Document management software

IITYWYBMAD

Currently, my business produces around 400 hi-res PDF's per week. We need to hang onto these PDF's for historical and archival purposes, and maintain them in their "print ready" format.

I need a piece of Windows Server software, which will index and manage these files (they must be keyword/text searchable) and deliver the results to the desktop.

I've looked at Adobe iFilter and Windows Search version 4, but they don't seem to suit my requirements.

Any of you have to do something similar or come across any solution?

Fysh

I haven't used it myself but you could try the community edition of LogicalDoc - it's the successor to an old SourceForge project. As far as I can tell the community edition should do what you require - it's accessible via browser, offers a document check-in/check-out function, and can do full-text indexing. If you want support you can buy the commercial version.

ejmaztec

http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-product/paperport/index.htm

Nuance Paperport.

I used an earlier version okay, but decided that the more recent version was too costly for what I wanted it for.

stevenmu

SharePoint sounds ideal for your needs. It comes in two basic levels, a free version SharePoint Foundation 2010, which will let you store and manage your documents, categorise them with metadata (keywords), search by keywords, and lots more.

The paid version, SharePoint Server 2010 (either Standard or Enterprise levels) will add full text indexing and search of the document contents (and loads of other stuff).

rolion

stevenmu wrote: »

SharePoint sounds ideal for your needs. It comes in two basic levels, a free version SharePoint Foundation 2010, which will let you store and manage your documents, categorise them with metadata (keywords), search by keywords, and lots more.

The paid version, SharePoint Server 2010 (either Standard or Enterprise levels) will add full text indexing and search of the document contents (and loads of other stuff).

Correct. Sharepoint let's you do all this !

opinion guy

What about reference management software like Mendeley ?
http://www.mendeley.com/

Tis free. Don't know how it will cope with your volumes however but it has meta tagging and search etc

rolion

I will not go for a free,unsupported solution for that kind of level of "business responsability" ! Especially,when you need them "ready now" and "archived" for a long period of time !

What about storage space?
What about links in the solution to storage?
What if you had/have to change the storage location due to server/hdd upgrade ?
Who's going to help you updating all those links ?

What about backup/restore/archived?

What about setting read permission for access level for some users,while leaving full access to techie people ?

What type of accounting/monitoring for local users?

What type of interface,"My Computer","Web based","Client/Server" !?


It needs a proper planing,even for Sharepoint !!!

Fysh

rolion wrote: »

I will not go for a free,unsupported solution for that kind of level of "business responsability" ! Especially,when you need them "ready now" and "archived" for a long period of time !

What about storage space?
What about links in the solution to storage?
What if you had/have to change the storage location due to server/hdd upgrade ?
Who's going to help you updating all those links ?

What about backup/restore/archived?

What about setting read permission for access level for some users,while leaving full access to techie people ?

What type of accounting/monitoring for local users?

What type of interface,"My Computer","Web based","Client/Server" !?


It needs a proper planing,even for Sharepoint !!!

Over a sufficiently long period of time, a "supported" product like Sharepoint won't necessarily be any better, because what MS (or any other supplier) will support now doesn't necessarily have any bearing on what they'll support in 10 years, and there's no guarantee that they'll provide a pain-free way of upgrading legacy systems to their Newest Shiniest Offering Yet. With an open-source offering there's at least the possibility of having someone on staff who understands the whole thing well enough to keep it running without an external software contract, but even then you've got the issue of procuring hardware that will run the OS supported by the software, etc.

The only way to deal with such a problem is to ensure that company policy is to keep someone in-house whose job is to be technically adept at maintaining such a system, including long-term forward planning.

A lot of legal firms and government departments in various countries face this issue, with many of them opting to keep paper archives as a slow & tedious but reliable back-up to the digital repositories.

rolion

Is Microsoft we talking about ! What software you used from them and never been able to upgrade or migrate !??

I do not like someone doing open source from back of his house and at his completely desire to stop or sell or force me in AUP ... OR ... even worse,a staff member that by adopting a proprietary solution cannot be fired never ever and he'll enjoy retirement still using his "in-house" ancient solution !

Back to paper then ...

Fysh

rolion wrote: »

Is Microsoft we talking about ! What software you used from them and never been able to upgrade or migrate !??

