I’ve been developing a website for my job for quite some time now. We are getting very close to the launch date – and I’ve had one issue stuck in my craw for almost the duration: Document Management.

Document Management

What is document management? It seems pretty straight-forward to me, but many people have looked at me cross-eyed when I’ve used the term, and some have come right out and said “What do you mean, document management?”. Well, there’s this wiki, but basically I mean a system that gives me the ability to post my files on the web and have a decent amount of access control(user roles, permissions, etc). Naturally there are other features that are not definitive, but essential: Revisioning, search, and metadata is just a start.

There are many document management systems out there, both proprietary and open-source. Of what’s available, all are lacking. What strengths they have are countered with other hard to justify requirements: cost, complexity, administrative overhead.

I’ll take just a minute to talk about two solutions I’ve tried already: Micro$oft SharePoint 2007, and KnowledgeTree Community Edition.

SharePoint

I’ve been using SharePoint for around 6 months now. It’s certainly not bad at the job of document management – and in fact has the ability to go way beyond – given a full time asp.net developer and a fat budget.

I actually had to take a class to learn how to admin the system. Sure I could have probably picked it up on my own, given enough time…but it just speaks to the complexity issue. So, after 2 days of class – the take away was really this:

SharePoint can do anything. You might have to program it to do that, but it can do it. Community of developers? Oh uh, yeah there’s probably one out there… So what does it do out of the box really well? How about locking you into other M$ products – does that count? The honest truth is that out of the box SharePoint has numerous features that are shiny on the outside, but hollow on the inside.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for our organization was the inability to use any type of authentication besides Active Directory – quite possibly a limitation imposed by the University to keep the system as secure as possible – but a real deal-breaker when you work with 62 different institutions.

KnowledgeTree Community Edition

Since this section of the article is really getting away from me…I’d better take a shortcut and include a part of some email correspondence with a KT sales rep:

My evaluation of KT is going well – although we have hit a few stumbling blocks. The mechanisms that KT uses to do the indexing seem to be overly done, requiring OpenOffice to be running as a background service, which is quite a bit just to allow for the indexing of word documents.

The documentation seems sparse – which is to be expected…but in addition the style of the commands seems to be an old and very specific style (i.e. chown -R nobody.nogroup as opposed to the more universal nobody:nogroup). We’ve had some difficulty getting the scheduler to run due to permission errors as well. From my point of view – not having expert knowledge of the history and reasoning behind the decisions about how KT is built – it seems to have a somewhat polished look on the outside, while being cobbled together on the inside…in need of a total rewrite.

Lastly, the integration with Drupal that I so badly needed didn’t work out very well. After applying the changes, the KT system became inaccessible, and a restore of the files and db from backups was necessary. This isn’t the fault of the KT software I’m sure, but nonetheless affects my ability to use it for my needs.

I’m afraid my KT project is on hold at this point due to time constraints.

I expect I will take it on again when time allows.

Ultimately, the system is fairly good and has a flexible authentication system, but the Drupal integration even if it did work was pathetic at best: can you say “iframe”?

Coming soon: How To: Setting Up Drupal File Framework On Ubuntu 8.10