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ISO 9001-Compliant Document Control?
SmoothBreaker writes "Coming into a new company, I have been tasked with sourcing Document Control software to meet ISO 9001 standards. From everything I can find, ISO places no requirements on the software itself, aside from maintaining control of documentation and process. This was discussed eleven years ago. I'd like software that allows intuitive use for our less savvy users, and in a perfect world, graphical access to previous revisions of a document. I've used Microsoft's SharePoint, which the higher-ups like simply because it's Microsoft, but thankfully they trust their Tech Department to find the cream of the crop. What experience do you have with this kind of software, what would you recommend using, and what should I avoid?"
Did I meet you yesterday? When you transferred to this company from India? If you need help, just walk over and ask.
You might look into KnowledgeTree. It's open source.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
You really don't need anything more than compressed files with timestamps.
Anything more than that is overkill, especially if you're trying to get ISO9001.
You might try checking out Alfresco which is an open-source Java based content management system with an excellent document module. In addition to ISO, it also meets many of the FDA requirements for medical product documentation. The link is http://www.alfresco.com
and control access with your sudo acl.
I'm joking, put down all those heavy ISO tomes.
Trolling is a art,
but I'm actually a fan of Sharepoint. Have used it for years and never found it lacking for documentation management in my line of work (engineering software development field). The price is an issue for some, but it requires very little maintenance and is fairly intuitive in it's workings, even to a newer user. Most of our co-ops figure out how to use it with little or no instruction, and our senior developers (myself included) haven't complained about lack of features or expressed frustration with not being able to get something done.
just my 2 cents.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
We use alfresco it runs like a champ....setup can be a bit tough but its worth it.
Don't pretty all software vendors, open-source or not, include those scary ALL CAP DISCLAIMERs that basically tell you to go fuck yourself if something goes wrong? So how can you sue? Have those DISCLAIMERs been tested in court?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
# chattr -R +a /home
C-x C-s C-x k
I have had good success with Design Data Manager.
This tools is primarily for managing CAD documents, but can also deal with other kinds of data.
http://www.designdatamanager.com/
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
"I've used Microsoft's SharePoint, which the higher-ups like simply because it's Microsoft, but thankfully they trust their Tech Department to find the cream of the crop.
It sounds like you don't like SharePoint "simply because it's Microsoft". I've seen SharePoint used for this exact business requirement many times and it is actually quite simple to implement. Some 3rd party tools might be needed for more advanced functionality (i.e. storing content external from the SharePoint database), but even then, the solutions are relatively simple.
Or basically any other wiki product could be used to fill this need. We use MediaWiki among a lot of other products in document control and it works fairly well.
For commercial offerings you might look into Documentum or FileNet. Both are quite good with maintaining document revision history and I believe both integrate with Explorer.
You may want to look into CogniDox (www.cognidox.com).
We used it at my previous company as central document repository. Has various levels of security, allows sharing some documents with customers. Has document review signoff support etc.
I liked it a lot.
You may want to check with your legal folks before going too far - my experience is that these days it is more important to destroy drafts (so they are not discoverable in court) than to protect against users having to redo something they screwed up.
Say what you do, and do what you say. I don't think you need software for that. What my company did was have a central document repository and a documentation standard, and everything boiled down to saying what we did, and doing what we said.
Towards the Singularity.
is also foss and has worked very well for me in production settings with up to 300 users. http://owl.anytimecomm.com/
Some of the ISO-9001 knowledge becomes very long-lived. Stick to things that will work for a very long time. It is not uncommon to see ISO, software, CAD, and project documentation files from 25 years ago. Having to support DOS PCs for legacy projects sucks.
Think about whatever software you use, and make sure it is formed around standards that will persist. For instance, does SharePoint depend on Microsoft Internet Explorer? Is Microsoft Internet Explorer V9 compatible with Internet Explorer V6? Take a look at all the other legacy software inside your organization dependent on Microsoft IE V6. Don't do it again.
In the end, there is a strong argument for keeping PDF, DOC, and XLS files around, and placing a version control system on them. Some systems, try to integrate the entire quality control system into a document management system, and the results cannot be maintained long-term. One expensive system that I deployed, didn't survive the 24-month rollout process. You need to stick to standards, and keep your options open, both short and long term.
