Building a Doc Mgt solution with iwov

Brewy

Big up,

I have been working with TeamSite and various portal products for a while now but my current project involves some new technology and a few challenges that I was hoping you guys could help out with. I want to build an easy to use web based document management system using TS, TST, MT and maybe FO. I'm not talking about anything too fancy here, just some way for users to easily add, edit and search a repository of documents via a portlet. I am new to metatagger and frontoffice so I am not yet sure about how they can help me out so what I might do here is run through a quick spec of what I plan to do and then everyone can tell me I am an idiot and should stick to fishing and drinking beer.

Define a DCT with a replicant that includes fields for pertinent taxonomy data (eg. doc category = 'business process' org unit = 'finance' and topic = 'pants') and a browse button to facilitate uploading of the file. The taxonomy data will enable (when the dct is closed) teamsite to upload the document to a folder in the appropriate workarea (example above might be put in WA/finance/bp/ ). This starts a submit workflow (this is where it gets hazy) metatagger fires up and builds its list of stuff from the document content which is then verified by the user. The job then goes for approval and if approved is submitted. Once submitted a script parses the document directory and builds a navigation hierarchy based on metadata/taxonomy defined in the earlier step (to go back to our example, the top level category may be Finance then business process and then pants) this navigation hierarchy is essentially some sort of drill down HTML menu that can be shoved in to the 'Documents' portlet. Later, the search engine comes along and gets all of the magnificent metadata captured by metatagger and indexes the document appropriately.

I imagine there is going to be a few catches as I think this out more. The documents in question are word, lotus notes and pdfs. The portal product is Sun ONE (pity it isn't plumtree) and we are going to be using TS6.0. Can front office be leveraged to ease this process? Is there a better way to do it (besides buying documentum)? Is Australia ever going to lose a game of cricket ever, ever again?

Cheers,

Ben

Michael

Hiya,

Last questions first --- no Australia isn't going to lose cricket ever again, especially not to the English

I would stick with fishing and drinking XXXX - it has got to be more fun then doing what you are planning with TeamSite.

That said you should be able to build a way to do what you describe below. However it is a non-trivial task; especially if you are not familiar with all the tools.

MetaTagger saves the metadata as extended attributes so you shouldn't need a seperate DCT for capturing metadata.

Your automatic navigation hierarchy based on your taxonomy might be doable -- depending on your taxonomy requirements however this isn't always the best approach. But if your main goal is simple navigation to documents then it is possibly ok.

I am not sure what you mean when you say one of the documents is of type lotus notes?

Great to see you are going to be using TS6.0 -- can I ask who you are working for? As for FrontOffice, I can't really provide much advice on that side as I have had limited exposure there. However, using the more complete CCI in TS6.0 you should be able to provide all the functionality through your portlet I reckon.

Good luck with it!

Cheers
Michael