1. There are a lot of document management software products available
today. IBM has a few products that might be beneficial to you (e.g. Content
Manager). Other top leading application service providers in the document
management arena are: Documentum 4i and PC Docs.
2. [Message posted by Jean Graef,
The Montague Institute] To solve this problem, we developed a database
using Filemaker, the most popular database for departments, teams, and
small companies. We looked at a variety of programs, but we couldn't find
anything that had all the features we wanted -- the ability to:
1. Handle all kinds of
documents -- books, articles, Web sites, graphics, etc.
2. Assign index
terms and subjects to both documents and people
3. Maintain
full contact information for people who had authored, suggested, or
been the subject of an article or Web site
4. Link contact
information to document information
5. Maintain
a thesaurus that can create a hierarchy of terms and link index terms
in relationships
6. Link to
documents, both on the Web and on our local hard disk or network
7. Handle e-mail
messages, notes of telephone conversations, and other informal communication
formats
8. Output
reports and files to help produce indexes for our print publications
as well as maintain a variety of indexes for our Web site.
Since our database doesn't contain
the document (only a description of it), copyright enforcement is up to
the user. In my personal database, I store copies of documents on my own
hard disk for personal use. If someone else wants to access a document
from a commercial source (as opposed to an internal document or free Web
site), they can learn about it by searching my database on our intranet,
but they can't access it unless they have permission (normally a password
or an enterprise-level license agreement).
3. We are going to buy a new software called Cindoc
Web, produced by Cincom, an American software house.
If I well understood, by Cindoc you'll be able to manage your electronic
documents, distribute them by users' profile, manage "dossier" (documents
originally in different format), publish on the web, make info retrieval,
etc.
In the software we already have (Texto produced by Chemdata France, now
acquired by Cincom), we are used to import the full text of the document
we index and summarize.
We are willing to let some of our client -- in a protect web site, with
a password -- to use this software and to search-read-download the full
text of the articles.
We don't have any commercial purpose, just to offer a service to our trading
online customers.
To get permission to publish full text (the most part of them are studies
found and selected on the free Web), our legal consultant advised us to
write directly to editors to ask for permission to publish their studies
(of course citing authors, source, etc).
This is the only way we find to publish full text studies, according to
the copyright rules worldwide.
At present we are going to send these requests and don't know what kind
of replies will get.
4. I have a great solution for your Document/Content Management Software
needs. There is a product called SydneyPlus that is an outstanding "special
library management system." I have no relationship with this company (wish
I did), so I have no reservations in recommending them to you. They provide
their entire package at no charge to potential customers to evaluate their
product and user support system.
My contact with the company is Judy Sandell in the company's Los Angeles
office. Judy can be reached at (310) 370-5654 or via e-mail at JSandell@ILS.ca.
I highly recommend that you contact her regarding your developing document/content
management needs.
5. I have been closely involved with creating and maintaining a dedicated
online data archive of e-articles/ images related to the textile industry.
It is available on the intranet of our textile business organization.
From my experience of managing online documents, it seems that most out
of the box solutions are inadequate in one way or another. It is best
to develop a custom made solution - for example, Microsoft has a product
FullTextSearch (FTS) packaged with their Internet Information Server (IIS).
If implemented properly, it can read non-structured data quite efficiently.
Customized browsers for subject browsing with header pointers to a database
map can be a very effective solution. Indexing with a trigger based /
store procedure solution is a simple way with a very small turnaround
time. Developing such a system is much cheaper than buying an incomplete
out of the box package.
If you already have a system with a standard database software i.e. Oracle,
SQL Server etc., and a standard web server (IIS, Apache etc.) you should
need no additional software.
6. I noticed your post last week to the competitive-intelligence eGroup
about doc-man, and thought I'd mention that, custom-built systems are
ALWAYS better than shoe-horning shrinkwrapped software to your specific
needs -- thing is, most people think they're also always much more costly.
I've been working with a great software developer (and market analyst,
incidentally) -- Susie Inouye of Databeans
-- who has built such a system for one of our joint clients. You can reach
her at sinouye@databeans.net with questions and specifics about the system
-- but it sounded like she might have some ideas for you.
7. If you are after a product that you wish to index content on your desktop
or across a small shared LAN you might like to try something relatively
cheap (or even free) like ISYS by
Odyssey Development, Kenjin by Autonomy, or Microsoft Internet Information
Server (MSIIS). I use the concept mapping capabilities of Autonomy's Kenjin
to alert me to subject-related content on my hard disk, info held on my
LAN and stuff out there on there on the Web (be careful though, it tends
to kill your machine unless you have a fast processor).
But...if you want overkill by choosing an application that has more of
an enterprise application flavor, there is a huge array of products from
the KMS arena focused on resource discovery for unstructured information
(Verity, Excalibur, Dataware, Mustcat/BrightStation, Microsoft, BroadVision,
Plumtree, Autonomy, CompassWare, Datachannel, Hummingbird) and on structured
information (Lotus Notes, Intraspect, OpenText, InfoAdvantage, AlphaServe,
Viador, CoreChange, Cognos, Brio, etc). Companies offering EIP [Enterprise
Information Portal] solutions include Netscape, Tibco, Epicentric, Portera,
etc. Add to this entrants in the content management sphere (Vignette,
Allaire Spectra, Interwoven, BroadVision, Documentum, etc) and you begin
to get a wide (and often confusing) range of applications to choose from.
Many of these have external spidering capabilities and use intelligent
agent applications for alerts, digests, dynamic personalization, content
aggregation, syndicated and syndicating capabilities, automated taxonomy
creation, etc.