I use a system whereby revisions simply consist of a copy of the file, with an incrementing digit at the end of the file name indicating the revision level. Works for me!
The problem with that logic is that expensive solutions can be abandoned on a whim. The supplier can make a simple business decision, they can go out of business, or taken over by a competitor. Depending on the contract, is it a term license or a perpetual license? Is the software dependent on other peoples code? With proprietary software, you can be locked out at any moment.
Additionally, have you ever actually tried to get a software company to pay out on a law suit for defective code? It is almost impossible. Check the disclaimers in the contracts.
My current organization is using Doxis, which has an interface very much like Office 2007. It took me all of 12 minutes to learn the basics.
Alternatively, you can use software source control applications, but for the non-techies, that will be a pain.
"what should I avoid?" You should avoid taking on politically dangerous and thankless tasks that make no contribution to the bottom line as your first assignment at a new company. Seriously, the tech issues here are secondary. First, figure out the politics. Next, make sure your second assignment contributes to the company's bottom line. Sorry to sound like a grumpy old fart here, but hey, I'm a grumpy gray-beard that has seen this movie before and I don't like the ending.
Use "chattr +a .bash_history" to guarantee that your bash history never gets truncated, overwritten, or otherwise mangled (which somehow always happens, even if you try to control it with the various bash environment variables).
I would scrap all that share point cruft, and go with the packet flow of ssh and a password + logs.
I have no idea what the fuck iso 9001 compliant is, nor do I care.
I'd buy a crap load of USB keys with a WRITE protect lock switch (like those old 64M keys.) Kiosk the shit up with passwords. Fines or prosecution for screwing up.
We are using a home brewed modification of Moin moin - http://moinmo.in/ with this patches: http://moinmo.in/ActionMarket/ApprovePageAction
It's been 2 years online, and we are very happy with the implementation (done by myself ;)
Pretty cheap too. Easy to administrate and the users like it.
My company makes a research management product, called Tamale (http://www.advent.com/solutions/by-product/tamale-rms), which is a very easy to use content management system for financial investment professionals. There is a server with a RESTful API, a c# rich desktop client, web client, blackberry client, and msft SQLServer stored proc api. Not sure what industry you are in, but it may fit.
good luck.
Since 9001 doesn't really define anything in terms of requirements you'll probably want to spend some time putting together what it is your organization wants to do with this content. Does your organization need/want a content management system? You're referencing revisioning on documents, so I'm guessing yes. Is this going to be a one off for the engineering/manufacturing folks? You could so something like this in subversion and have reasonably simple versioning of your documents. A wiki model works if you're just trying to do knowledge capture but I'm guessing you've got structured documents you need to manage. If you've got people who are fairly technical and can handle the caveats that come with something like that it's cheap and easy. However, these types of implementations frequently turn into folks in marketing or somewhere else saying "well we have FOO over in engineering we can probably use it too", next thing you know you've got the whole company using something that was kind of cobbled together for one group. Sounds like you've already got SharePoint, it's usable but I'm not a big fan of it as a content management system. Works decently as a collaboration platform. I haven't seen their latest stuff and I know they're trying to make moves in that direction so it might be better, but at last view I was underwhelmed. It's very platform specific, the search functionality was poor, it was difficult or impossible to get a good metadata model together and security was goofy.
Try and look towards the future and see if your organization is going to need to take it up a notch in their content management needs. How complex is your security model going to be? How much content are you expecting to manage? Are you going to want a full text search capable system or would a metadata search be good enough? Think about a metadata model for your organization, then research the topic and rethink it. A good or bad metadata model can completely change the fate of a content management system implementation.
What I've seen of Alfresco I like, it's free software so if you're budget constrained or just value that type of thing you've got that going for you. Someone else mentioned Knowledge Tree for a FOSS product, I haven't touched that so I can't comment. If you're going to go commercial I really think Oracle has a great product with their UCM platform (used to work there), but it's gotten god awful expensive and they suck as a company to deal with. Documentum seems like a massive resource hog and maintenance intensive from what I've discussed with people who've done work with it. I had an install of TRIM under my care at a previous gig, HP owns them now, and that had some quirks but was generally good. If you're focusing on records management capabilities this probably deserves a closer look as that's what they kinda specialize in. OpenText is pretty highly regarded, but I haven't touched it or known anyone directly who has.
