Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Alfresco was supposed to be the OSS alternative to documentum/stellent/etc closed source systems.

It was basically a freemium model, which means that a complete OSS solution is out of reach.

This basically looks like the same thing. I guess Hashicorp is slightly better at OSS, but... I dunno.

A DMS needs:

1) storage (duh)

2) metadata

3) permissions enforcement

4) search / indexing

5) rendering to pdf and pdf signing services

6) workflow engine for document lifecycles, versioning, approvals, rendering

7) a bunch of virtual filesystem interfaces like CMIS, maybe JCR, webDAV, SFTP

8) a decent web client

9) a decent integration API

It's quite the laundry list. A "modern" one should probably be cloud-aware (so docs can be stored in cloud object stores, utilize interface with the various semi-document features of S3 or other object stores, etc.

IMO it should also be implemented perhaps as a non-cloud self-hosted option atop Cassandra or some other scheme with good global replication and scale.

Honestly I don't understand why a consortium of governments and businesses with high regulatory requirements don't simply get together and develop a common platform for this. They'd rather give billions of dollars to Documentum or Oracle. If they want support, SOMEONE will provide paid support, like Postgres

I would add 10) document review tools and management.

Authors in larger organizations are more editors than authors, and documents require submissions and detailed reviews by many different people. A management feature would be summarizing comments (RID - review item discrepancies, AI - action items, etc) and status of each comment; plus document deltas; plus document delta markup (change-bars in the margins of presentation versions like PDF).

Another feature would be support of document hierarchies, where changes to one doc invoke functions/procedures/status changes on subordinate docs.

Another feature would be tagging a set of matching documents as a "release" set.

The enterprise products support much of this. And the price is not small.

Indeed this laundry list is a great description of the services that are needed to manage documents. There's probably one more to add to the list (document generation, i.e. starting from a template like a generic NDA or an employment offer and generating a new document by inserting data like company name, expiration date, etc, into the template). Since this thread talks a lot about how to provide these features on top of Google Drive and Google Docs, you can have a look at my company AODocs (www.aodocs.com) which provides a cloud-based Documentum/Alfresco/etc alternative, using Google Drive as the underlying file storage.

> Honestly I don't understand why a consortium of governments and businesses with high regulatory requirements don't simply get together and develop a common platform for this.

This is a great recipe for billions expended on a system that should cost a few million at most.

You'd have better luck getting a grant and just writing it for one gov agency with the caveat that you get to open source it.

There's that new government I.T. development office that was set up under Obama. Give the task to them.

> Honestly I don't understand why a consortium of governments and businesses with high regulatory requirements don't simply get together and develop a common platform for this. They'd rather give billions of dollars to Documentum or Oracle. If they want support, SOMEONE will provide paid support, like Postgres

Or have a cooperative of businesses write the necessary software.

In Germany we have vaguely similar thing going on with DATEV: Basically all tax advisors are members of the DATEV cooperative if they want to use their software suite, which for all intents and purposes is able to implement absolutely anything a tax advisor is required to do while at the same time implement all regulatory requirements such as confidentiality, archival rules, reporting, logging etc.

In my opinion there should be a similar thing going on for all industry to implement the regulations required by GoBD, GDPR and so on.

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