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.
> 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.
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