Merlin 4 - A step in the wrong direction?

[Dave Warden]

Well me experience with Merlin 4 is proving to be a little bit of a mixed bag.

 

It appears that the web sharing function of Merlin 2 is defunct and now there is the Merlin Server. This seems to be great as long as everyone in your organization has apple products or a licensed copy of Merlin.

 

In Merlin 2 I could develop my project and then share via the web link and have people log in and provide me updates directly from within the web browser, it would seem that now I get to pay $300 just to allow people to see my project in a web browser. Not even sure of what the value there is in this as if I have anyone that I want to see progress I can print to pdf and mail to a distribution list once a day.

 

What are the other benefit of the server? “Faster than the speed of light” says the website, I downloaded the trial and accessed a project from within safari on the Mac hosting the server and changes to the view take minutes to load. I’ll do some further trials on a different network and using both another mac and a windows machine to see if there problems with the network I’m testing on.

 

There is nothing in the documentation about specifications for the Mac required to use as the basis for the server, can anyone running the server advise what they are using. I was looking at a last generation Mac Mini, 2.6 GHz with 8Gb of memory and 1TB hard drive. Can the server be hosted on a synology disk station? Does the server keep versions of the project for a back-up and recovery if needed?

 

I’ve not yet downloaded the iPhone app, was hoping there would be a 30-day trial option on this also, to see if this will serve my needs. Can information be edited via the iPhone app or is it, once again, just a portal to view?

 

On the plus side I like the interface on 4 and the reports section seems to be a bit more manageable and customizable.

 

Anyone that can offer advice and guidance on using and managing project, documents in a cross platform environment for a small team (5/6 people) I’d greatly appreciate it.

 

 

Regards

 

 

Dave