Overview

Artisan is Left Angle's cloud service that allows you to connect and collaborate with your clients or other team members and share your files and projects.

Autograph currently mainly offers files and project synchronization with the Artisan cloud. In a future version, Autograph will also integrate timeline markers, comments and review right within your timeline for better productivity. For the time being, users invitation, permissions settings and reviewing features are only accessible in the web.

Files Synchronization

Every files synchronization with Artisan is never automatic, it always asks the user for confirmation to avoid data loss or corruption. Whenever files need to be uploaded to Artisan or downloaded from Artisan, the change tracker window will be filled with actions to review.

Autograph offers 2 different places for synchronizing different files:

Project-specific files are synchronized from the Project Sync Panel
Global shared folders are synchronized from the Preferences -> Artisan Sync tab

Each action to review indicates either an Upload, Download or Local Removal of a file.

Removing a local file will never create a removal action on the cloud. To delete a file on the cloud, you need to manually do so, either from the Artisan File Manager view or directly on the web.

Each action can be enabled or disabled with a switch to ignore it just this time. On the top of the list, global buttons allow to quickly enable/disable all actions and finally a button to clear all actions.

Even if you cleared the action list, you can re-populate the list at any time with recent changes by clicking on the refresh button

To permanently disable the action, click on the Ignore button, which will add the action to either the download or upload blacklist. The blacklists are available in the top-right corner of the Changes-Tracker.

The blacklists support wildcard regular expressions. This is a useful way to completely ignore a sub-folder from being uploaded/downloaded. For example:

cache_files/ would ignore all files under the cache_files directory.

temp_stuff/*.png would ignore only png files from the temp_stuff directory.

Once you reviewed all actions to be performed, you can start executing them by clicking on Apply Changes.

A progress-bar will report progression on all tasks as well as upload/download speed.

Working as a team efficiently

When multiple team members try to upload/remove a file on the Artisan drive at the same moment, operations are sequential on the server, meaning the second person doing an action will be the last change reflected.

The following steps can be taken to help avoid situations where you loose files:

Do not give write permissions to users if not necessary, see the Artisan documentation. For example, you may create sub-folders for specific people which can only write in that folder, as a staging area.
Communication is key: try to separate the work so that people are working on different projects/files.