I do not like someone doing open source from back of his house and at his completely desire to stop or sell or force me in AUP ... OR ... even worse,a staff member that by adopting a proprietary solution cannot be fired never ever and he'll enjoy retirement still using his "in-house" ancient solution !

Back to paper then ...

A few years ago, I worked for a major multinational who, for historical reasons, were stuck on Exchange 5.5 for mail services. An upgrade to Exchange 2003 was mandated by global HQ. That's not a particularly problematic transition, according to Microsoft - but it was still a massive project which took months of planning before deployment and cost well over £1M. And before you say "cowboys" or "muppets", bear in mind I'm talking about a situation with something like 20+ offices and 3 main sites, with more like 30-odd DCs (some of which would be promoted to become DCs and exchange servers, making the process even more fun).

My point is that if you're looking for supplier support from Microsoft (or many other large suppliers), you've got to be prepared to be forever stuck on the upgrade treadmill. MS, and most suppliers, hate providing long-term support for products, because it's not as good a money-spinner as selling you the new version every 3-5 years. The fact that XP Pro has had extended support for 13 years is a substantial aberration - 10 years is the norm for corporate/pro packages, and even at that after the first 5 years you're talking about vulnerability fixes and nothing more, not the hands-on "I need to keep this running and am finding Interesting Problem X" support that you'd actually need for something like this.

If you're going to throw around scare-mongering rubbish and FUD like "ZOMG OPEN SOURCE WILL MAKE ONE OF MY EMPLOYEES UNSACKABLE" you're already doomed, because you can only think like that if you've got no idea how you would implement a piece of infrastructure service like this.

If the system you implement has to be a long-term service and the company's continued existence depends upon it, you don't leave it up to one person. You establish a project to establish and implement the solution to begin with: the project should define the criteria you will use to determine suitable potential solutions and a scoring methodology, along with milestones for the implementation process and acceptance criteria that must be met before final sign-off/go-live. This means that if you go through an external supplier you still have a way of ensuring that you get what you need, not just what the supplier wants to sell you.

Once you have it up and running, with a full set of documentation specifying every relevant aspect of the hardware, software and support agreements, you will designate one or more individuals to have responsibility for the service. This again comes back to the criteria in the project - the functionality agreed upon and provided by the project is in place, and this person or team will ensure it works.

Part of that responsibility is to document the ongoing operation of the system, documenting any changes they need to make or maintenance visits that are carried out. This should tie into the standard business oversight structure with a periodic review (ideally happening every six months or so), during which any issues should be raised and suitable solutions discussed.

6-12 months in advance of the hardware support expiration date for the equipment, consideration should be given to future plans - whether this means getting a support extension from your hardware vendor or replacement hardware depends on the available options. Similarly, OS and software product support lifetimes should be given consideration (if an open-source package has been chosen by the project team some agreed de-facto product lifespan will have been agreed, which can be treated in the same way).

If a point is reached where the hardware or software cannot be easily replaced, another project becomes necessary to identify a new system to take its place, with one of the requirements being the ability to migrate from the old system. (At this point, you'd be surprised how much it might help to be using a comparatively open database like MySQL compared to a commercial closed database product, but as with everything else, it varies).

Now, if you don't want to put that much thought into such a solution, that's your call. But such a call would mean it's your fault if you end up with an employee who you can't fire because you don't understand what he does and can't replace him.

stevenmu

Personally I think open vs closed source is a very poor criteria to choose a product on. In the example above, I'd be very surprised if Exchange and AD being open source would have made the upgrade any easier. Products should be chosen based on how well they meet business needs and budgets. Sometimes business needs will require extensive enough changes to core functionality that open source is preferable, but often they won't. Equally development projects are sometimes cheaper than licenses and upgrade, but often they're not.

