Comment by Gruselbauer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gruselbauer | Hacker News Reader

I work for a small high end cosmetics business in the European Union. That particular industry has a lot of compliance and documentation rules imposed on it by Brussels. My predecessor in the line sadly pushed using Apple's Filemaker for that. It's not even that bad in the latest version and certainly offers some advantages over similar solutions but the guy was horribly in over his head. I'm talking fifty fields in a table having near identical names, undocumented... everything, no clear UI design paradigms, needlessly complicated UX and storing PDF as binary data in tables by the thousands.

But I feel like I'm stuck with repairing his shit because there's not a nice and clean solution anywhere in sight. I thought of Wiki systems but the actual data entry will be done by people who would be completely put off by any kind of syntax/markup whatsoever. I'm neither good enough a Web developer to roll something similar myself nor can I dream of creating something like an entire documentation system.

I think the problem might apply to other smaller businesses in the EU and especially Germany, too. Lots of docu to have ready in the unlikely but not impossible case of an inspection.

For the cosmetics industry it'd need to be able to track ingredients, lots of external evaluation docu, internal procedures and so on. While at the same time it would need to be usable by people who are far removed from tech literate.

It sounds as though a customizable CMSm or DMS would be just the thing to take care of the fiddly bits that trip up developers of de-novo solutions (ie. accessibility, internationalization, usability, binary format document storage and indexing, access control, etc.). My personal favorite in this space is Plone[1] which has an excellent security record and happens to have many EU developers, but most of the popular contenders will do as a starting point.

Enterprise intranet/extranet apps often start out small and then spread like kudzu, eventually prompting a major project to replace them wholesale with a huge consulting-ware solution (like Sharepoint) that never fulfils the promises made (The exception being the specific niche you're asking about, compliance, which does have proprietary solutions that work, but are incredibly expensive).

To avoid that fate, try to pick something that you know can start small but you have evidence that it can also easily (ie. without a huge consulting engagement) scale to an organization-wide solution with 3rd-party as well as in-house extensions.

Good luck!

[1] https://plone.org

You could take a look at Jira. I understand most people reading this are probably cringing right now, but the cause of that and what makes Jira appropriate is just how customisable it is. You can setup custom fields, validations, workflows.

While this is probably not a too bad idea, I just can't stop myself lamenting over the customisability of Jira.

Before going bananas with Jira, either be very strict or use separate instances.

I currently work at in a relatively large organisation where all teams of various crafts and trades - not only development - share one Jira instance, since Jira is obviously what 'Agile' teams use.

Let's say that not all teams are equally equipped for analysis and generalisation.

Although there is supposedly some control process, there are now several hundreds of custom fields, many duplicates of the standard fields, and duplicates and triples or more of many custom fields.

The contents of them all are like the dwtf meme: True, False, FileNotFound.

This looks like a problem we recently solved for driving schools in Luxembourg that needed to track a lot of data about students for legal and internal reasons.

I'd be very interested in discussing the needs for a compliance and documentation tracker system and see if there is a market for it.

You can reach me at clement@clement-weyer.lu

Have you looked into Jama software? It is customizable and very user-friendly. I use it for requirement management but imagine it would be good for document management as well.

Hey, do you have an email address I can reach you at? Because I am interested in helping you solve your problem

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