Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. ~Robert C. Gallagher

The following snippet of email exchange is typical in most organisations these days.

A:       "Please find attached the draft copy of the proposal."

B: "Hi, I have reviewed your proposal. My comments are in Yellow."

A:       "Thank you for your comments. I have incorporated some of your changes, rebutted to a couple of them. My replies are in blue."

B: "Where are my original comments? Some of them fell through the gaps, I think."

A:       "Here is the original document you sent with yellow comments."

B: "Here are my responses to your blue comments in red."

C:       "I have reviewed your documents. My comments are in purple."

By the time one figures out what needs to be in and what needs to be out, the proposal is overdue and you have still not finished the estimate because you spent all the time in figuring out the different colors in the document. And if you are color blind like me, even the Almighty cannot help you. In the above exchange, C came in at the very end and added a whole lot of confusion since it is difficult to find out which document he modified. How does one overcome these problems? I can almost hear many of you think "Why not document version control? It is available in most of the office suites." If you use the version control feature of MS Office or OpenOffice, you have actually saved yourself from some grief.

But it is not the correct answer since documents are owned locally (on the user's machine) and one counts on all the players using the same suite. Another BIG assumption is that everyone is playing by the rules. How many times we have been left in a lurch when one has deviated from the rules and has broken the chain? The office suite is very unforgiving. And rightfully so. There is no intelligence built into it. Which is why we have Document Management Systems.

Document Management Systems

Wikipedia defines DMS as "A document management system (DMS) is a computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents." While this is not the most authoritative definition, it is consistent with what many other definitions say. Typically large organizations have strict document control and versioning systems. Some of the most common commercial solutions are Documentum, Veritas, SharePoint etc. There are a few Open Source solutions as well. Contineo and KnowledgeTree are two such DMS that I have evaluated.

While both of them are available for download and use, KnowledgeTree belongs to a new breed of solutions that are both commercial and community driven open source. Here is what I experienced with both of these solutions. Just so you know, it took me ten minutes to get Contineo working. KnowledgeTree community edition is not so easy. The version I downloaded (3.5.2 Stable) was buggy from an installation perspective and documentation was insufficient to get a fully workable demo to validate most of the features that are available.

Contineo:

Contineo installs like a breeze. Of course, you need to have Tomcat working already to use this. Installing Tomcat is not rocket science, though. But installing the provided war file was easy and it was running in ten minutes or less. It was very cool to notice that it automatically scanned the uploaded file for keywords and author information. It accepted Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat formats. It does not support spreadsheets in the current version, which is really strange. It supports five languages (none of the Indian languages figure, though) and has tight security couple with workflow. The Keyword feature is useful for searching through large volume of documents. Security is tight and the kicker is that is will automatically scan your Google email box for documents and store them in the DMS. What more can you ask for? Check out Contineo at http://contineo.wikispaces.com. Drop me an email with your comments or if you have problems installing/configuring Contineo.

Venkat Mangudi is an Open Source Evangelist and Strategy Consultant based in Bangalore. After having worked across Europe, Asia and the US, Venkat returned home to set up a consulting firm called quite unimaginatively, Venkat Mangudi Consulting (www.venkatmangudi.com). He can be reached at venkat@ venkatmangudi.com.

Issue BG89 Aug 08

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