SCC MediaServer

Pros: We use SCC both as our photo archive and to manage and send assignments to our photographers. It works, it always works, and most importantly, it works well.

Over the many years we’ve used SCC, we’ve asked them to do more, change things and develop new solutions for us, and they’ve never disappointed. SCC works with us, not against us. Their support is excellent — they listen, understand our needs and work with us to solve problems.

It’s a reliable system backed by people who genuinely care about making it work for their customers.

Cons: Honestly, none. And I’m a tough client. After many years of using SCC and regularly pushing them to improve, change and develop things for us, I can’t think of a genuine negative. When we’ve had an issue or needed something different, they’ve listened and worked with us to solve it.

Overall: I highly recommend SCC to any organization looking for a reliable archive, an efficient way to manage and send assignments, and, most importantly, a company that listens. They’re responsive, flexible and genuinely care about their clients. After many years of working with SCC, that level of service and commitment continues to stand out.

Pros: I have worked with the same handful of people at SCC for about fifteen years, across three different companies. That kind of continuity is almost unheard of in enterprise software, and it is why the support is as good as it is. They know how our system is organized better than I do, and they remember decisions made years ago that nobody on our side wrote down. You reach a real person quickly, and because they already understand the publishing workflows the product sits in, they can usually diagnose and resolve an issue very fast. When you are running weekly publications on deadline, getting back up and running quickly is critical. They are very flexible with customization and have worked with us to build highly customized integrations into our workflow systems. The platform itself is boringly reliable, which is exactly what you want from the system holding the photo archive. Ingest and workflow automation are deep: hot folders, FTP and email ingest, wire and stock provider feeds, and proper handling of IPTC, XMP and EXIF.

Cons: The interface shows its age and has a bit of a learning curve. It has a lot of capability, but it is not always intuitive or easy to find. Because of that, occasional users may not love it, while the photo editors who live in it tend to be pretty die-hard fans.

Overall: SCC MediaServer seems to be the standard across the magazine and newspaper industry. I have administered it at three companies over about fifteen years, mostly supporting magazine photo departments. Two of those companies came to me through acquisitions, and both acquiring companies were already running MediaServer. One employer migrated off it to a flashier and more expensive DAM. Several years later a cost analysis found that SCC MediaServer would run a fraction of what they were paying, so we migrated everything right back, this time onto SCC's cloud solution. By then the web client and an AWS-hosted deployment had removed most of what used to make it a chore to administer.

Pros: Love how the platform is customizable to our needs. It's user-friendly and it's great to have all of our digital assets available in one place. And SCC staff are quick to respond to issues and suggestions.

Cons: Some times I wish it would be easier to view the different media types together, for comparison purposes. I know it can be done, but the resulting view is a bit clunky. And I totally understand why because each media type has different fields.

Overall: We've been using this platform for years and I appreciate that every year it gets better. It's easy to use, even though some of my co-workers would like it to work more like Google. I don't need that!

Pros: Most importantly, I can't say enough good things about the SCC team who supports, implements and accommodates our business requirements.
The system is robust and reliable giving confidence 24/7 for our users.
Our system contains over 26 million assets which include text, pdfs, eps, audio and video files which can be searched and items retrieved from quickly.
The system is very flexible, accommodating both import and export of multiple file types.
The SCC development team is always keeping up with latest technology including cloud hosting and implementation of AI and C2PA Conformance in recent years.
The SCC team has successfully managed several on premise server upgrades and an eventual move to cloud hosted data and servers without any data loss and minimal down time.
Their advice is always honest and they don't promise anything they don't feel they can deliver.

Cons: The biggest complaint we get is that the GUI feels dated and isn't as flashy as many web based systems - but it is functional and clean to navigate with little training requirements for new users.
SCC's move from a boolean search type of query to natural language queries would appeal to the new generation of users who are more accustomed to expecting this. We have not yet updated to this new feature although we were impressed by the demo of it we saw.

Overall: I have been involved with the installation, maintenance, use and support of SCC's MediaServer system for the past 18 years.
I've never dealt with a vendor who seemed more like a team member working towards a shared goal of giving users the best, most flexible, experience possible. They really are always "there" going "above and beyond".

Pros: Reliable product that performs well. Has everything we need and is customisable. Excellent, responsive support.

Cons: My only niggle is that you have to stop services to make configuration changes.

Overall: We rely on this product in a busy newsroom which has low tolerance for outages or delays. SCC has always performed well and is a solid hard worker in our suite of software.

Pros: MediaServer provides easy to use features for people finding and manipulating digital assets. Even more important is its continued evolution of user-facing features and adaptations to new technology that keep the product incredibly stable and cost-effective.

Cons: There is nothing notable that we don't like -- it just works.

Overall: We have been using MediaServer and MediaFactory for well over 10 years and it is critical to our ability to produce high-quality content. SCC continues to deliver new capabilities and solid, reliable services. In the few times when a problem has occurred, it is solved very quickly. The service availability is stellar.

Pros: SCC is fast, reliable and easy to work with. It's web-based archive portal has sped up our research tenfold over our former in-house server. We went from forgetting what we were researching during the wait to completing multiple tasks back to back. Productivity is way up.

Cons: I have not found anything that I dislike in the year we have used it.

Overall: SCC is a robust system and has a talented staff to transfer huge volumes of data quickly for easy launch. We had nearly 40 years of data to transfer and we lost no time. I'd recommend to anyone looking for a database manager.