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Take my comment with a grain of salt. I don't work for Stellent but I do make a living through their software.

Stellent's CMS is essentially a web repository for documents. It does versioning, WebDAV, Office and Windows Explorer integration, LDAP integration, metadata and full text search, and it can generate PDF and HTML renditions of your source documents. They support a wide variety of formats. You will still be stuck with Word but at least you will have a decent web enabled colaboration tool.

Stellent makes several free components available to enhance the system or you can write your own. The software is Java at its core and you can run it on *nix or Windows.

Here is a link http://www.stellent.com/en/products/ucm/index.htm/

The software is proprietary and expensive. You can also use it to run websites (WCMS) but that's a whole different topic.

According to my wife, Expedio^H^H^H^H^H^H^HStellent Content Server rules!

http://www.stellent.com/en/products/ucm/index.htm

I sometimes worry she might leave me for the server. ....did I just open a door?

I've had a similar task once and we used HTML Transit, a software by Stellent (http://www.stellent.com/) and distributed by Avantstar (http://www.avantstar.com/). You can define templates for all kinds of word styles and fine-tweak the HTML output quite neatly. And, another advantage, I had excellent support when some questions arose.

According to the "About," they're using Outside In by Stellent to parse file formats. This lib has been around for a long, long time, which is why you can search MacWrite files.

The "About" also refers to X1, which is another desktop search solution.

You're right that this is a great way to go. Trust me, there are some CMS companies picking up on this. Due to the fact that many of these organizations are going for the private sector first, you may not see a public incarnation of the technology right off the bat.

Anyone know of public domain implementations of WebDAV? I'm sure it's on the horizon if not already there...

Stellent (formerly INSO) Outside In is a popular commercial solution to the problem. It is an SDK for conversion of lots of document types (including Word) into plaintext, HTML, or XML. Its allows you to control how much of the formatting is preserved, and in what manner. It's not perfect, not crash-proof, and not free, but it might do the trick in a corporate situation, especially when wrapped with a watchdog process. My company has had a lot of success with it.

One great system we've installed where I work, is from a company call Stellent. www.stellent.com, Great piece of software, configurable and changable to your hearts content, The server is java based runs on linux/solaris/windows with apache.
It can convert documents automatically to PDF, and stores both the PDF and the native file in a specified direcory in the filesystem.
Only sad thing is it's not open source (but you can modify anything you want to anyway) and it can get expensive depending on the number of users that will be checking in files.

We've been using it here for over a year now and most people love it. Documents are easier to find than before, and we don't loose documents like we used to.
Just wanted to pass this one on.

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...

The Nokia 7650 isn't Tri-band, so won't work in the US. The T800 has also licensed Stellent viewing technology for many file formats including word, excel & ppt. The Nokia also doesn't support iMode, has smaller screen, isn't touchscreen, etc. etc. :)

We just implemented Stellent's Xpedio Content Server for a client. This is really a hybrid product that serves the web world as a content management system and also the backend world of workflow (a little tricky to customize the standard workflow to suit our needs) and document management. Also included is a link between the two meaning you can have MS word docs transformed into JSP (any format really, this was just what we did) and publish them out based on some publishing rules.

I would give it a 3 out of 5 for its CMS capabilities, but a 4/5 for its DMS capabilities. Pretty good out of the box product. Easy enough to customize--includes a JDK for writing cutom components and has an EJB for tapping into the database. Also as a plus it comes with Verity search engine bundled which does a nice/fast full text search.

This is on the lower end of price for medium sized solutions. It was a little clunky to get redundancy/clustering up and running, but in the end we made it happen.

We just implemented Stellent's Xpedio Content Server for a client. This is really a hybrid product that serves the web world as a content management system and also the backend world of workflow (a little tricky to customize the standard workflow to suit our needs) and document management. Also included is a link between the two meaning you can have MS word docs transformed into JSP (any format really, this was just what we did) and publish them out based on some publishing rules.

I would give it a 3 out of 5 for its CMS capabilities, but a 4/5 for its DMS capabilities. Pretty good out of the box product. Easy enough to customize--includes a JDK for writing cutom components and has an EJB for tapping into the database. Also as a plus it comes with Verity search engine bundled which does a nice/fast full text search.

This is on the lower end of price for medium sized solutions. It was a little clunky to get redundancy/clustering up and running, but in the end we made it happen.

If you are looking to manage Business Content, Stellent Content Server is probably your best bet. It has way to many features to list and is very customizable. It comes out of the box ready to run unlike many of its competitors. It also has a strong publishing add-on in case you are interested in publishing native content (Word, Excel, etc.) to be converted for a website. Check it out at Stellent.

maybe richard stallman should get off his high-horse of accusing users like my mother, who know no better, of being an inconvenient nusance. and integrate some conversion tool with procmail or something.

so an email comes through, you check the attachment mime type, you see its a .doc. you take the file, run it through the conversion utility and rewrite the mail body using an .HTML attachment.

there problem solved.
i'm sorry but there is no way that a minority of linux users can convert the majority of windows users to change the way they work.