Every Cumulus catalog can work with Cumulus Vault. For those that do, either all of its assets are stored in Vault – and are subject to its control – or only selected ones. Cumulus Vault enhances the possibilities of using a central location for a catalog. As the Cumulus Vault Administrator, you define for each catalog whether and how it is going to interact with Vault.

The first step is to prepare a catalog to work with Vault, which is done by adding special version control fields to the catalog. The fields that belong to Cumulus Vault are Check out Location, Check out Date, Check out User and Version History. They enable Clients to check an asset out to a particular location and provide information describing who checked out which version when. For information on adding these version control fields to catalogs, see “Preparing Catalogs for Vault” .

The next step is to set up the catalog to hand over its assets to Vault whenever they are cataloged. You can either tell the catalog to hand over all assets, or let each user decide whether the assets they’re cataloging should be placed under Vault’s control. You then specify Vault as the central location for the catalog. (Central Location is Cumulus-speak for a location to which Cumulus copies assets during the cataloging process; e.g. a folder on your file server or an FTP server.) For information on specifying Vault as Central Asset Location for a catalog, see “Linking Catalogs to Vault” .

A further consideration is whether users have the permissions required to check assets out of and into Vault. For information on these permissions, see “User Access to Vault” .

Once assets are stored in Vault, users can retrieve them by checking them out, a procedure that locks the associated record in the catalog for other users. When an asset is checked back in, Cumulus moves it as a new version to Vault, and unlocks and updates the associated record in the catalog. Previous versions of the asset are retained in Vault so that users can view their histories or access them, if they become useful again.