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Subject:RE: What are you using for document management? From:"Dan Goldstein" <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 16 Dec 2008 16:12:16 -0500
I don't have a specific Electronic Document Management System to
recommend, but I do have a process for choosing one. Apologies to all
who've heard the following story:
At a previous company, I wrote a spec of minimum requirements for an
EDMS. Then, we got Those-Who-Know, Those-Who-Care, and
Those-Who-Sign-Checks to look over the spec and give their comments. Our
spec was about three pages long, and it was pretty concise.
Once we had an agreed spec, it was easy to review the candidate
applications -- we looked at MS SharePoint, Xerox DocuShare, IBM/Lotus
Domino.doc, Livelink, Documentum, etc. The vendors were happy to come
and make their pitches.
I sent the vendors our spec before their visits, and insisted that they
compare their out-of-the-box capabilities with our spec during their
presentations. Most of them (surprise!) required vendor customization
that dramatically skewed the initial price comparison. The one major
vendor whose product required no customization was actually
disappointed! -- but we weren't. In the best of all possible worlds, the
only cost is the initial purchase price.
Caveat emptor, and keep your eyes on the spec.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Latella, Vincent
> Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 3:52 PM
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> Subject: What are you using for document management?
>
> Having searched the Techwr-L Archives, it looks like there
> hasn't been a thread on this in quite some time (assuming the
> archive search form isn't busted).
>
> Anyway, I'd like to know what everyone's using / doing for
> document management? Are you using purpose-built software?
> Does your company have an enterprise content management
> system like SharePoint or Documentum? Does it work for you?
> Any and all recommendations are appreciated.
>
> (I work with a team of developers that has amassed a
> ridiculous amount of documentation [technical specs, code
> snippets, requirements, user guides, etc.] over the years,
> and we're looking to get a handle on all of it. We'd like
> version control, check-in/out, access control / group or user
> provisioning, full-text searching, and a really, really easy,
> no-nonsense interface. Oh... and it's got to be cheap, too! Our
> company is very large, and other business units have used
> SharePoint and Documentum. Because our company already has
> licenses, we have access to and have tried both for free.
> Unfortunately, we didn't like SharePoint, which appears to be
> a "jack of all trades, master of none," and Documentum is
> slow and the full-text search capability isn't working
> properly.)
>
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