On 25 Nov 2001, Craige McWhirter wrote: > On Sun, 2001-11-25 at 15:48, Howard Lowndes wrote: > > I have a client who wants to store a variety of document types in job > > folders. Some are (cough) .doc, .xls, some are .jpg, .html, .gif. There > > could be any mixture of these in any given job folder. > > > Is there anything Linux based that comes within a bull's roar of what he > > wants; or even something that runs on that other OS. > > There are plenty of these beasts, commonly referred to as Document > Managements Systems and they do all the things your client wants and > they are all horrible beasts, do horrible things to your files. A real > administrators nightmare but a suits dream. > > All of them are so bad I won't recommend any of them :) > > Your client can expect to pay $60,000 just for the rights to use the > system, then add on hardware, consultants, user training.......
On the other end of the scale... we have an internal 'jobflow' system at EverythingLinux/LinuxHelp I wrote in perl. It's NOT a document management system. It needs help in that it doesen't use perl's Mime stuff yet and instead uses sucky metamail to break up the attachments, consequently it doesen't understand some emails and just includes it verbatim, headers & all. Just so we know if we're on the right path what it does is takes incoming email assigns it a job number and keeps all parts of the job as 'articles' within the job. Each reply is also tacked onto the articles list. It's completely text based and GPL'ed although I neglected to put it somewhere public. It currently stores everything in MySQL. It could be adapted to display graphical attachments, word docs, PDF's etc in the same way any text based client does (ie if running under X, launch appropriate viewer utility based on /etc/mailcap). Other useful features are multiple queue's (can view several simultaneously), priority, sorting, assigning jobs to staff, bouncing to email, applying a command to a bunch of requests by tagging first (eg deleting multiple spam's), delaying requests (cool for reminders), manually injecting jobs from the command line, limited blocking of certain senders, matching email addresses to known customers (in our case contract customers get a higher priority). It's linked to our orders system in a minimal kinda way in that if a request is linked to an order that order can be viewed/held/unheld but that's easily removed. It's not all good, there's just something I can't put my finger on when it comes to usability as with us we get *shitloads* of emails and some things seem to get lost in the queue (not programatically, but more from users not noticing or tending to ignore some cases). The main thing is it's fast to use over slow links because it's text based, especially with SSH compression. -- ---<GRiP>--- Web: www.arcadia.au.com/gripz Phone/fax: 02 4950 1194 Mobile: 0408 686 201 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
