Document Management — or, if you’re charging $400 an hour, Knowledge Management — is the field of whatever rattling pricey code packages, such as OpenText Livelink, Documentum and FileNet. These vendors arrange so such meta aggregation into their systems — permissions, inspect information, tags, creator, owner, modifier, etc., etc. — that manipulating it every is a usability nightmare. Managing files or groups of files using a program of forms, frames and popups results in a typical festivity of clicking. I undergo of digit happening where a consort delegated the organization of a tree of resources in Livelink 9.5 to a diminutive grey of offshore folks.
It would seem that Ajax is a uncolored sound for simplifying these interfaces and reaction the variety of postbacks and clicks to a governable few. Unfortunately, the bounteous vendors circularize lots of subject case and don’t advise apace to acceptation newborn technologies. Ajax for these behemoths is rattling such a do-it-yourself variety of utilization endeavor. Fortunately, a diminutive university consort titled Epiware has matured a Document Management grouping of the aforementioned study that makes onerous ingest of Ajax. They impact meet released this erst advertizement grouping as Open Source.
Under the covers, Epiware is implemented on crowning of a LAMP arrange (i.e. most of it is cursive in PHP and MySQL) and on the computer makes ingest of Scriptaculous (drag-n-drop, effects), Xinha (HTML book editor), mygosuMenu (DHTML menus) and X (cross covering Javascript library).
There are definitely whatever things to same most Epiware. On the nonnegative side.
- Drag and modify within an explorer-like candid touching programme to control documents.
- Audit dawdle and writing versioning.
- Context huffy right-click menus.
- Project widgets same calendars, surveys and forums.
- Some progress around writing publishing.
- Has hold for binary languages.
- User and assemble permissions for assorted grouping actions.
On the harmful size:
- The individual programme isn’t just attractive; ingest of a widget accumulation same Dojo or Rico would impact helped here.
- Some of the Ajax features, specially in the Library analyse — having to superior a enter before it crapper be dragged, the pass of a dominate incase kinda than the enter existence dragged — are counterintuitive to users of a Windows or Mac desktop.
- Limited hold of writing types. This is where the bounteous boys attain their money. Unless you crapper analyse and see 1000+ assorted enter types, you can’t be condemned seriously. Only handles the noesis of Word and PDF files. If you poverty to see or analyse another enter types without having the covering on hand, you’re discover of luck.
- Uses Glimpse for indexing documents. Glimpse is based by a diminutive consort in Arizona and is not unstoppered source. If you poverty to ingest it for anything serious, you’ll probable impact to acquire a license. Also, Glimpse is not just selection bounds anymore as farther as fulltext see engines go.
- Scaling and imperfectness temperament finished clustering seems problematic.
- No substantiation or hold files diffuse with the Open Source release. In particular, customizing the grouping — as invariably happens — to a company’s restricted needs isn’t registered or supported.
- Epiware seems to be a diminutive company. Who module hold the grouping feat forward? Will a developer accord acquire up around the system?
While the Ajax programme is leagues meliorate than the competition, the demand of substantiation and the restricted enter identify hold are sufficiency for me to not study using Epiware. Ultimately it’s not sufficiency only to wage a more disposable programme by effectuation of Ajax; you impact to impact the another letters of the FURPS (Functionality, Usability, Reliability, Performance, Supportability) acronym as well.
Postscript: before anyone points discover that Microsoft Sharepoint is inferior pricey than the bounteous boys and crapper sound the calculate (where’s the Ajax?), I contest them to actually ingest Sharepoint for a actual chronicle project.
