TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Re: Managing a Collection of Documents From:Laura Lemay <lemay -at- lauralemay -dot- com> To:"Janoff, Steven" <Steven -dot- Janoff -at- ga -dot- com> Date:Thu, 30 May 2013 09:30:25 -0700
Try Alfresco -- it's a document management CMS, and open source. It will do everything you list. You can edit files (including office files) directly within the site, which is mighty nice. No content management or publishing, just documents. You'll need to set it up; I don't know of any hosted alfresco services.
Laura
On May 30, 2013, at 9:16 AM, Janoff, Steven wrote:
> [Note: This is different from DaLy's recent request for a CMS solution. Here, there is no requirement for publishing, and money is an object. This was written a few days ago, and held for posting until now.]
>
> Hello Friends,
>
> Recently I posted requesting ideas for "Tracking and managing blog posts" and folks were gracious enough to suggest WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, and Joomla.
>
> The project has expanded quite a bit so I'm not certain whether these apply anymore, but I thought I'd give a broader scope about what's going on to see if there are any derivative ideas. (Blog posts now represent only a very small portion of the files I'll be dealing with, maybe 5%.)
>
> I want to manage a growing collection of documents that will include: (1) Text files (mostly created using Notepad++), (2) MS Word files, (3) PDFs (the majority created from the Word files in the collection), (4) a handful of Excel spreadsheets, (5) a number of image files (PNG, JPG, GIF, maybe a couple of others), (6) multimedia files -- audio (MP3/MP4) and video (AVI?), (7) the occasional PowerPoint file, and maybe one or two other file types but those are the major ones.
>
> Now, the text files may go through 2 or 3 or 4 versions. The Word files may go through 1 or 2 versions. The PDFs -- at least those created from the Word files -- will also go through a couple of versions, matching those of the Word files.
>
> I want to manage all this remotely, in the cloud -- Google Drive or Dropbox or something similar.
>
> I would like to have some kind of version control so that I can keep track especially of the TXT files.
>
> I'd like a couple of other people working on the project to be able to access these files, and on rare occasions selectively edit as necessary (e.g., a text or Word file), but primarily just access them at any time for viewing, printing, review, etc.
>
> I'd like to keep it open source if possible, e.g., I don't want to invest in Sharepoint or something like that.
>
> Any thoughts? This almost sounds like a combination CMS and RCS but I have no idea what would do this. I don't need a real component CMS like Astoria or Trisoft or Arbortext or similar, because this is not a publishing system per se. And I don't really need to worry about reuse or single-sourcing (at least not that I can foresee). (I thought I might be able to do this with Flare but that's overkill and you lose all the publishing benefits of that tool. This is not a publishing requirement.)
>
> It's really just storing, tracking, and managing a bunch of content files. The only thing that makes this rise above a pure document management system (if I've got that right) is the editing and revision-tracking of the text and Word files (although I do want to track any revisions of other file types, such as the PDFs). But worst case, I can just store and manage successive complete iterations of each file, since the ones that iterate the most (text files) are usually pretty small.
>
> This seems complicated to me but I suspect a number of you would see this as straightforward.
>
> Thanks greatly for any advice you care to share on this, and I appreciate your thoughts too on any tools or technologies you'd like to suggest.
>
> Steve
>
> PS - In the absence of a good open source solution for this, I'd be willing to consider a reasonably priced commercial solution that could do the job.
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> New! Doc-to-Help 2013 features the industry's first HTML5 editor for authoring.
>
> Learn more: http://bit.ly/ZeOZeQ
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as lemay -at- lauralemay -dot- com -dot-
>
> To unsubscribe send a blank email to
> techwr-l-leave -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
>
>
> Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- Visit
>http://www.techwhirl.com/email-discussion-groups/ for more resources and info.
>
> Looking for articles on Technical Communications? Head over to our online magazine at http://techwhirl.com
>
> Looking for the archived Techwr-l email discussions? Search our public email archives @ http://techwr-l.com/archives
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
New! Doc-to-Help 2013 features the industry's first HTML5 editor for authoring.
