Tutorial: Connecting Content-Creation Workgroups with the ProMAX Platform Portable Y

Sharing Resources

When multiple users connect to the Platform, it becomes a shared resource, and it's important at that point that the administrator has the ability to allocate resources based on an individual user basis (Figure 12, below).

Figure 12. Allocating resources to different users. Click the image to see it at full size.

Mounting and Sharing Storage

Storage Groups are individual hard drives that are connected to the Platform. Platform Space is like a virtual drive that can contain multiple different hard drives or individual folders within a drive. When we add a storage group to an existing platform space, you can view all of the individual folders on that hard drive and you can mount them individually (Figure 13, below).

Figure 13. Mounting existing Platform space.

Doing so will assign a drive letter to that folder (Figure 14, below). This can be very useful if you don't want to mount the entire hard drive and share the entire hard drive. However, be aware that you're limited to mounting 26 devices, virtual or physical, because that's all the letters there are in the alphabet.

Figure 14. Drive mounted, letter assigned

In Figure 15 (below), we can see this individual folder and we can mount it. It'll occupy the W letter, and we can now see it under our network location (bottom half of Figure 15, below) and access the content within that folder there on the hard drive that's physically mounted to the platform.

Figure 15. The mounted drive with drive letter (W:) assigned in Platform Spaces and shown in its Network Location. Click the image to see it at full size.

Now if you're like me, you may want to mount the entire hard drive in one go. So I’ll dismount the folder and remove the Platform Space (Figure 16, below). Essentially, we’re undoing what we just did in the previous step.

Figure 16. Removing the dismounted folder from the Platform.

Now I'm going to mount that same 2013 archive 15 hard drive onto my workstation directly, create a new folder called 2013 archive 15, and take all of the folders that are sitting on the root of that hard drive and bring them into that new folder that I've created. I'll unmount the hard drive and reconnect it to the platform now. When I refresh, I can see the hard drive under the storage groups and I can add that entire folder of 2013 archive 15 into my existing platform space (Figure 17, below).

Figure 17. The 2013 Archive 15 hard drive now appears under Storage Groups. Click the image to see it at full size.

We can see this individual folder and we can mount it. It'll occupy the W letter, and we can now see it under our network location and it'll be visible under My Computer. I can navigate to it and access the content. The only change is that there is a new file that's been created by the platform.

Now I’ll log out of the administrator access, dismount all of the hard drives, and log in under that new user that we created. I just need to enter in my username of Shawn and my password from the remote user login. In Figure 18 (below), I can see the three drives that are available and I need to individually mount them so that they'll be available on my remote computer or workstation.

Figure 18. Drives available to a remote user. Click the image to see it at full size.