In a company I worked with we considered all source code files to be engineering drawings and they were treated accordingly. This way they fit into any QA tracking system.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Documentum has been the leader in document management systems for years, the down side is that it can be expensive, difficult to program (docbasic???) and only runs (really) well on Oracle database (do NOT run it on SQLServer).
Filenet is not a bad system, but it has gotten hella expensive since IBM started calling it Enterprise Content Manager.
Sharepoint is a Documentum killer, in about two more releases. My team makes pretty good use of it, but I honestly am not impressed by the overall performance, configurability (expect to code webapps to meet difficult requirements) and the data model behind 'lists'
If you really do not want your management to consider Sharepoint, then arrange a performance benchmark between Sharepoint and Documentum involving several hundred simultaneous users and scale it up to a few thousand. Documentum will chug through it like a trooper and Sharepoint will be dead in the water
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I was an ISO 9001 internal auditor at my last job. There are no ISO 9001 rules regarding software that manages the system, and all the stuff I read above about "do what you say, say what you do" is correct. That being the case, I would have a few recommendations about any software package you pick. 1) If the software is going to be able to directly edit documents, there will be a system that needs to be in place to record all changes to documents made as a function of time, with the appropriate signatures garnered. 2) It should be at least partially user friendly, not only easy for you to use, because you never know when the company will want to shift directions and teach a secretary to use it, using your skills for something else. 3) Obviously, security, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that but its worth a mention. And lastly, 4) control. Who can add/edit/delete/modify documents and when? I don't know about your company but mine often cut ISO corners temporarily so that they could get a product shipped immediately, and the paperwork would catch up later (or perhaps the next day). Maybe an optional lag/override function built into the document system? Hope that helps.
Sharepoint is not an approved document repository at my company (granted we are CMMI Level 5, not ISO9001). We use ClearCase because it is a certifiable repository. We'd LIKE to use Sharepoint, since it is easier to use for the non-developers and would cut down on mistakes and time lost in managing documents, but we are slaves to the process.
Recently, we successfully completed our registration audit where I work. As an above poster said, do what you says and say what you do is the key. Depending on the size of your organization document control software may not be the best approach. What we did was define our formats and then used a centralized file share to display the documents. Any document that was printed out is considered to be uncontrolled. The only person with read/write access to the share is the document control clerk, and all document change requests are filtered through them.
This system proved to be simple and effective. We only have about 5 people that actively change documentation so spending the time and resources to source a software solution just did not seem effective. If you have more people that actively change documents, then I can see where having an automated system for tracking those changes and ensuring the proper authorities approve them would be more efficient.
The biggest challenge to ISO 9001 compliance is NOT the documentation, but having the participation of all the management and the employees. Otherwise, you will end up scrabbling to ensure you have everything all by your lonesome, and when you fail you will be blamed for it. Make sure that whatever you choose to do, that everyone involved will use it.
As you noted, ISO 9001 document management requirements are quite loose. I had been cheer leading the concept of using a wiki as a DMS in my workplace for the past few years. It never gained much traction, I expect due to a significant lack of understanding of those included in the package selection process. The limit of our corporate IT department's skills is upgrading Lotus Notes every possible time it can in the hopes that SOMEDAY the whale (dead) will actually start to swim... No, seriously, the folks that chose our new DMS wouldn't know the difference between a SQL server and a toaster.
Anyway, the bullet-proof audit trail created by Mediawiki (and any wiki, really) makes satisfying internal and external audits very straightforward. Proper ISO required access restrictions can be delegated using some of the very useful security extensions.
What is a DMS for anyway? Do we really want to be managing documents? or content and information? The "here comes everybody" philosophy has significant implications for traditional document management in the manufacturing world. The typical response of a manufacturing plant to these requirements is to assign all DM duties to too small a group and wonder why the damn thing never gets done. Documents are chronically out of date, nobody even has the soft copies anymore...
But what if the documents/articles could be updated by those who use them? What if everybody was part of the DMS? Page staging with the flagged-revs extension, watchlist email notification to keep maintainers in the loop. A DMS that spreads the load to all it's users instead of monopolizing a few? That's where classical DMS needs to go. Badly.
Yah, Mediawiki sucks for input. But for output? Can't beat it.
