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Some of the suggestions above says that you should just chuck everything haphazardly into a big pile and then use search engines to trawl the whole mess. I don't buy that. Instead, (like some others) I'd suggest a proper content management system such as the ones from http://www.alfresco.com/, http://www.interwoven.com/ or http://www.hummingbird.com/.

The reason for this suggestion is that I know that these systems are being used by organisations which handle, as OP said, hundreds of thousands of documents and which have satellite offices (e.g. large multinational lawfirms). They provide several benefits such as the possibility to structure projects, have both project related documents and e-mails saved and indexed in the project folders, allows for searching and proper document version chains (meaning that you can revert to older versions of documents if some klutz breaks a newer version).

Of course, this means quite an investment, a learning curve for everyone at your company and, most likely, the hiring of an individual with experience of the chosen system.

A significant number of Qantas flights are 24 hours long.

What programs are government agencies using that can't run on Linux?

If you can suggest an Open Source application that cleanly supports an interface with Document Management Systems, such as ODMA, I'd be very interested.

I work in a (non-US) government department, and we're required by law to keep all documents for certain amounts of time ... the exact amount of which depends on the type of document. We also have some legal requierments to protect certain types of documents from some employees. (eg. If two branches of the department are supposed to be providing independent advice on the same topic from different perspectives, we need to be able to demonstrate they haven't been reading each other's work.) This sort of thing is also often very important for law firms.

We do this by educating staff to save documents into a Document Managenent System (we currently use Interwoven's Worksite but aren't locked into it), which requires them to enter some extra metadata about what the document is, and helps to centralise the whole document management thing immensely.

I use OSS at home for my own things all the time, and at home I've gone without Microsoft products at all for at least 2 years, but last time I looked at the main Office tools (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc), I couldn't find any reliable support for ODMA. To be fair, Microsoft Office also has hopeless half-done support for ODMA, but at least it's popular enough that the main Document Management System providers have grudgingly written their own plugins to work with MS Office. ODMA's an open protocol that's already supported by much DMS software, though, and it's unclear to me why it wasn't supported by open source office and related products long ago.

After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry with 5 years being a good company/product to deal with.

I've just started work for a government agency (not US), where there's a legal requirement that all documents have to remain accessible for a minimum of 25 years. The solution to this appears to be to keep them stored in a central repository (we use WorkSite from Interwoven).

The problem I see with this, which I intend to comment on at an appropriate time, is that everything stored in the repository is stored as a Word document. Even if the documents are available in 25 years, we're still relying on Microsoft to keep its products backwardly compatible for that long. You're absolutely right that the industry moves quickly, but unfortunately that's not an acceptable answer for us with file formats.

25 years before today, there was no standard platform, Windows didn't exist, IBM had only recently hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to create an operating system for their new design of PC, and VisiCalc and WordStar had only recently been released and were in the process of becoming relatively popular.

I have personal Microsoft documents that are only 12 years old (notably MS Works 2.0) that are impossible to open with any modern software. Especially as I don't run Windows any more (just as I didn't 25 years ago), I have no way of opening them short of scraping out the text strings. The format was closed in the first instance, and Microsoft decided to drop support. Relying on old software really isn't an option, because it won't be available in any supported form in the future. (If the software's available, supported, and not coded to expire, the platform and API's that it requires probably won't be.)

If we even occasionally had to open closed format documents from 25 years ago as a legal requirement on our modern Windows/Office platforms, we've be having an awful time. The only thing letting us off to date (in my organisation) is that we've only been keeping electronic documents since the late 1990's. Open formats are tremendously important, because at the very least, they're documented. There's no more relying on a closed source vendor to access your data.

Don't know about anyone else, but I've been using that for a while.

Many content management systems use xml, and have such a syntax, including logic. Interwoven Teamsite is one of them.

Some tags:
http://cms.filsa.net/archives/cms-list/2001 /Jun/01 09.html

Particularly useful (though sometimes a pain) was iw_iterate. Which I guess was prettymuch a foreach

It depends on what you need. CMS is a very, very broad term, and most people are looking for a WCMS (Web Content Management System) when they say it, even though their true needs may be different.

I would recommend getting the Content Management Bible, which you can learn more about here. It covers the various systems out there. One company I worked for realised they needed a Digital Asset Management system, like Artesia, and not something like Interwoven.

Good luck! And remember that O'Reilly isn't the only reasonable tech publisher out there.

