Document Management (best strategy to implement)

Question

I have a situation where users have a primary document (a purchase order) that will, throughout its life, have various other documents added to it. The documents could be email messages, word documents or anything else.

Right now the (clunky) solution is to print the document to PDF and then append the document to the Purchase order stored as a PDF.

I'm thinking of using a database (keyed by PO number) and linking the documents to it. The only issue with this is getting the documents into a standard (PDF) format and linking them them to the PO in the database. Any suggestions on a user-friendly way to do this?

Answer 1

If your intention is to store the PDFs externally, your best bet is to store the document with a file name containing the DocumentID generated from your Documents database table, as in

475833.PDF

You will need another table to collect all of the related documents together, like a binder table.

Printing to PDF does have the advantage that it is not dependent on any particular application to produce the PDF; it will work in all applications. The trick is to find software that allows you to specify the file name programmatically. CutePDF does this using registry entries.