Categorized Document Management System

Question

At the company I work for, we have an intranet that provides employees with access to a wide variety of documents. These documents fall into several categories and subcategories, and each of these categories have their own web page. Below is one such page (each of the links shown will link to a similar view for that category):

We currently store each document as a file on the web server and hand-code links to these documents whenever we need to add a new document. This is tedious and error-prone, and it also means we lack any sort of security for accessing these documents. I began looking into document management systems (like KnowledgeTree and OpenKM), however, none of these systems seem to provide a categorized view like in the preview above.

My question is ... does anyone know of any Document Management System that allow for the type of flexibility we currently have with hand-coding links to our documents into various webpages (major and minor , while also providing security, ease of use, and (less important) version control? Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?

Answer 1

You should look into Alfresco. It's extremely extensible and provides a lot of ways of accessing the repository.

Note: click the "Developers" tab for the community edition.

Answer 2

My question is ... does anyone know of any Document Management System that allow for the type of flexibility we currently have with hand-coding links to our documents into various webpages (major and minor , while also providing security, ease of use, and (less important) version control? Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?

Well there are companies that make a living selling doc management software. Anything you can get off the shelf is going to be a huge time saver, and its going to be better than anything you could reasonably develop by hand.

I've used a few systems:

Sharepoint: although I hear some people don't like it, I didn't either ;)

HyperOffice worked really well for my company of around 150 employees and has all the features you describe.

Current company uses Confluence, I like it :) But its probably one of those tools whose pricetag isn't worth it, especially if you're only using a subset of its features like doc management.

I haven't used it, but one guy I know raves about Alfresco, a free and open source doc management system. I looked at its website, seems simple enough to use.