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EDMS Requirements #842

Open M0d3rn15t opened 6 years ago

M0d3rn15t commented 6 years ago

First let me say what a great plug in this is.

I apologise if I am breaking rules with this 'post', I'll delete it if it offends.

I have a document from a few years ago which detailed the minimum requirements for an EDMS at the time. Many of the items are already covered but I wanted to start a discussion on some that aren't and I couldn't find a better way of doing it.

I know it is best if feature requests are made one at a time, but as I say some of these I know are already covered others may be but I just haven't spotted them. The idea I had was to list them all here and then we can cherry pick and create new issues of the most wanted (or we can just delete the whole thing).

Again, appologies if this offends.

Document Management System Requirements

'Everything is a document'

The following outlines minimum eDMS requirements

I have crossed out any features I feel are covered, I am sure there are more. Some, like the office plug-ins are obviously outside of the scope of this project. Some might be too difficult.

picman commented 6 years ago

From my point of view:

  • Scalable Storage - Symbolic link via url? Dropbox, Sharepoint, Google Docs, OneDrive, Amazon S3 etc.
  1. There can be used a URL link for single files.
  2. Storage system you mentioned can be mounted as a network drive/ Then you can map DMSF folder to the network drive.
  3. Direct access to S3 or other mentioned storages we can put on a feature list.
  • Extensible Document Types (e.g. all office type (e.g. docx, doc, odt, xls, xlsx, ppt), CAD files (e.g. dwg, dfx...), PLC Projects (*.acd, etc), archives (e.g. zip, rar, 7z, etc), photos, pictures, sketches

It's not clear for me what is this feature about? An extra column which says that .ods and .odt documents very probably belong to LibreOffice family?

  • Customisable document categories (not types) (e.g. Plan, General Arrangement, Specification, User Requirement Specification, etc) - achievable with custom fields?

Use custom fields.

  • Document Properties - (tags?)

Use custom fields.

  • Customisable Document Ids

Not available. A specisfication of "customisable" needed.

  • Check In (e.g. Commit and lock out changes (?))

Unlock.

  • Check Out (e.g Check Out = copy file to work area and unlock copy)

Lock.

If you edit documents in an office tool, documents are automatically locked/unlocked. In other cases you are supposed to lock/unlock them manually.

  • Versioning (Issue vnn, Draft dnn, etc)

Each document has got its version in document's details. If it's not enough a specisfication is needed here.

  • Workflows - customisable and by category

You can specify Approval worflows and the use them for documents aprovals.

  • PDF Export (not as important as it once was).

We can put it on the feature list.

  • 'Folder' Automation - to allow the creation of 'hard' copy project folders or virtual project folders (e.g. IOMs, TCFs) for the client or customer. Note: Each document might have any number of document packs in which it is included. It would also be useful if when a document was updated it would remember which doc. packs it was a member of and flag (or automatically reissue) updated documents.

I'd recommend using of document links here.

  • ADS/LDAP Integration - only for internal system?

For what purpose?

  • Scan to DMS (interface to scanner software or other e.g. Nuance) (OCR?)

This is out of the plugin's scope, I think.

  • Save to DMS (e.g. word plugins to save directly to a DMS folder)

You can mount DMSF documents via WebDAV as a network drive. You can edit documents directly in an office tool. A missing feature might be a "New empty document" feature in the context menu. This I'd put on the feature list.

  • Change request management

A specification need here.

  • Review management - standard redmine issues?

Here and by the previous point too you can use issues and attach documents to them either directly or as document links.

  • Document markup - internal to documents application? or pdf mark up tool?

You mean to modify original documents before downloading them using a water mark? A candidate for the feature list.

  • Digital Signature (e.g. docusign)

A candidate for the feature list.

  • Form management (Creation, Filling and Filing) - e.g. Document Transmittals, Receipts, change request etc.

No idea what this is about.

  • Voting/Rating

A candidate for the feature list.

  • Meeting management (external plugin?, calendar?, issue?) - e.g. document review meetings

Out of scope of this plugin.

A candidate for the feature list.

  • Outlook Add IN

For what purpose?

  • Android/IOS Apps

No application is needed. Why? Just use the web application.

M0d3rn15t commented 6 years ago

Karel,

Thanks for the reply. Interesting points here.

I shall post new feature requests (including specifications where I can) over a period of time. If I may I will also carry on a wider discussion here.

Scalable Storage

Can network drives be mounted using a url? In other words, can a remote drive be mounted to a cloud server? I am not really a Linux person, can you create a symbolic link to a url or an IP address?

I am raising another issue for the Online Storage interface featurre (Dropbox, CloudDrive, S3 etc.)

Document Types

I have re-read the DMSF User Guide and it appears that document types are only important from the point of view of the search engine (Xapian), is that correct?

In my original document, doctypes were important from the point of view of document viewers, which allow previews in existing DMSs and editors for opening documents directly from the DMS 'desktop' (check out space).

I guess this feature is for the moment out of the scope of the project, and we can ignore it for now?

Categories and IDs

Categories could be implemented using custom fields, but are often implemented as part of the ID.

A document name, e.g. Software Specification, or even Crisp Kettle Software Specification doesn't uniquely identify a document. Documents are often, in engineering circles at least, given a unique id, e.g. PD170322-SRS-0001 as it happens this is usually both a document property and part of the file name.

Some EDMS systems handle them - for the time being I guess we can ignore them as separate issues (probably best at this stage as a local implementation issue).

Properties Custom fields might be useful for this but what I meant was that some (most) EDMS systems read the document properties from the document itself as it is uploaded (this is here document type awareness comes in).

I should say here that I am aware that DMSF is an open source, non-commercial project and I can't expected it to be as fully featured as commercial products. As I said when I posted, this list was simply a 'Wish List' of features that I have previously compiled at work.

I'll explain some of my other points later. Thanks again for your time.