Extendable .Net Document management for under $30K

Question

hi there guys,

i am looking to answer one of those problems that sometimes get give to us devs by sales staff trying to get a sale in under budget.

We have a client that requires the following:

• Document management system that support AD authentication (even if the server may be in another location - potentially on a VPN)
• Ability for us to bulk import about 2000 documents (lets just say PDFs and Word Docs etc)
• The need to mark some documents as "external" and then allow us to write part of their website so that it shows the documents in a "downloads" section
• Pretty good permissions management
• Written in .Net and MSSQL so that we can get in and play if we have to (through apis or directly)
• Very well documented and support to be able to jump in and complete a rollout within a month or two. (we need to do a lot of other stuff as well outside of the DM)

All up the budget for external software would be $30-40K.

This sounds like an impossible task as the budget for software and the timeline are a bit painful however that is the job and we need budget for extra dev and implimentation (not to mention the import) - which will be alot more than the cost of the software but not enough to pay for a custom solution that offers the same level of featureset and beauty

Answer 1

Sounds like a job for SharePoint. If you can get by with Windows SharePoint Services (which from the description you probably can), its a free part of Windows Server. It has document libraries for storing documents, great AD authentication, document upload features, the ability to add metadata to tag documents and build views for them, written in .Net, it scales well and a ton of information on the 'net about how to develop against it. Plus a whole bunch of features you probably don't need now but might be handy down the track.

SharePoint can be a beast but for your required feature list it looks like a good fit.

Although it uses SQL Server, the general warning with Sharepoint is to stay out of the database and do everything through the object model API or web services.