Oh, our company chose Intelex over ETQ for our system. I try not to take it personally.
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
I worked Document Control for 2 years for a general contractor. The project was 3 years and $280M, and I managed everything, from submittals, to blueprints, to physical samples (ever try to file a chunk of concrete?).
I couldn't have done it had I used my computer for anything other than printing labels and maintaining an index in Excel. The more physical paper you have, the easier things are. Sure, you need the physical space, but I never had a software issue or idiot corporate IT destroy years of work with a keystroke, either. It's even more critical in a lawsuit-heavy industry like mine, where a single list file could be the linchpin to a million-dollar claim.
And, even though construction engineers are generally disorganized fools, they can always come up with that missing (paper) file in a crunch (Oh, it fell behind my bookshelf, here you go!"). I don't know how many times I had to answer the question "Hey, I deleted a file on the server a week ago, now I need it again, can you get it back?" with "No, man, it's gone forever.".
I looked at the 3 big ones, alfresco, KM and Nuxeo, and like the latter best. For one, their full version == their GPL version. So if you want to do it all yourself, you will get all the features.
Secondly, I found the interface nice and simple.
Thirdly, they have this option where you can open a document from your browser, edit it and save it back into the DM system directly. (That requires a plugin for your browser & office). They used to have an openoffice version of that plugin too. Very sweet.
I set up Subversion. My design goals were: Keep it available from nearly anywhere (http/s), usable on nearly any OS and nearly transparent to most end users.
I then checked in our main documentation data area (held on a NetWare file server shared out via NCP and CIFS). Tortoise SVN is the client of choice on Windows and I use KDE integrations on Linux desktops. Finally, Trac gives access if needed from locked down systems. Non SVN aware users just have to be told to be careful with files in the shared checked out area (like don't put ISO images in it! or delete things without telling the repo about it because they'll just re-appear again on an update).
We have Quality Doc admins who are responsible for checking things into the repo.
We have been happily ISO 9001:200[08] registered for three years now.
I may look into something more sophisticated eg for indexing etc but to be honest this is a simple set up which does what the standard needs and does not get in the way of the end users (including me)
we are certified and use fengoffice.
http://www.liferay.com/products Open source, Java-based, commercial support if you need it.
Check out Qumas DocComplaince which designed for ISO and other FDA regulated environments (electronic signatures, document revision control and approvals, workflows etc.. )
it's $$$$ but it's accepted in the industry.
Using Apache, PHP, Postgres, Maintains revisions and signoff lists. document owners, authors. It ain't pretty but it has gotten us through 2 audits with high marks. Still needs some security brush ups.
And there are some aspects that are still not user friendly.
But we have had some other companies ask for copies. Never have given it out though.
If you want a version and can wait a few weeks I can send it to you. Along with notes on what needs to be fixed.
Say what you do, and do what you say. I don't think you need software for that.
That depends entirely on what you are doing. I've done IS09000 audits and for pretty much any businesses of any sophistication or size, some sort of software document management is more or less "required". Not in the sense that it is mandated but in the sense that you'll find your life impossibly hard without it. Too much paperwork to shuffle and too many parties needing it to make it reasonable to not computerize. Strictly speaking it isn't required, but you can do drafting with a pencil too and there are good reasons no one does that anymore.
You might want to check out Windward Reports Windward Arrow product http://www.windwardreports.com/arrow.htm It drops into SharePoint and adds the missing doc gen piece. Their engine is run on both .NET and Java if you ever need to make a switch in the future.
--TR
So far I have used pc-DOCs (now owned by Hummingbird and I was DOCs certified), KnowledgeTree, SharePoint and Alfresco. My recommendation would be Alfresco just for the fact that different browsers could be used, SQL server may not be available (cost, standards, whatever), document routing and approval is required as well as Alfresco could run on Linux, Windows and Mac on top of a real application server (i.e. JBoss, Tomcat, BEA Weblogic, etc.). It can integrate with AD/LDAP for logins. Don't forget that Alfresco also has add-ins for OpenOffice and MS-Office 2003. Another benefit is that Alfresco also comes in a community edition for free.
We internally used TWiki for a long time, as it gives us more structure within documents. Now we switched to the new Drupal Wiki http://www.drupal-wiki.com/ which allows us to build up more complex workflows and a nice access scheme. I also comes with a much better user experience than other Wikis out there.
