Suitcase 10 Server Eases Workgroup Font-Management Woes

Ben Long

1

Managing fonts on your own computer can be confusing, so imagine what it’s like to manage an entire workgroup of computers. Fortunately, Extensis’ Suitcase 10 Server can ease most of the hassles and headaches involved with managing fonts on a network. For design firms, prepress agencies, publishers, printers, or service bureaus, the software provides a simple solution to the problem of keeping an entire network up-to-date with the latest fonts needed for a variety of projects.

Suitcase Server sells for $999.95 with five copies of Suitcase 10 client (Mac) or Suitcase 9 (Windows). To add more users, you purchase additional copies of the Suitcase client.

Central Storage
Suitcase 10 Server was created for groups needing access to a consistently managed set of fonts. The software does not allow you to open fonts across a network; rather it simply provides a central repository from which client machines can automatically download copies of all the fonts required for a particular job. Suitcase Server works with the Suitcase client application to ensure that the fonts used in a document passed around a workgroup are the ones intended by the document’s creator.

The idea is simple: You put all the fonts for a particular project into the Suitcase Server, and anyone working on that project can easily download all the necessary fonts from there. If the design specs for the project changes to require new fonts, you need do nothing more than add the new fonts to the font folder for that project on your server. The rest of computers in the workgroup will then automatically synchronize with the server, ensuring the fonts will be up-to-date.

One benefit of this font-download approach: Users don’t lose access to fonts if the server goes down, given that all fonts are actually copied to their local drives.

Your Serve
Suitcase 10 Server consists of two applications — the Server itself and the Server Administer, which you can use to define font sets, specify an access password, and add user licenses.

The software runs on a PowerPC Macintosh or Windows NT system and requires only a modest processor and 32MB of RAM. With its small memory footprint, it can easily be run from an existing server, or you can install it on a spare, older machine you might have lying around. We tested the Macintosh version of the server on a blue and white, 400MHz PowerMac G3 running OS 9.1. On our machine, the server required only 10MB of RAM and had no trouble running alongside our firewall software and several other server applications.

Getting Started
After installing the software, your first task is to copy fonts to your server machine. Suitcase Server will only recognize fonts stored in its own SuitcaseFonts folder, so you’ll need to copy all relevant fonts into this location.

Once you’ve copied your fonts, you can launch the Suitcase Server Administrator app to create Server Sets, which are special collections of fonts that clients can automatically download.

Server Sets are really just like normal Suitcase font sets, except that only the server administrator can create and modify them. When you launch the Server Administrator, the program automatically scans the SuitcaseFonts folder to create a list of currently available fonts. From the Administrator app, you can create new sets and drag installed fonts into these sets.

Any user with Suitcase 9 or 10 can access the server. Whether you’re using version 9 or 10, you first have to configure the Server settings in Suitcase’s Preference dialog. Simply enter the server’s IP address and you’re ready to go. (Yes, Suitcase Server is entirely IP-based, meaning you can access the server from any IP-based machine.)

There are two ways to access the Server from Suitcase 10: You can choose to Synchronize with Server, which will simply copy all sets installed on the server to your computer, or you can choose to subscribe to a set. This latter option will copy a specific font set to your computer and then check at regular intervals to see if it has been updated. Suitcase 9 only provides the Synchronize option.

Fonts are copied into a Suitcase Server Fonts folder in the root directory of your hard drive, and a new set is automatically created inside your Suitcase app. Network sets can be activated and deactivated just like any other type of Suitcase set. With this basic functionality, you can ensure that everyone on your network (whether in your office, or around the world) has the same font sets available.

1 2 Next