-definable, dark mode support.
For improved security or bandwidth preservation, you can now set how long before an idle session logs out.
In DEVONthink’s Settings > Server > Users pane, a green indicator shows who’s logged in. Very handy for administrators.
While still limited by web technologies, you can now view more document formats. This includes some Quick Look-viewable documents, such as Pages or Excel.
Of special note, is support for viewing EPUB ebooks. A table of contents makes it easier to navigate through the document and improves the reading experience.
We have improved performance in several areas, such as navigating through large groups or through the object list using the keyboard. Also, updating the view/edit pane is now more responsive.
More robust and performant communication between the web interface and DEVONthink.
DEVONthink Server is intended for business, academia, and group collaborations, but it is also available to individuals who want to make the investment. One of the advantages of this is that you only need a Mac to host the server, and then you can simply access the shared databases with a browser from a Mac, Windows PC, or Linux computer. For those starting out with DEVONthink, when running it in trial mode, you have access to the web server so you can try it out for yourself!
And for more information about DEVONthink Server, see the chapter In & Out > Web sharing of the help or user handbook.
I’ve used DT as my personal information management database for many years, but it never occurred to me to use DT Server for my company’s internal documents. After trying many web-based apps to manage internal documents, I finally decided to try DEVONthink Server. Overall, I’m impressed by the UI and the functionality and love not having to pay separately for each seat. It looks very clean and modern and seems intuitive. I have a few comments and suggestions though:
It would be nice to have replication available, along with a separate Replicate permission.
I’m able to display Mermaid diagrams by manually adding the Mermaid script tag to the top of each document. However, it would be much cleaner to have a preference setting to enable Mermaid and Prism, just like in the desktop edition.
I’d like to be able to manage users without shutting down the server. Instead of disabling user management while the server is running, we should be able to perform the edits, then hit an Apply button, which would restart the server.
I’d like to be able to enter a specific IP address for the web server to listen on. This could be added right above the Port setting.
It would be useful to have a log of user actions that could be filtered by user, date, action type, etc…
OpenID and/or SAML would be great.
My biggest ask is for user roles and granular permissions. Currently, we have to manually set permissions for each user. I’d rather be able to create a role, like Staff, and assign the permissions at the role level. I’d also like to be able to apply permission overrides to groups and documents. Permissions would flow from top to bottom getting more restrictive as you move down. For example, you could grant a role read permissions on a database, but prevent that role from being able to view a group within the database, then so on, for individual documents within a group. Ideally, roles could be hierarchical, so you could create a Manager role that would inherit all Staff permissions, etc…
Yeah, I realize that I could use department logins, but then I’d lose the ability to see which users are online, how active they’ve been, etc… Additionally, some users have multiple roles in the company and thus need access to multiple databases. I don’t want them to have to login separately to each database.
