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Well first off I think its time that someone gives the "cheap, good fast; pick any 2" speech to management. A complex document repository with version control that keeps documents created in a half dozen systems presentable in a variety of radically different ways for a wide range of documents, is not going to be cheap or implementable without dedicatd staff and budget. Its just not going to happen.

I suggest you look at documentum and try and figure out a wish list for the management system. Then you going to have a few choices:

1) Have your wish list look a lot smaller than a documentum type solution (this is dropping good)

2) Buy a documentum type solution and implement it.

3) Change your document creation process so that web content delivery with printable versions is built in from the ground up. That means logical not graphical document design, so Word is out the door and you are in the world of automated document production (which is not going to be trivial either).

You are asking the impossible. Clearly your boss wants a real solution. He just doesn't understand how much work is involved in creating a real solution.

If you already have the MS Office infrastructure, Sharepoint integrates pretty well. MS Office documents in Sharepoint document libraries open in your IE browser and the Sharepoint tools for comments and discussions within documents integrate pretty nicely. You get the option to use a simple change management model.

Sharepoint lets you subscribe to just about any content in the Sharepoint web, giving you email notifications when things change. So for example, you save your draft design document (as a Word document) into a Sharepoint document library and send a request for review to a group of people, subscribe to the document, and when your reviewers make comments in your document, you know about it immediately. Works well.

There is a workflow capability, but you have to set it up in Frontpage. I didn't find this terribly useful or user friendly, but then again, what workflow system is?

All in all, it's at least worth taking a loot at. Granted, it's not free as in beer, and it helps to already be stuck with some MS infrastructure, and it helps to have some FP experience.

To state the obvious, in a perfect world I would be working in an OSS shop and would have experience with something like Zope and could tout it's benefits to you. But that's not the world I work in.

One other non OSS product you might want to look at is Documentum. I've used this product as well, and if it weren't for some stupid PHB-like reasons, we might be using it instead of Sharepoint. It does the document management thing pretty well, has document management, revision control and workflows. I'd judge it to be more robust than Sharepoint in these areas.

Finally, just to preserve some OSS credibility and not sound like a total MS tool, I'm working on a port one of our applications that currently runs on OpenVMS and HP-UX to Linux to take advantage of the lower TCO and in response to customer requests for a non-proprietary platform solutions.

Have a look at documentum:

They have document management backed by a relational database to hold the metadata. Includes workflow, signoffs and query language. Yes it also does web site management(a "small" but still growing part of the content management picture). Mr. Chef will still be printing the menu for many years to come. Now can I get that menu on my PDA via 802... :) Oh and drop me an email when chef makes baked alaska!

have you ever heard of documentum, livelink, imanage, hummingbird? these are all big players in the ENTERPRISE content management game. i would really like to see you walk into a 3000 user enterprise and say "oh ok, sure, just store all of your documents in CVS. its really great and its free."

i think that this book looks like a fantastic piece of work. we run our entire knowledge management system on livelink and since it moved from a user base of 30 to 150 people, things have gotten a little out of control. our taxonomies are badly defined, we are duplicating content all over the place rather than re-use. so after reading the overview and the free chapter, i think this book would be HIGHLY beneficial for large organisations that do use really solid, profressional content mangement systems.

so, the bottom line is, i think your comment is bollocks! :P

Documentum, a very large purveyor of high-end content management software, says they will begin shipping Tomcat with their v.5 products in November. They are converting from a proprietary macro language and preprocessor to JSP for all of their web interface functions. Customers who already run either ASP or an app server like BEA or WebSphere won't have to use Tomcat.

IMHO, that's a pretty significant endorsement. Unfortunaely, all the v.5 and Tomcat info is in their developer site which requires registration with a prodcut key.

This is important for a couple of reasons. One is the obvious one: different CMS applications have different needs. But conversely, they also share needs. Which is why you shouldn't limit your research to specialized web CMS solutions. There are generalized CMS platforms that can be easily to web applications, and might be good compromise between off-the-shelf and roll-your-own solutions. Also a good choice when there is no off-the-shelf solution for a particular CMS problem, which is often the case. Documentum is the leading vendor of these, but it has many competitors.

Their product is used by many organizations to manage content, including web content. Notable clients can be found at their web site, a good number of drug companies use their product to manage fda drug applications, and delta airlines uses it to manage their web site. Link here.

OO is only good for academic reasons to show off organization...

This isn't entirely accurate. Most of the modern implementations of document management (DM) systems use some form of an OODB to enforce organization.

In my mind, database-like properties of a filesystem is a lead-in to bundling document management with the OS. Most small organizations use plain filesystems/fileserver as a DM system. This doesn't scale well when you start looking at organizations that have more than one location, or more than a few hundred employees. Finding and sharing current versions of business documents becomes an interesting problem. Venders such as FileNet and Documentum have been addressing this problem for a while, integrating their propriatery clients with the os, etc.

So, fast forward to when MS releases this new DB-like filesystem (assuming they get it working), adding simple business process and flow around the document store, say, on a fileserver, is all they'd need to undercut much of the DM market.

...a content management system (CMS).

I work in the CMS group at a large tech company. (Key word: large.) We use ATG and Documentum to form ours, but there are many others depending on your needs... Interwoven, CVS, etc.

Here are the major features you should have in this system:

• Easy management of content by non-technical people (yes, this wasn't one of your original goals, but if you're going to work on a content management system, do it right and enable forms-based publishing so not everyone publishing to your site has to know HTML/scripting.)
• Version control, which CVS covers. Look at Documentum for more of this type of stuff.
• Instant publishing so people can push content NOW and dated publishing so that people can push press releases out on Friday at 8AM without actually having to touch the system on Friday.
• A large database on the backend that can handle all of these features, and at least two frontend servers: one for staging and one for released content.

This may sound like major overkill, but trust me, it's not. Put it this way: if you implement a solution using CVS (command-line tools) and rsync, you've just created a barrier to entry for publishing on your site. You want the marketing people to be able to push their cute little Flash/PPT/PDF presentations out NOW without having to log into a command-line system, and you want those same marketing people to do that without having to know anything besides Flash/PPT/PDF. You want publishing on your site to be easy and straightforward so that you, the sysadmin, can focus on the backend stuff without having to deal with marketing whining that they can't seem to get their new PDF on the site.

Spend the extra money and go with a content management system from the companies that do this for a living, and then you can rest easy and do the things you really want to do in your job while letting the website content manage itself.

Document Manager is a document management system with the ability to check-in/check-out documents, track changes, and support multiple users. It supports all usual operations (rename, delete, view, edit) and comes with optional support for a secure HTTP server.

Yes, I know it's CVS implemented all over again, but it's very good solution for cooperative team work (it doesn't support ACLs right now).

Check out the products available from Hummingbird, Documentum, and Eastman. A long list of document management vendors lives here.
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-dB

Probably the most popular are TeamSite and Documentum, but there are also contenders such as LiveLink and NetPerceptions.

My own personal opinion leans towards TeamSite, but because I've heard good things about rather than trying it myself.