The best software will be useless without QA and/or RM/DC personnel that can enforce its use. This is because 9001 is a matter of quality processes, and the software can only implement those processes and policies that are already in place. An auditor wants to see that you can do what you say you'll do, whether that's one person with a key to a filing cabinet of contracts, or electronic file access tracking (knowing who has even looked at a document). There are businesses that can do that without software at all, I've worked with several. It really depends on the size of the employee base and their acceptance of a new tool. I don't believe it's possible for software to be certified for something that it can't accomplish, and it can't without complete buy-in from all employees. Good luck with that.
And just so you know, don't let your boss think you can get this done in six months, even if you pour your entire work week into it. The average mid-large corporation spends tens of thousands in hard and soft costs testing and implementing a new Content Management System in phases over years, which doesn't even include the vendor costs of licensing and supporting the thing. Unless you have categorical authority to pick a program and implement it, you will run in to a LOT of roadblocks, and even picking what to buy may not be something that you can put on your "completed tasks" list a year from now.
Lastly, if you are in fact part of your IT department, do check with your organization's org chart to find out if there are Quality/Document/Records people your choice will be impacting. The fact that you are asking Slashdot for software help instead of ARMA or a Quality organization for records procedure help, belies the possibility that your company is not mature enough to separate Information Science from Information Technology.
I think subversion works great for this. If they are Windows users, give them TortoiseSVN. They just edit files that look like they are on a network share. The only extra work is that they must check-in documents when they are done with them. And click an option to get the latest before they start working.
I do tech support and bug troubleshooting for a company docuware (www.docuware.com) which does all you want it to do. We integrate with sharepoint, all the major MFPs, have version control and a simple interface. We have customers with 2 users all the way up to a few hundred users
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I'm watching this discussion with interest, because it's about something I have been wondering about, myself.
The two questions I've come up against are, broadly:
1. Are there tools that make Microsoft Office files play nice with standard version control systems? I like to use Git or Subversion, and have all their standard features available. Particularly diff. Can I put MS Office files in a Git repository and get version control and human-readable diffs?
2. If I were setting things up for a new organization where we weren't bound to Microsoft Office yet, what should we use? I like to use Latex, myself: it's powerful, can produce professional quality output, plays well with version control, and has various front-ends available from text editor to point-and-click. What are other people's experiences and recommendations?
As for ISO 9001 compliance, I have been to a few organizations that are certified, and none of them actually had any software in place for document control. They did have procedures that people were expected to follow, including requirements such as putting documents on a network share, putting version numbers on documents, and leaving old versions of documents around.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
By then, M$ ISO will just make Sharepoint the sole standard.
Mod parent up.
Check out Using a Wiki to Implement a QMS at the Elsmar Cove: http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=32513
They care that it works with the corporate standard which is IE.
You got it backwards. IE is the corporate browser because they've heavily invested financially and politically in crappy, brittle enterprise systems that break when you move away from IE6. Nobody picked enterprise software because of the browser it ran on.
I deal a lot with corporate IT management types. Seriously IE--in particular IE6 which is the standard that is the issue--has NO redeeming qualities WHATSOEVER. IE6 does not conform to standards. IE6 is insecure. IE6 is slow. IE6 is obsolete. In places where IE is mandated it has NOTHING to do with it being superior. Hell, it doesn't even have anything to do with it being welded to the MSFT OS--when you already have to create a corporate image with things like Citrix, 3270 emulation, notes client, VPN, in-house apps, etc etc. what is the big deal adding Firefox? You have to slipstream in service packs and countless security updates to make IE even marginally acceptable anyways.
Corporate types make IE the standard because some pointy-haired boss 10+ years ago made the decision to invest millions into SAP or similar big gigantic ERP mess that included web portal functionality that was built against IE6. Some of these ERP abominations even involved the deployment of ActriveX controls and other toxic, proprietary IE only garbage. Back then they didn't care--Netscape was dying, Firefox didn't exist and the new Gecko engine was not even halfway finished baking. IE was indeed the "best" (and being built in rather convenient) option and arguments from IT people were considered academic to PHBs and thus fell on deaf ears. If the business software was really kick-ass and it required Netscape they sure as heck would've went to the effort to deploy netscape, but there was no such software out there for the enterprise.
