[Zope] What do you use for document management?

[Loren Stafford]

> > I need to implement/acquire a document management system (for chip
> > engineering docs) that works well with Zope. I have no experience in the
> > field of DMS, so can someone point me in a good direction.
>
> You can use Zope directly as a DMS. It offers FTP and WebDAV access,
> document histories,

Versioning is a requirement. What are you referring to when you say
"document histories"? ...Zope's Versions and undo lists? ...or something
else?

> full text and metadata indexing etc. Of
> course there is
> some missing functionality, but this is being worked on, e.g. in
> the Content Management Framework project.

I will check in to that in detail. Thanks.


> The only serious problems you might get with Zope "out of the
> box" are full
> text indexes for very large documents (ZCatalog might not be good
> enough or
> too slow for that)

Most of our documents are modest in size. I don't know of any "very large"
ones.

or documents Zope does not know (e.g. PowerPoint; there
> is an import filter for MS Word!)

We will have PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files in the system. Full text
indexing is not a stated requirement, only keyword indexes; but I suspect
it's easier for me to do full text indexing than to get good keyword
abstracts from the originators. I think I can handle indexing PDF files
using XPDF; do you have a pointer for the MS Word filter? Anyone, know about
indexing PPT?

> and handling very large files in general.

Not a problem here.

> But if you choose to store all files in the filesystem and only keep
> references in the Zope object database, the latter can be solved.
>
> If you tell us more about the functionality you are going to need (either
> privately or on the list), we might be able to support you as we
> are working in this area, too.

I think the only other requirement I haven't already mentioned is a concept
of ownership, so that only the document originator can check in new versions
of a document. That shouldn't be hard with Zope.

-- Thank you for your suggestions,
-- Loren