Shannon,

I've looked at a few open source Electronic Document
Management Systems a few years, but nothing was really
eye-catching then. 

A few questions:
1. How many total users of the system?
2. How many of those users will be using the system at
any one time?
3. Do you have a rough estimate of the number of
documents you will be putting into the system over say
a month?
4. Any idea how large these documents will be on the
average?
5. What kind of documents will you be storing? Images?
PDFs?
6. How will you be indexing the documents when put
them in the system? By hand? Automation?

What most organizations want in a document management
system is fast document retrieval performance combined
with metadata indexing for those documents. Normal
filesystems kinda suck when you have hundreds of
thousands of documents and a lot of users all trying
to access them at the same time, especially if there
is revision control.

I've managed FileNet (http://www.filenet.com) systems
in the past, while not open source, is used by large
corps and runs on UNIX, Linux and Windows. It was
originally written for UNIX, which can be seen in the
file structure and naming conventions, even on a
Windows implementation. I am not recommending to you
however, as it is $$$.

FileNet is fast and scalable because it provides a
custom filesystem (32GB "virtual platters", no blocks)
with flat file indexing for storing the location and
other file info (number of bytes in file, etc.) about
the documents. User metadata document searches are
handled via an RDBMS, which provides a document ID to
the row in the flat file DB.

Whatever you do, choose _very_ carefully, as
converting from one EDMS to another is painful and
slow.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

John Hebert



--- Shannon Roddy <sroddy at gmail.com> wrote:

> I can't remember if this has come up before, but
> anyone know of a good
> open source document management package out there? 
> Hopefully with the
> ability to specify different access controls per
> file.  Yes, this
> would be running on Linux/Apache.  ;-)
> 
> While I am at it... any suggestions on web based
> calendaring?
> 
> -Shannon
> 
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> General at brlug.net
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> 



      
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