Now IE6 is widely recognised as being the garbage it is, there are real, honestly superior alternatives out there and even MSFT has moved on with IE7 and IE8 barely supporting IE6 style behaviour because it is saddled with the IE6 legacy it shot itself in the foot with in its other products..
IT managers who are not idiots realise what IE is, and know IE is not a standard. XHTML 1.x and HTML5 ad CSS2.x and so on are standards. If they pick Sharepoint it has nothing to do with it working with IE--it is becasue they are a MSFT house and they just cannot bother to fight lock-in (or they are contend being locked into their guilded cages). Of you use MS Windows for your client AND server OSes, MS Exchange for communication, MS Office for document creation, MS SQL for your database, IIS for your intranet, MS Forefront for security/antivirus......why stop there? Certainly Sharepoint would be easiest to integrate, easiest to use, etc. At least from an end-user perspective.
The thing is Sharepoint works GOOD ENOUGH with non-IE/standards-based browsers, but the coolest stuff about it isn't the web portal anyways it is how it integrates with Office and Visual Studio/Team Foundation Server and so on. If it had seious standards-compliant issues that made it rely heavily on IE, I seiously doubt ANY competent IT manager would go near it--they'd remember the hell they've had to go through because of th IE6 lock-in the've had to deal with the last couple of years.
Why not just go basic with some sort of source control like VSS or CVS?
Cheap and easy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've wondered about what document management system to use in an ISO context the other day, and was recommended Agorum (www.agorum.com).
Does anyone have experiences with that? Good / no good?
- Hubert
ISO-9001 is not about specific steps, methods, techniques or policies, it is about that you have a plan/procedure, that you follow the plan, and that the following of that plan is documented (and includes a feedback loop for process improvement?).
I remember when I worked at a large telco equipment supplier that was going for ISO-9001 certification, we were told about a restaurant that was ISO-9001 certified - the owners did it as a lark, and it was quite simple. Your plans procedures can be quite thin, you just need to follow them and have documentation that shows you follow the procedures...
Ken
A self serving recommendation, to be sure, but a company called CEBOS makes an ISO 9000 compliance suite called MQ1 that has a fully compliant documents module. Windows-only, fat .NET client, SQL server based. It supports controlled/uncontrolled documents, electronic signatures based approval process, conversion to PDF, embedding control/version info in Word and Excel docs, and a ton more. The professional services guys know ISO inside and out and will really help you get compliant.
You don't have to buy the whole suite if you just want docs, you can just buy the docs module (the whole suite includes APQP, training/HR, supplier management, project management, maintenance, gauge calibration, regular and L.P. auditing, basic customer management, purchasing/receiving, metrics, corrective actions, tooling, data collection (SPC/SQC) synchronization with ERP/CRM systems, etc... all pretty well integrated.)
Tell them Jason sent you so I get a cut of the commission :)
http://www.cebos.com/
(Full disclosure, yeah I work there :)
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The USA .Com/.Gov/.Mil dominions are solution-centric from top down... the solution is the answer.
For me Data has Implicit value to the scientist, engineer, mathematician... for almost one-of-a-kind specific purposes.
For me Content has an Explicit value to the public (citizens, managers, politicians...) for general entertaining, history, leaning... application.
For me Documents have a duplicit value to groups (Law, Medicine, Accounting...) for common purposes of tracking, transactions, commerce.
For the .Com/.Gov/.Mil dominions data, content, documents are all information, and fit the cookie-cutter solution.
The frycking BDSOB C*Os should be asking the simple question.
Will I (even with PKI and encryption) be able to find, use, share, modify... my original information in five...ten years?
For all Information Management (IM) solutions, I have read about, the answer is PayUs-ABunch for another proprietary solution/upgrade.
The answer is "Open" IM standards, but that would reduce the US/EU/RU corporate-welfare payments over time; So, FyckUS.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
And apparently dated in my views, thanks for the info
Wherever You Go, There You Are
There is much missing from the above, the current ISO9001 certification ISO9001:2000 has other requirements for a 'Quality Management System' above what was stated already. Much of it boils down to something similar to above:-
'Say what you do', 'Do what you say', 'Measure them both', and 'Offer proof of ongoing improvement in the customers perception of quality'.
