Open Source Document Management

Posted by nholland @ 04/24/2006

Recently, a potential client asked us if we could recommend a viable open source document management system (DMS) for their needs. Despite our deep experience with Open Source business solutions, I didn't have one to recommend. I think that is primarily because so few businesses have need for a true DMS - even if they could benefit from it. As I thought about it, we could benefit from one because we save so many files and even have an elaborate naming scheme for versioning.

So, I went on a quest to see what I could find. The systems I chose have the following features: Easy to use, Flexible to store any file, Versioning, Ability to handle large Volumes of Data, Customizable Meta Data, Document Text Search (including PDF), and Provide a Web Interface for Universal Access. Here are the ONLY two candidates I found:

KnowledgeTree: http://www.ktdms.com/products/ktdmsfeatures

Comments: Mature and well-supported open source solution. Supports grouping of data, meta-tags, versioning, and has some nice time saving features for dealing with large volumes of data. I particularly like the ability to have pre-defined data requests per document type - as well as the 'discussion'. It doesn't have anything specific for media management - but the system's flexibility keeps that from being an issue. Per your requirements, it also has some basic collaboration through checkin/out and 'work flow management'.

Support: Commercial Support available, as well as commercial tools for better integration into a Windows/Client environment.


jLibrary: http://jlibrary.sourceforge.net/4/index.html

Comments: Looks to be a very promising solution. jLibrary combines a rich feature set you'd expect in a document management system with an easy to use interface. It also has a nice feature of providing access via a client, as well as the web. jLibrary allows for large volume management, meta-data for groups, and even a relationship manager(separate from meta and categories). Currently, the product is in beta - so it may be good to wait for the first production release.

Support: Commercial support is available

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Comments

Take a look at the open

Submitted by Shawn Thomas (not verified) on Fri, 09/22/2006 - 11:45.

Take a look at the open source project " title=Epiware>. It is has a pretty neat document managment section that is AJAX enabled so you can do drag and drop in the application. It also extracts content from word documents and pdf documents and indexes it so that the content of the documents can be searched, also had change history, check-in checkout, and access history. They have a demo up, so you can test it out. It uses the standard LAMP stack.

Good Luck

I would recommend a solution

Submitted by Dan O'Leary (not verified) on Thu, 08/24/2006 - 02:26.

I would recommend a solution that uses open file formats and supports an open architecture, even if it is not truly open source. your client will soon find that most of the open source solutions are ECM , not EDMS solutions. Let me know what they end up going with.

-Dan
http://documentmanagementnews.blogspot.com

Have you checked out docmgr?

Submitted by port7 (not verified) on Sat, 05/06/2006 - 14:33.

Have you checked out docmgr? (http://www.docmgr.org/) I have just found it and have been playing with it, it looks OK. Not sure how well it will scale, but it has Postgres as a backend and the front is just php on apache, so it should be able to.