Re: Managing a Collection of Documents

[Lee Hunter <lee -at- streamoflight -dot- com>]

Sounds like a perfect candidate for the Alfresco cloud solution.

Lee Hunter


On 30 May 2013 09:16, Janoff, Steven <Steven -dot- Janoff -at- ga -dot- com> 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 lee -at- streamoflight -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.

Learn more: http://bit.ly/ZeOZeQ

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -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