The preliminary steps described below prepare your company's production environment for using the DSM Extension to Virtual Ticket Developer. You may also want to refer to the Introduction to Digital Storage Manager section of the User Guide for an overview of Digital Storage Manager technologies.

Before setting up Virtual Ticket Developer, you should:

1. Establish an archiving workflow that utilizes the DSM Extension features of Virtual Ticket Developer. The workflow should fit into the existing production environment. For more discussion on the archiving workflows supported by Virtual Ticket Developer with the DSM Extension, refer to the Basic Workflows section of the User Guide for more information.
   
   
2. Assign two key roles to individuals within your company:
   • DSM Users who will have access to DSM Extension features included in the DSM Extension to Virtual Ticket Developer.
   • DSM Archivists who will be responsible for performing archiving tasks using DSM. Considering the accepted practices within your company, you may find it practical to assign this role to the System Administrator or even not appoint this role to a particular employee. In the latter case, archiving responsibilities may be shared by members of the production team.
     
     
3. Determine the scope of the production and archive folders and develop naming conventions for them. The concept of production folders implies that the file server folders are constantly modified and in active production use. By contrast, archive folders contain files and folders that do not undergo any changes and normally reside in the archive location.
   
   While setting up a Virtual Ticket Developer system that uses the DSM Extension, you can utilize InterSync server agent to keep the Virtual Ticket Developer database synchronized with the contents of the production and archive folders residing on the file server(s) or other locations.
   
   Additionally, by organizing and naming production/archive folders in a standardized way, you provide a classification mechanism for files and folders and categorize them in logical units. For example, the production folder may contain folders in which all files related to particular Jobs are located. We will call such folders "Job Folders". Job Folders typically conform to a naming convention. For example, Job Folders may start with a Job Number followed by a Job Name (e.g. "0001- Job Name"). The classification schema allows you to automate the process of extracting metadata encoded in file names and other file properties (such as location). For a detailed discussion of this, refer to "Associating Files and Folders with Jobs" in the MetaConsole User Guide.
   
   
4. Determine the scope of metadata you would like to associate with files and folders. The default structure of digital resource records provided by Virtual Ticket Developer is rich enough to accommodate the typical metadata necessary to support most production and archiving workflows. Moreover, the predefined structure of the digital resource records may be extended by creating additional database fields to hold more metadata than is set by default. This is described in "Setting Up The File Cabinet".
   
   Although users may populate the metadata database fields manually, it is possible to instruct InterSync to automate this process by extracting metadata encoded in file properties (see the previous step).

Related Topics

• Introduction to Digital Storage Manager
• Basic Workflows