Deep in the company's website, they state, " With this patent, Interwoven joins the class of top tier software companies that recognize that market leadership is directly related to continued innovation combined with the protection of intellectual property. Patents represent the most effective and powerful way to ensure that a company protects its long-term investment in research, design and innovation."

Unfortunately, the fallacy of the first part of that self-serving statement is that history demonstrates the contrary: Innovation, especially in the area of software innovation, has been most successful in an atmosphere of sharing, openness, mutual support and peer-recognition. This is well-documented by Manuel Castells, Lawrence Lessig and others. Patents impede the advance of innovation by preventing potential competitors from innovating. With patent protection, innovation is limited to those who can afford the overhead of traaversing the patent minefield (as Stallman puts it). Those who choose to share innovation with the restriction that those who benefit also share their follow-on innovations - even when innovations pertain to other than software disciplines, accelerate the innovation process, and thereby support the development of a sustainably expanding economic infrastructure.

I do agree with the company's second statement: Patents are "most effective and powerful way to ensure that a company protects" its stuff. It just does very little for the rest of society, and for the economy in general.

This neglects one of the large commercial CMS's, which doesn't force anyone to change their URLs at all, since it has virtually no presence at all on the production side. Unless the site actually mentions it's using it, you wouldn't be able to tell, short of hacking the web server, and looking for a single small listener that plays no role once files are transferred to the site.

So, try again!

(Disclaimer: I might at one point in time have been employed by these people and/or used their product someplace I was employed and drank their spiked punch, so take this with however much salt you like with margaritas)

Since it sounds like you already are receiving the documents electronically, you need a content management system. There are plenty out there, and it depends on the types of things you want to do. there's Stellent which is primarily a content management system for documents, but i dont know what sorts of Linux support they have. Also there's Interwoven which is a little more based on web deployment content management.

another poster has mentioned Lotus, but there is a product from IBM called IBM Content Manager that runs on DB2 and WebSphere (which both run on Linux) and gives you really powerful storage and delivery of your stored content.

Of course, you could always check SourceForge which shows at least a dozen projects with "Content Management" in their descriptions...

I seem to remember that it was the principal development language for Interwoven TeamSite... which is many things, but not a quick one-off script.

Average 1st time install price for Interwoven customers? About US$250,000 for licenses. Development time and hardware are on top.

Wow, two rare words in one sentence - and they are actually names of two competing products. I wonder if chromatic is an affiliate of both of them :-)

...is Interwoven's Teamsite. My impression is that it's more geared to building web sites than internal documentation, but it still might interest you.

T-Ranger is right -- you'll probably have to spend some big bucks here, at least as things currently stand. This sounds like a good free software project for some enterprising programmer out there...!

I also work at Interwoven, and from talking to a few other people I've gathered that the official line is, "If there's a sufficient demand, we'll do it." The thing is, even though the Teamsite server has to run on Solaris or NT (including Win2k) the web server can run on just about any server OS; that includes the development webserver which can sit on a different computer than the Teamsite server.

Additionally, most of Interwoven's customers are Big Business, namely companies which run pretty heterogenuous computing environments (from what I've seen), meaning that of those who are running webservers on 'other' OSes, such as Linux, they will always have at least some Solaris or NT boxes 'lying around'. This adds up to very little demand from customers for other ports thus far. At least that's the way I interpret the situation.

I would love to have a Linux port myself since only Sparc Solaris is supported meaning I have to run the NT version on my Laptop -- No offense to NT fans, I just prefer to work in a unix-like environment; and yes I'm aware of Cygwin, but *sigh* it's just not the same.

Everything in this post is my personal opinion and does not represent an official position from Interwoven.

Chris

Totally agree. Before everyone on Slashdot goes crazy about how there is all this prior art from CVS, Zope, and wiki, read the actual press release.

What eMedicine has here is a full content management system. This is not version control. Most importantly every product mentioned as prior art in the /. posting is missing one thing: workflow processes. The ability to automatically enforce some asset be edited by this person, approved by 2 of these 3 people, then moved to staging, approved after UA testing, and moved to production seems to be a key part of what eMedicine has.

This has certainly been done before though not by any of the products mentioned above. Interwoven's Teamsite and Vignette's V/5 Content Management Server are 2 examples of products (and there are a number of others) that seem to do everything mentioned in the press release.

But true content management and workflow support are things that neither CVS, Zope, or wiki have. Slow down Slashdot.

I happen to like Interwoven's Teamsite product which is all run through a browser and has some neat features. Very cool product, and best of all it runs under Solaris, not NT. Unfortunately, no Linux support yet - but I think they're working on that.

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.