Hi Steven I've been thinking about this and Open Office/J2EE backend.
It sounds like a pretty good fit for your requirements. For starters, it sounds like Open Office will give your users many more opportunities re: formatting than notes currently does. The reason it's of interest as a Document storage option is that Open Office stores all of its documents as compressed(zipped) XML. This means that all of the attributes are saved in a parseable form.. This means as documents are saved on a central repository, it would be a case of a server process unzipping them, parsing the XML with JDOM, indexing them and storing the result in Progress (or Postgres even). As for retrieval and opening, I'd suggest (being a java bod) a Swing GUI front end that can execute on Linux and Windows. It searches the backend DB (J2EE/Progress) on any/all indexes and fires the relevant open commands at OpenOffice. Not a big deal I wouldn't have thought. I've written a similar Java/J2EE document process for a mob of architects that does a troll through documents for a different reason (QA) and it wasn't so difficult. You could even write the SWING bit in Progress if you wanted - but that stops you from an eventual move to Linux on the desktop. Java Swing doesn't as it runs on both. Alternately you could go HTML front-end. The JDBC driver for Progress has been improving somewhat (but could do better). There is no reason why you can't store the indexed data in MySQL or Postgres. Thinking about it, you might even be able to intercept the save/open event in OO thus removing some of the effort for finding changed/new/deleted documents. HTH Stuart Guthrie Eureka IT Pty Ltd http://www.eurekait.com On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 14:43, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Over the years I have been gradually reducing our reliance on Windows. Our > main ERP application runs on the Progress RDBMS under Linux. Really the > only thing left now is Lotus notes. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like > there will be a linux client in the short term. They have now discontinued > the Solaris client. (In fact in the long term this could be a good thing > because it will push me away from using a proprieyary solution.) > > We use Notes for email which can easily be replaced. However, we also use > it for document storage. Instead of word processing in something like word > or Openoffice we use Notes. It is a little primitive but has all the > features you need for 99% of letters. This creates a central store of > letters and also gives a way for easy seaching for documents and lists > document summaries. > > The email need can be solved with an IMAP server and any number of clients. > The individual word processing / spreadsheet need is solved by Openoffice. > > Does anyone have any suggestions about how I might provide the central > document storage, searching and summaries provided by Notes? Then I might > be on the way to being Microsoft free. > > Regards > Steven > > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ > More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
