Document Management for Free???

Obviously you can spend a small fortune on document management tools, but what we’ve realized over the last 12 months is that generally speaking you don’t need to spend a fortune, in fact, you don’t need to spend anything at all! A few months ago we started testing opensource document mangement tools, in the end we settled on a very simple system called Jackrabbit.

This is opensource code, covered by the Apache Licence. It is written entirely in Java and runs on any platform for which there is a Java VM available, in other words most places!!! If you’re a technology buff and would like to find out more about the technology please click here, but if, like me, you like to just know what its going to do and not worry too much about how…

…basically we’ve plugged it in as many places we can thing of – if you are creating a quote, an order, a customer, a product or an asset you can now upload documents directly into the document management system and they will be linked to the relevant object. If you email your quote to your customer you can choose which documents from your document management system you’d like to send with the email. We’ve added a global document feature in so you can add things like standard terms documents in relating to specific types of document eg Purchasing terms for capital purchase items and you can add these any time you mail. So where next?

• We think it would be useful to integrate this into our customer portal, so that customers can select documents if they need to view them.. so this might be the spec sheets for your assets, or your standard terms and conditions.
• Its been suggested that we could add in an automatic scan in function, so that for example we’d print your dispatch document with a bar code on it, the cusotmer would sign it, you’d scan it and it would automatically upload to the document management system and link to your order for proof of delivery. Then if the customer wanted to print a copy.. they’d go to the portal to do it.

We’d really like some more input from our customers about what you would find useful. Please let us know what you think.

Categories: New Feature , Technical