Accruent Meridian Enterprise Server 2020 Administrator's Guide

Meridian Enterprise Server

Meridian Enterprise Server is the core product in the Meridian Enterprise product suite. It provides centralized, scalable, web services and administration for use with Meridian Enterprise, Accruent Project Portal, and other business systems. Besides the shared services, Meridian Enterprise Server includes the latest generation of Accruent Publisher and Meridian Explorer technology.

Note:

Although the names Meridian Enterprise Server and Meridian Enterprise are very similar, Meridian Enterprise Server should not be confused with the application server of Meridian Enterprise. They are distinct systems that work together. Throughout this guide, each name is used explicitly for its corresponding system.

Meridian Explorer provides a web browser–based view of the documents and related information in one or more Meridian Enterprise vaults. The platform is a very effective way of providing read-only access to information consumers of technical documents on a large scale. Meridian Explorer provides an innovative interface for quickly and easily finding documents with minimal end-user training.

Meridian Explorer includes the following major features:

  • Incremental synchronization of documents and related metadata from one or more Meridian Enterprise vaults to a Meridian Explorer consolidated repository.
  • Zero install, web browser-based read-only client. Engineering change requests and electronic redlines can be sent to vaults configured with the Meridian Asset Management Module.
  • Support for server-based viewing.
  • Configurable property pages, search pages, and views.

Accruent Publisher is a configurable systems integration solution for copying (publishing) documents from one document management system to another. The Publisher can optionally render documents in the source system to a different file format before publishing them to the destination system. Publisher combines these two actions—rendering and publishing—in a publishing job that it can run either on demand, as a scheduled task, or in a scheduled batch along with other jobs. Publisher provides links to the most common engineering document management systems. Publisher also includes rendering modules for the most popular engineering content authoring applications. Additional links and rendering modules are under development by Accruent.

Publisher includes application links that can be installed to simplify publishing documents from within source document management systems, such as:

  • Meridian Enterprise
  • Accruent Project Portal
  • Microsoft SharePoint
  • Any Windows file system

The links add documents to the publishing queue, which can be managed through a website installed on the Meridian Enterprise Server computer or a separate web server. The queue can be viewed and controlled using any web browser from anywhere on the network.

Note:

Accruent Meridian Enterprise Server 2013 (and higher) is a replacement for prior versions of Accruent Publisher and Meridian Explorer that has been completely redesigned and reprogrammed. This allows Meridian Enterprise Server to provide additional functionality over prior versions. Although Meridian Enterprise Server has many of the same features as prior versions of Accruent Publisher and Meridian Explorer, the products are not compatible and Meridian Enterprise Server 2020 should not be considered as a direct upgrade from the older versions.