ISO Excellent/Innovative/Efficient/Fast/Cheap Document Management Software

January 22, 2007 7:44 AM

I'm looking for Document Management software along the lines of MediaWiki that is extremely user-friendly and FAST, but has more security options and more ability to control edits.

I love the change-tracking, easy-linking, and web format of Wikipedia, but it is too difficult to restrict unauthorized changes to Documents in a large business environment.

Basically, I'm looking to initiate an Intranet Documentation library for use by about 400 people. The budget is about $30,000. We're talking Corporate Standard Operating Procedures, Corporate Forms, Etc., that require regular updates.

What options do I have?

posted by owl to work & money (9 comments total)

iManage
posted by caddis at 9:31 AM on January 22, 2007

I'm using dokuwiki in our company and it has been working out great. The security restrictions are as fine grained as you need them, even down to the page level by user. It's not totally obvious at first how these permissions work (at least it wasn't for me), but once you get going, only takes me a minute to set/remove permissions from whole namespaces or individual pages.

The benefits of using a wiki for operating procedures etc are vast, but there are some weaknesses to consider.

1. no wysiwyg editing (at least in dokuwiki)
2. tables look great on the page but can be a pain to edit when they get large
3. attaching documents/images isn't the easiest thing in the world and attachments are not versioned
posted by gfroese at 9:32 AM on January 22, 2007

Confluence is "Enterprise Wiki Software"; from my little experience with it, I know the security is quite a bit better than MediaWiki (i.e., it has some). I haven't tried to set up any really sophisticated rules about editing permissions, however.
posted by rkent at 9:50 AM on January 22, 2007

I'm going to second rkent's suggestion for Confluence. We rolled it out for our entire I.T. Department (15ppl). If you get into issue/project tracking further on, the creators (Atlassian) of Confluence make a nice integration to a system called Jira.
posted by ronmexico at 9:58 AM on January 22, 2007

Seconding the recommendation of iManage. I've worked as an admin in big law firms for six years now and that is pretty much the gold standard.
posted by jason's_planet at 10:06 AM on January 22, 2007

Oh, and if you need to track changes in the documents, you should use
Deltaview which is also the gold standard for that sort of thing.

Whatever you do, don't use that shitty Track Changes feature in Word.
posted by jason's_planet at 10:15 AM on January 22, 2007

Dokuwiki works for me. Better yet is that the permissions are in text-based files, so it's possible to write scripts that create the new user and give them a password and default group permissions from some other IT user-management tools that you may use.
posted by SpecialK at 10:26 AM on January 22, 2007

We also use iManage. It works fine, but recently I had a project where one document was being written by 3 people (and their assistants). Becuase people refused to be paitent and wait until no one else was working in the document, some changes were lost, or we ended up with odd versions hanging out there. So beware of that. (This is an issue with people, not so much the software, but I'm sure you've got people to deal with).

We also use Deltaview to track comparisons. I don't know how to make it work, but when my assistant uses it for me, it works great.
posted by dpx.mfx at 10:43 AM on January 22, 2007

We have been using a built-in document management feature in Lotus Notes, along with the track changes features in Word Docs.

It's awful.

I didn't create our current system, but I'm on a committee to fix it.
posted by owl at 11:15 AM on January 22, 2007