FWIW, I've been a SharePoint consultant/developer for 5 years. I've never once thought "I wish this was open source so that I could implement X", and I've never once found a situation where I thought an open source solution would be more cost effective. I've been called onto a few projects where customers had tried open source products and development to get a tiny subset of SharePoint's functionality and failed miserably. Though to be honest, I've also been called onto a few projects where other people had tried to implement SharePoint and failed miserably.

excaliburhc

alfresco -
use it in our current work envoirnment - running on a linux server but there are windows versions available.
comes with both supported (costs) and unsupported(community) versions .

offers all dms requirements - archiving / logging / web page / file share access

never had any hassles with it , handy to set up (linux side anyway) easy to use.
worth looking at

http://www.alfresco.com/

seems they do a windows version also - could be worth just for testing.

just me twocents

Fysh

stevenmu wrote: »

Personally I think open vs closed source is a very poor criteria to choose a product on. In the example above, I'd be very surprised if Exchange and AD being open source would have made the upgrade any easier. Products should be chosen based on how well they meet business needs and budgets. Sometimes business needs will require extensive enough changes to core functionality that open source is preferable, but often they won't. Equally development projects are sometimes cheaper than licenses and upgrade, but often they're not.

Oh, I agree - a project on the scale of the migration I mentioned is always going to be difficult just due to the number and complexity of systems affected.

I don't evangelise open-source as a rule for anything - it really depends on the specific scenario. For certain requirements it's possible to find open-source solutions that are as feasible as closed-source solutions (for instance, I'd automatically be wary if a prospective supplier for web development services insisted that LAMP wasn't a feasible or affordable option) but there are no absolutes. For those on a financially-constrained budget who can afford the time required to gather expertise (or who already have some of the required expertise in-house) an open-source implementation may be more affordable than a commercially-licenced alternative, but the downside is that you're dependent on that expertise for all your support requirements.

Swings & roundabouts, really.

Capt'n Midnight

Fysh wrote: »

The only way to deal with such a problem is to ensure that company policy is to keep someone in-house whose job is to be technically adept at maintaining such a system, including long-term forward planning.

Keeping someone who is well versed in an expensive document management system may not be easy.

Capt'n Midnight

rolion wrote: »

Is Microsoft we talking about ! What software you used from them and never been able to upgrade or migrate !??

Like when they change the license for SQL from concurrent clients to seats. So instead of having a limit of 50 users at a time , which was fine for archive retrevial you had to buy 650 licenses based on the number of people likely to use the system , and since it was per device you'd also have buy more licenses if you wanted to use tablets and phones.

Microsoft can and do change licensing terms and conditions such that you can't plan ahead 10 years.

Also the move to pay per use means that you could have to pay a yearly license to use (ie. gain access) to a historical archive.

Biggest problem is that any such system MUST be able to import and export such that at any point you can retrieve the data for uploading into whatever system will come along in the future.

Oh and don't get me started on stuff like tape, where you had to buy the latest version of the backup software because symantec or whoever didn't give you backward compatible rights, a whole world of pain in learning new software, new gotcha's , incompatile drivers and compression...

Fysh

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Keeping someone who is well versed in an expensive document management system may not be easy.

Heh, you could say the same about using Active Directory as a Windows single-sign-on system. "Ooh, the licence cost for Windows Server 2k8 R2 isn't that expensive - this could be feasible after all. Wait, what the hell is a CAL?"

That said, though - if your business needs a piece of infrastructure and is dependent upon it working correctly, you either pay someone (in-house or externall) to maintain it or you pray very regularly to $DEITY that nothing goes wrong. Expensive or cheap can only be measured against the impact to the business of the infrastructure failing. If the cost of a failure is enough to put your company out of business, then you should either change your area of business or take the advice of John Malkovich re: your support person:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jUBbCgMWmE

SouperComputer

http://www.hyland.com/onbase-and-ecm.aspx

No affiliation other than the fact that this is what we use at work for scanned documentation, integrated with our EMR/EHR.

rolion

Fysh wrote: »

A few years ago, I worked for a major multinational who, for historical reasons, were stuck on Exchange 5.5 for mail services. An upgrade to Exchange 2003 was mandated by global HQ. That's not a particularly problematic transition, according to Microsoft - but it was still a massive project which took months of planning before deployment and cost well over £1M. And before you say "cowboys" or "muppets", bear in mind I'm talking about a situation with something like 20+ offices and 3 main sites, with more like 30-odd DCs (some of which would be promoted to become DCs and exchange servers, making the process even more fun).

