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Cross Platform Document Management Systems?

Posted by Cliff on from the organizing-the-21st-century-office dept.

Alan asks: "I'm looking for a way to do document management at the office. We have windows people and linux people, some writing documents that are a few lines (developer notes for example) and others are full of charts, graphs, etc. Currently we have a file server that has shares set up for the documentation, but it lacks any sort of revision control, and with the salespeople writing in Microsoft Word there are cross-platform issues. We were thinking of setting up an wiki or an everything-based site, but as it is only text, it's not good enough for everyone. There is also the matter of getting our master documentation (which is in PDF format) accessable to everyone as well, possibly in an XML format that can be imported into indesign or Pagemaker or something. There are lots of solutions that work for different departments and different systems, but it would be nice to have something that works for everyone."

3 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Xerox Docushare by juliao · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you consider getting a commercial product, try Xerox's Docushare.

    It's web based, features access controls and revisions, HTML rendering of Office documents, and a lot of other nice things.

    Best simple document management system I've seen that scales from small teams to large groups.

    --

    free the mallocs!

  2. Welcome to format hell by fm6 · · Score: 3, Informative
    When you refer to "cross platform solutions" you're attacking the wrong problem. It's easy enough to set up a document server with basic version control. Most document servers have clients for every common platform. And even if yours isn't supported, there's always a Web or Java client.

    The problem is compatibility between applications. Every application has its own format -- in some cases even different versions of the same app can't share files.

    The software vendors would like you to believe that their products solve this with "import/export" filters. Bullshit. I have never, ever seen such a filter that's suitable for everyday use. Some require a lot of skill to use. But most just fail to parse this element and that. So you get data loss ranging from minor formatting errors to suprise content loss.

    The closest I can suggest to a total solution is to make everybody standardize on a small set of formats. There's a minimum of three, for plain text (and don't forget the Mac/Unix/DOS line break issue!), rich text, and graphics (possibly more than one). Easy enough to find standard formats for each these. The hard one is rich text, but not for any technical reason.

    Technically it's simple. Settle on a widely-used rich text format and forbid everything else. If you don't care about the content-formatting dichotomy, LaTeX is a good candidate -- techies can use their favorite text editors, techno-muggles can use any number of WYSIWYG tools. (Being a technical writer, I would insist on XML, but that doesn't make sense for every organization.) Problem solved, right?

    Wrong. If your organization is at all typical, you've got a lot of people who have an investment in their Word, Powerpoint, and Excel skills, and would quit if they had to start over. That's a social engineering problem, and I don't have a solution for it.

  3. Zope by jfunk · · Score: 3, Informative

    I can't believe that nobody has mentioned Zope.

    I've been looking at this lately and Zope is an ideal solution.

    Zope can grok anything if you can find/write a product for it. It can also search it using ZCatalog.

    I downloaded the MSWordDocument product and it kicks ass. When you stick a Word document into the Zope database it has it's own 'type.' When you access the document it will, by default, render it in HTML (thanks to wvware) and display it, with a bar at the top with a 'download' link that retrieves the original document. What makes this even cooler is that, since Zope can extract the text, ZCatalog can give you a search interface.

    I built a simple system with search in about five minutes using the web interface and DTML tags. No lie.

    There's a similar product for PDF files and if I make one for StarOffice files, it'll be useful at the place where I work.

    To top it all of, Zope has built in versioning. You can even do diffs between arbitrary versions. It also has webdav support so that Windows users, with 'Web Folders' and Linux users, with davfs, can open and save files, with locking and everything as if they were local.

    All the little stuff is already there, too. User accounts and login handling is native, you can attach metadata to anything, and you can write scripts in Python, Perl, or PHP.

    Needless to say, I highly recommend it.