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I worked at a place that used FileNet, which is now an IBM product, to do this sort of thing. We had millions of scanned documents in the system. I wasn't personally very impressed with it, in that whenever anything "bad" happened, you had to call IBM because finding support online was impossible, and at that they support wasn't very good. It was also a very picky system, those seemed to handle the load well. If you go with it, I strongly encourage doing it for UNIX/Oracle because it screamed "poorly ported" when we used it for Windows/MSSSQL. It has an API for integration, but it is also, poorly documented and would take some time to integrate into your existing business systems.

This is more of a rant at this point, but it is a stop-gap solution that allows people to continue to use outdated business processes storing important data in image formats or in documents scattered about with minimal indexing/search capabilities, rather than analyzable "data" that can lead to "information." I always take the position that if the goal is something on paper, or the goal is to store something that "was" on paper, it is time to rethink the business process to see if we can automate it, or store/present the data electronically in the first place. The old school fights against it, but no one has ever been able to say it wasn't more efficent in the end and enabled IT to say "yes we can" when the next great idea came along versus "here is a stack of papers, figure out $trend."

Take this as constructive advice from someone who works in the field: what you don't know could fill a library (that's a building with books in it).

You could try educating yourself first about Filenet before posting, but I forget; this is Slashdot. Filenet has a buttload of products; they also provide lots of consulting to go along with those products. BTW, consulting is IBM's bread and butter, if you didn't know. Filenet made $422 million bucks last year. At that level of income, IBM will make its money back in about 4 years.

Sure, I'm a Filenet admin, so I'm biased. But I get paid pretty damn well for it.

And it runs on UNIX. So there.

Take this as constructive advice from someone who works in the field: what you don't know could fill a library (that's a building with books in it).

You could try educating yourself first about Filenet before posting, but I forget; this is Slashdot. Filenet has a buttload of products; they also provide lots of consulting to go along with those products. BTW, consulting is IBM's bread and butter, if you didn't know. Filenet made $422 million bucks last year. At that level of income, IBM will make its money back in about 4 years.

Sure, I'm a Filenet admin, so I'm biased. But I get paid pretty damn well for it.

And it runs on UNIX. So there.

In your scenario, this could eliminate the need to differentiate between incremental and full backups, as it will automatically move to nearline anything that isn't being updated on a file by file basis, and your often modified files will be kept online... meanwhile, the entire filesystem will be available 24x7. This replication and data storage solution proved to be worth millions of dollars in my scenario, and sounds like it could save you a ton of money and headache as well.

Don't forget about the IBM DB2 Content Management portfolio. It provides a lot of features from access restriction, peer approval, and a nice easy to program interface (document manager). And with all the government regulations popping up, a company may need to make certain documents a part of the company records, which can then not be altered.

There are several comparable products that are less expensive as well, like FileNet that can do similar type of functions.

I currently use Westbrook Technologies' filemagic it only runs on windows, requires msde, and probably is not cost effective for an individual, but I know filenet runs on solaris, and who knows mabe it costs less.

Go to www.filenet.com ... we hire interns all the time, and we even pay them.

At least, we do at the Costa Mesa location.

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.