By davelmacd on

Hi,

I am relatively new to drupal and keen to leran more, I know of Drupal as our church uses it.

I have just been employed, the company I will work for have just taken on a large customer and after talking through a few things today it turns out that we will need a good CMS - Document management solution a bit like sharepoint.

Basically a place where we can keep the customers documents in an orderly fashion so that all the konsultants can have access to them.

What is described here is exactly what I am after:

Open Drupal Document Management
https://drupal.org/sandbox/nam999/2064769

Does anyone have any good "out of the box" solutions / modules that are ready and can be installed in drupal?

Am sure that if there is a good commercially available solution available at a reasonable price the company would buy it, but I would need to demo it first and show them the product "up and running"

As mentioned I am relatively new to Drupal and keen to learn, I would only suggest sharepoint to the company as a last resort if I cant find any Drupal solution, my first week at work is from the 3rd February, we go live with the new customer 1st April and I would need a live solution from the 3rd March.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your help,

Dave.

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

There's quite a bit of difference between document management and simple file management. Drupal hasn't done much in the way of document management and from what I can see, the best way forward with true document management is by integrating with alfresco. This is more inline with what sharepoint does. Both 'drupal' and 'alfresco' are unique enough terms, that googling both of them will lead you to lots of awesome info on proceeding down this path.

For simple file management, which is what 'Basically a place where we can keep the customers documents in an orderly fashion so that all the konsultants can have access to them.' implies to me, you can use core drupal along with the views module. Simply create a 'file' content type, add a core file field and whatever other fields you might like (like categories or whatever), and use views to create a searchable sortable list of files.

Regardless of the method you decide, that's an ambitious schedule for anyone not already familiar with drupal (though I consider the 2nd method at least doable in that time frame).

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

WorldFallz - can I ask more about the what a document management system provides that is different from file management? I've never used a document management system (I don't think), so I'm curious to know the benefits they add.

Thanks!

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

Document management is what sharepoint, alfresco, and knowledgetree do. It typically involves very tight integration with an office package, handles versioning, revisions, collaboration, workflow, etc. if you've ever edited a word doc from a sharepoint library and saw the extra toolbar/functionality that appears in the right side toolbar it's that stuff.

You can cobble something like it together with file fields, but it's not really the same.

Did that help at all, lol?

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

Kind of. I've never worked in anything larger than a team of four though (though the company was about ~1000 people), so I've never used a system like that.

Thanks for the elaboration.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

The most important features, that cause my users to refuse to use drupal for doc mgmt, are automatic doc checkout on edit, concurrent lockout, and automatic new version on save. Think a very user friendly GIT with GUI for documentation. And imagine having to replicate that with drupal :-(.

There is the http://drupal.org/project/document module which claims to be document management, but it too is really just preconfigured file management.

I've spent quite a bit of time on this because I would love to displace sharepoint in my org, and afaic, drupal with alfresco is the only viable document management option. Now I just need to find the time to master alfresco ;-)

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

The most important features, that cause my users to refuse to use drupal for doc mgmt, are automatic doc checkout on edit, concurrent lockout, and automatic new version on save. Think a very user friendly GIT with GUI for documentation. And imagine having to replicate that with drupal

I could do it :D

Actually, I may just add that to my list of a million things. I'd like to try out Alfresco first though, so I have an idea of how the workflow works.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

I could do it :D

Of any of the myriad of times i have seen that claim over the years, this the first time I actually believe it ;-)

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

Thanks for the vote of confidence!

davelmacd’s picture

davelmacd commented

Hi,

Thanks for the prompt reply and info.

Maybe I am wrong but from what I understood from the past is that Drupal has various modules that you can customise you the Drupal site with.

So I thought that there might have been a CMS module that you could add.

I´ll keep googling anyway and see what I can come up with.

MANY THANKS again for the advice.

Dave.