Anyway, so the question as asked. There are many products out there that state ISO9000 document control conformity, my company used several including Sharepoint and a very restrictive system called Quality Workbench.
My opinion is that if you want an easy life, go for something very restrictive and conforming. Your Quality Assessor will love you (I was one) and its an easy tick in the box. BUT, your colleagues will soon hate you and loath the very ground on which you walk for making their life harder. That will in the end result in them bypassing the standards to get the job done. So make their life easier and yours a little harder and use something more human, my current favourite is a good Wiki, and before you go moaning that a wiki cannot for the core of an assessable document control system just think. Its all in the definition!
If you define the document control system as a fluid, managed system where each interest party is kept informed of managed changes then that can be a wiki. Every change is tracked, notified and can be discussed, inline at any time then it seems to me that it is the system of choice. You will though spend much time with the assessor explaining al your control methods.
If your company needs document system, consider www.boltwire.com It's a flat file wiki, but it has all database-like functions and some really good features for ISO900X docs handling: most important here, simple authorisation tool (page variables) and hierarchy of pages. It allows access level control for different subtrees, tree or subtree operations (move, rename, copy, delete)...and tons of other things. Really easy to use and maintain, powerful scripting - and free.
www.thingamy.com is totally different stuff. It's.. well, you have to see it to believe. It is fully capable of running the entire QS of your choice, not just docs and it's just a small part of it's functionality. It is not free, but it's affordable even to smallest company. In a word - worth of your time.
BoltWire is php and ThingAmy is java made. Both runs nice on toasters too.
I simply love it both :) but for the moment use just BoltWire.
Hope this helps,
Lino
The co. I work for is TL9000 certified and had been using a home grown site to maintain document versioning, which has long out lived it's time. Like you, sharepoint is the future here. I'm currently bulding a document library on sharepoint using Sharepoint Designer to serve as the new repository. This is my first project on Sharepoint, and so far it has been able to accomodate my requirements:
- Provide document versioning (I'm not using Sharepoint versioning.... Instead, the author uploads a document to the library once it had gone through the required aprovals),
- easy user interface (used SP Designer), auto document number assignment, etc).
The library also keeps the document source files and a copy of the review approval sheet.
In my customization, I added jQuery to the mix along with a great SP jquery library called SPServices (over at codeplex)... This library allows u, through jQuery, to call webservices from sharepoint thus further enabling u to create usable and user friendly sites.
I have also used KnowlegeTree; it's very good.
Try DocBase Direct, from Core Business Solutions. www.thecoresolution.com.
Full disclosure: I am an Alfresco SI partner. Alfresco is actually a SharePoint server and it has an open source version and a fully supported version. If you like what SharePoint does but don't like MS, give Alfresco a try. In addition Alfresco supports the draft CMIS which should allow it to interoperate with other DMS should you choose to swap out the back end.
Others have talked about Documentum and other open source systems, I spent 6 months looking at systems like Nuxio, Hippo, basically all the big open source players. Alfresco is by far the best supported and easiest to customize. Out of the box, the interface isn't pretty, but it is usable. They have a collaboration tool and a traditional ECM interface (both browser based). If you are looking at closed source systems, Alfresco beats them all on price hands down. Documentum can cost 7 figures with customization and it is very difficult to use. There is a whitepaper here on total cost of ownership: http://www.alfresco.com/products/whitepapers/.
Oh and Alfresco is extremley scalable. SharePoint does not do delta's with versioning, so you change some metadata on an 80 MB PDF file and you now are using 160 MB. SharePoint becomes pretty unusable before you hit 100K docs in the repository. Alfresco can handle 100 million docs and still be very usable.
We've been developing a web-based ISO 9001 system for a few years. One of the first modules we developed was for Document Control. We have all of the features that you'd expect to address the requirements of ISO 9001 and a good track record of customers who have had their system (and by association, our software) audited and ISO 9001 certified. I won't bore you with too much marketing guff - check it out at http://www.qualitysystems.com/ if you would like more info or a free demo.
http://dynaorg.com
I have set-up ISO-9000/SOX compliant process at 4 companies.
As others have said, software is only part of the solution, but this product is design for ISO-9001 from the ground up. In-use before Sharepoint existed, and updated and in-use ever since.
Please fill out the contact form if you would like a demo.