Document Managment

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Hi guys,

I am currently in charge on reviewing, developing and implementing a new management system for procedure documents etc.

Currently we just have word and excel documents scattered across the server in various folders.

I was thinking some sort of code in the name of the document ?

Like

KAL1243:Reviewing Document Systems.docx

or maybe just skipping Word documents all together and implementing a copy of mediawiki like suggested elsewhere.

Can someone shed like on how documents are managed where you work ?

I'm interested to see just how many variables exist for this.

 

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My shop is rather small, so document management isn't a terrific issue. In larger companies, there's usually some sort of workflow associated with document creation, transmission, and ultimately even retirement and document destruction.

My only real experience in this area is with MOSS 2007 which has strong document management features. In my brief stint at HP, I also used a document management tool, but it was proprietary to HP and a real mother bear to use.

I believe that there are both ethical standards and legal requirements for the management of documents, so I'd expect someone in management to be aware of how documents are supposed to be handled in your organization.

 

Our documentation is managed online; the articles are a combination of Word and PDF files, and they're indexed under their respective categories. Quick, easy, painless way of doing it IMO. In my previous job all of our documentation was stored on our Intranet which was run on a Twiki platform.

It was a decent enough knowledge management system. I recommend it.

 

We use Tortoise CVS. We tried Groove, but it didn't work well for our needs.

 

We currently use a basic file and folder system. We also have SOPs to define all these sorts of naming conventions too.

One thing I can recommend is that you make your documents in word (for example) with tracking enabled. These then go into a 'working' directory. Then when you have the document finished (at least the current version) you then publish it to a 'public' directory as a pdf.

 

CVS is a configuration management system, slightly different kettle of fish. Similar products are Subversion, Team Foundation Server, Git, etc.

Documentum is probably the most famous Document Management product. Others include worldox, Filenet etc.

See here :-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system

I think BM has a point in that many people don't really need document management, it tends to be for large corporates, subversion and its related tools (TortoiseSVN etc) should suffice.

Alfresco is an open source DM product, maybe worth a look if convinced DM is what you want.

As mentioned by nugget you can get VERY basic document management functionality in windows, you can make folders HTTP folders, you can compress and encrypt files/folders, turn on ShadowCopy/PreviousVersions etc. You can manually 'version' with a filename convention. You can 'publish' using a filecopy process. However subversion is probably the way to go.