My point is that if you're looking for supplier support from Microsoft (or many other large suppliers), you've got to be prepared to be forever stuck on the upgrade treadmill. MS, and most suppliers, hate providing long-term support for products, because it's not as good a money-spinner as selling you the new version every 3-5 years. The fact that XP Pro has had extended support for 13 years is a substantial aberration - 10 years is the norm for corporate/pro packages, and even at that after the first 5 years you're talking about vulnerability fixes and nothing more, not the hands-on "I need to keep this running and am finding Interesting Problem X" support that you'd actually need for something like this.

If you're going to throw around scare-mongering rubbish and FUD like "ZOMG OPEN SOURCE WILL MAKE ONE OF MY EMPLOYEES UNSACKABLE" you're already doomed, because you can only think like that if you've got no idea how you would implement a piece of infrastructure service like this.

If the system you implement has to be a long-term service and the company's continued existence depends upon it, you don't leave it up to one person. You establish a project to establish and implement the solution to begin with: the project should define the criteria you will use to determine suitable potential solutions and a scoring methodology, along with milestones for the implementation process and acceptance criteria that must be met before final sign-off/go-live. This means that if you go through an external supplier you still have a way of ensuring that you get what you need, not just what the supplier wants to sell you.

Once you have it up and running, with a full set of documentation specifying every relevant aspect of the hardware, software and support agreements, you will designate one or more individuals to have responsibility for the service. This again comes back to the criteria in the project - the functionality agreed upon and provided by the project is in place, and this person or team will ensure it works.

Part of that responsibility is to document the ongoing operation of the system, documenting any changes they need to make or maintenance visits that are carried out. This should tie into the standard business oversight structure with a periodic review (ideally happening every six months or so), during which any issues should be raised and suitable solutions discussed.

6-12 months in advance of the hardware support expiration date for the equipment, consideration should be given to future plans - whether this means getting a support extension from your hardware vendor or replacement hardware depends on the available options. Similarly, OS and software product support lifetimes should be given consideration (if an open-source package has been chosen by the project team some agreed de-facto product lifespan will have been agreed, which can be treated in the same way).

If a point is reached where the hardware or software cannot be easily replaced, another project becomes necessary to identify a new system to take its place, with one of the requirements being the ability to migrate from the old system. (At this point, you'd be surprised how much it might help to be using a comparatively open database like MySQL compared to a commercial closed database product, but as with everything else, it varies).

Now, if you don't want to put that much thought into such a solution, that's your call. But such a call would mean it's your fault if you end up with an employee who you can't fire because you don't understand what he does and can't replace him.

Right... what next !???


I reckon a simple Windows Explorer interface with folders and subfolders ,stored on a plain simple Windows Server (or Linux for other side of techies) with the right security/share permissions ,logical structure based on Client,Data,Project,Invoice (whatever selection key needed for business to work) will do the job !
From Windows Search to Large Enterprise solution,i think that OP is lost and we just keep throwing plus and minuses !

My two FREE CALs throw in here...

Regards.

Capt'n Midnight

rolion wrote: »

logical structure based on Client,Data,Project,Invoice

In reality this and the ability to do searches are the big problems.

Garbage in , Garbage out.

By the OP wants the server to index them ( I presume they are in a searchable format and not content protected / printed as graphic )

IITYWYBMAD

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

In reality this and the ability to do searches are the big problems.

Garbage in , Garbage out.

By the OP wants the server to index them ( I presume they are in a searchable format and not content protected / printed as graphic )

Correct CM. I've been testing Alfresco for the last few days, and it looks like it might actually fit the bill.

Thanks Guys (and Gals!!)

rolion

IITYWYBMAD wrote: »

Correct CM. I've been testing Alfresco for the last few days, and it looks like it might actually fit the bill.

Thanks Guys (and Gals!!)

Quote:

Microsoft Office Integration
Alfresco looks just like SharePoint to Microsoft Office, allowing users to upload, check-in, check-out and modify content right from Office

End quote !

So they designed an application that works with Office and Outlook and on Sharepoint !??
And you have to pay for it when Sharepoint is free !??

Good luck...

IITYWYBMAD

rolion wrote: »

Quote:

Microsoft Office Integration
Alfresco looks just like SharePoint to Microsoft Office, allowing users to upload, check-in, check-out and modify content right from Office

End quote !

So they designed an application that works with Office and Outlook and on Sharepoint !??
And you have to pay for it when Sharepoint is free !??

Good luck...

It's the community version I'm currently evaluating, which is fully functional, and free.