Hacker News Reader

Comment by vhiremath4 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with versioning & management systems for docs is that you need the process to drive the adoption. Getting people to version, approve, and fully manage a document database is the hard part. Many companies do not even adequately document - they just send information in a Slack/Teams message and nothing is written down for later (this is why startups like Glean exist: https://www.glean.com/). There are massive companies that exist without this organization layer and just whip up Notion/365/Office docs with the expectation the documentation will get lost and become irrelevant very soon (even if a search feature existed).

The point I'm (badly) trying to make it is that my intuition tells me very few companies will actually pick up and adopt software like this. If they do, there might be many nuances in their process and they might find the versioning easier to do with simple duplicate Notion/Office/GDocs parent templates.

View on HN

> (this is why startups like Glean exist: https://www.glean.com/)

https://www.glean.com/pricing is the worst ‘pricing’ page I’ve ever seen XD

To their great credit - I gave them feedback about it and it's already changed!

This is painfully accurate. I setup Alfresco for our company, and I used the versioning tools etc. while doing documentation.

A few years after I moved out of documentation I went back to Alfresco to download a document, only to find none of the tools still in use. jessica_edit_v2_final.pdf type documents all over my beautiful server!

Nobody uses versioning to work on document. It is too annoying and merge barely works if at all anyway. Trying to convince people to put work in progress document in a DMS is a lost battle. Sharepoint via Teams might happen but that's stricly for the shared folders and cooperative edition functionality.

A DMS is very good for storing reference documents however.

The only company I worked for where DMS was really successful, there was someone in charge of managing it full time. The only documents which could go in had to have been reviewed and signed by the relevant persons. Documents were considered as not existing unless they were in the DMS and producing said documents was a significant part of our objectives as they were contractually mandated by our customers.

This had the nice side effect of making retrieving documents very easy.

This is typically what happens unless the users of the software really need it. For example the concept of folders is really outdated, but good luck getting people to use a good tagging system to replace it.

Law firms are heavy users of a DMS, especially versioning. Insurance companies use it too, but probably not versioning. So there are customers, but quite specific.

Most people have only interacted with file management systems, which are far more basic in their functionality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com