I recently asked for input on document management systems and received a good number of replies from people. Thank you!
In the following, I present my evaluation of each of the systems in the order in which they were suggested. In all cases, I hope to be shown wrong!
Plone
Having been involved in Plone development for several years myself, I was a bit surprised when two people suggested it for my requirements. Plone to me is a content management system, not a document management system. It’s optimised for portals with members publishing content on webpages, along with the occasional non-HTML file. Elaborate and advanced workflow definitions regulate the cooperation between contributors.
Here are the relevant points I found:
- Its default storage (ZoDB) is excellent for content, but for plenty of large files, one needs to set up external storage. Alternatively, a tool like Reflecto can be used, but it requires reindexing of the Plone catalog whenever files are manipulated directly and not through Plone. I have not tried this, but it sounds like it’s the wrong tool for the task.
- Objects can have keywords (i.e. tags), but those cannot be defined on-the-fly, nor can they be edited via external storage or WebDAV. An ontology product as well as a keyword manager exists, however, and something could be implemented using lovely.tagging or similar
- Plone uses AJAX very sparingly, and not at all for file management (although this is in preparation). So moving files between folders is painfully slow, all the more if you have to do it in bulk.
- Bulk upload/download support seems to be available only via Flash or Java.
- Even though Plone 3.0 supports revisions and version control, it uses an exclusive-access-scheme with locks, and lacks any form of merging support (binary versioning). Locks can be broken by others.
All in all, I am confident that a document management system could be implemented on top of Plone, but it would be quite an involved task, and the result still suboptimal.
Thanks to the folks in
#plone/irc.freenode.org for their help
and pointers.
Twiki
Twiki is advertised as an enterprise wiki, and even though it supports batch uploads, its intended use case is to be a wiki: documents only exist in the form of attachments to “topics” (wikipages)
Nevertheless, it’s worth to mention that attachments are stored on the filesystem and can be directly manipulated, Twiki will automatically detect changes. Also, a WebDAV plugin exists, but it’s not been ported to Apache 2.0 yet.
In conclusion, I don’t see Twiki as suitable for the job. However, I have been referred to someone who is using it as a DMS, and I am waiting to hear back from them.
KnowledgeTree
There are two things I noticed almost immediately when I surfed to the KnowledgeTree website: right at the top, it says “Open Source Document Management Software” and “Try It / Buy It” next to it; well, I can deal with that, but then, on the product overview page at the bottom, I see them advertising “leverages best of breed technology: PHP, Java, … MySQL” and I suddenly feel very uneasy. It’s not news that PHP and MySQL are very often chosen for projects, but to call them “best of breed” is like advertising your car to be built of the “best substances in the world”: wood and spit.
NP: Pulp: This is Hardcore
