I'm doing alot of research into this topic as I want to organise my docs at home and also at the office. Finding affordable solutions one can actually test drive is quite hard. Some that I've downloaded just don't seem to work (testing on brand new Vista PC). I've seen some software on Amazon but not really sure what they're like.
For home I'd like something to organise files, full text search, good scanner integration, nice interface etc.
But for the office it seems harder. I need something that does proper workflow and keeps versions. So I have the latest version of a document for a given year for example and I can roll back to another version. It will have an audit trail. Documents can be approved, checked in/out etc.
Seems like something that more people should be using but apparently aren't. My Google/twitter searches lead back to the same tired and vague webpages. I have only two leads that look interesting so if you can augment my knowledge with something useful that would be cool.
And I might even drop some promotes your way
For home I'd like something to organise files, full text search, good scanner integration, nice interface etc.
But for the office it seems harder. I need something that does proper workflow and keeps versions. So I have the latest version of a document for a given year for example and I can roll back to another version. It will have an audit trail. Documents can be approved, checked in/out etc.
Seems like something that more people should be using but apparently aren't. My Google/twitter searches lead back to the same tired and vague webpages. I have only two leads that look interesting so if you can augment my knowledge with something useful that would be cool.
And I might even drop some promotes your way
I've got clients with shared drives in their office, 20,000 docs and no real idea of how to control them. Then I come along trying to find the correct version of a Word doc they did a year ago.
Paperport is one commercial off-they-shelf product I've seen but not convinced by it. And unbelievably after posting this I got an evaluation link from another company whose software AGAIN did not install. It was looking for IIS (isn't that dead now?) but claimed to be installing it.
Getting the impression that software in this area has stagnated for some time.
You can also sift through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems even though not all of those are DMS.
Windows Server comes with Windows Sharepoint Services out of the box. It's not quite as good as MOSS, but very good for basic document management tasks, and doesn't require any additional licensing.
Don't use SVN for document managment. SVN isn't meant for opaque binary documents, it's meant to handle text files (source code.)
All the cool programmer kids are using one of these. They are both very popular (lots of support/help available), and very well featured. There are a few advantages to git for folks who are publishing code, but if that is not what you are doing you will not see the difference. They are both free (as in speech and beer), and require no server backend.
Since you are on an MS OS you are probably better off with mercurial, since git has not generally been MS friendly.
These systems allow you to control the contents of folders, or groups of folders, as one unit, commit the current state, add/rename/remove files or folders, and sync them with any number of other copies. Every copy has an entire revision history, so you can grab any version from any copy. Very useful.
I personally use a two teared approach:
1) Everything I edit on my machine is automatically saved by RCS, so whenever I save a file from my editor it commits, I rarely use these versions, but it has saved my ass on occasion when I did something stupid on changes I had not committed to a repository.
2) I manage projects (code/text/latex/tax returns), with mercurial, and then sync them with my server to keep backups, or to publish code/sites.