Open Source Document Management

At work we used to be a small operation with very few documents and it was nice and simple to keep everything straight. I, as the CTO, am the keeper of all the operational procedures, network diagrams etc, and Pierre (our marketing guru) manages all the sales and marketing documents. The company web server runs a CMS called Joomla, which has a decent enough file manager, so we put the documents up there in a password protected area when they’re complete and we want to make them available to selected clients.

We’ve started to grow, both in head count and sophistication, so now we’ve got a lot more documents to manage and a lot more people wanting to manage them. Our documents are usually authored by one person, but in many cases require review and comment by sales, marketing and technical people prior to release. What would be great is something that would manage the workflow, with notifications and audit tracking, and integrate with our website to make the final result available to clients, all in a controlled manner. We need a Document Management System. Our company likes to use open source software wherever possible, so my first port of call was Google, which gave me the following:

• xinco
• contineo
• KnowledgeTree
• Epiware
• Alfresco

Most of the above are Java applications, which I really don’t like, and I’ll cover in a later blog post. KnowledgeTree is written in PHP and ticks all the boxes. Alfresco is a Java app, but it’s functionality is too good to dismiss straight away. Let the testing begin!