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Subject:Re: Interested in Document Management software From:Rev Simon Rumble <simon -at- rumble -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 22 Mar 2002 10:29:31 +0000
On Fri 22 Mar, Brad Jensen bloviated thus:
> And my company, www.elstore.com, is working to do that right now. We have
> been doing document archiving for years, now we want to make a simplified
> document content management system.
Glad to hear it!
> I want to deliver a simple, useable, functional product at an affordable
> price. Tell me what all thes things mean to you, in your own context.
Our central problem was knowledge discovery. We need, essentially, a
document catalogue. My project is going some way to solving that
problem, but not in the simplest way possible.
This would be my quick list of requirements, in descending order of
importance.
Simplicity: the system needs to be easy to use.
Pricing: it needs to be very cheap. We haven't even been able to get
the cash for Framemaker licenses to end our MS Word hell, so getting
money for something as difficult to sell to management as Document
Management would be tough. No per-seat licenses, although that could
be a good way of making it affordable to small clients IF the initial
fee and per-seats were cheap enough: no more than US$30/seat.
External access: we have users all around the world so it needs to be
web-accessible, but would be nice to have a more OS-centric interface
too for rapid use by our team.
Metadata: MS Office metadata must be totally supported.
Searching: We need full-text search of documents in a wide range of
formats, though mainly MS Office. Search metadata and text.
Security: Flexible, but not as complicated and error-prone as MS ACLs,
permissions. Would be nice for documents in the "published" section
to be accessible to clients as well as internally.
Tracking: Workflow and tracking would be nice, but our team is pretty
small so it's not that crucial.
Versioning: This is another "would be nice" but just can't be done
well. Any version control system MUST handle MS Word natively and
must have a VERY good visual diff tool: see tkdiff for CVS,
Bitkeeper's 3-way merges etc.
I'd be happy to discuss this with you more privately. I have a pretty
well thought out idea of what such a system should be like. I also
know tools which do the various pieces of the problem, but none that
do it all.
Would anyone be interested in a sanitised (company-specific info
removed) copy of my Document Management analysis? We're a small (~100
employee) vertical market software company.
--
Rev Simon Rumble <simon -at- rumble -dot- net>
www.rumble.net
Send email with subject "send key pub" for public key.
If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it,
he is obligated to do so.
- Thomas Jefferson
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