Document Management

Where I work, we are aiming to use TWiki attachments to store essentially all process deliverables in our new Quality-driven intranet structure (you click down through a process, using a non-TWiki website, and get to a TWiki page that is nothing but attachments). TWiki's ability to version attachments is quite important here.

This will be quite important to uptake of TWiki, so I'm also planning to use a modified UserCookiePlugin to solve GettingTheUsernameWrong and ForgettingPasswords without having to re-host TWiki on Windows.

I'd be interested in discussion on how to do this sort of simple DocumentManagement, from anyone who has done a similar structured doc management system (I hear that one TWiki site replaced Documentum...) Even if you are just thinking about this, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

-- RichardDonkin - 02 May 2002

At work we replaced a Documentum system which was used for IT documents with TWiki, although it's only used in retreival (archive) mode. It was because of this that I added version control for attachments to TWiki.

-- JohnTalintyre - 02 May 2002

At my daytime job we use TWiki for document management, this is alongside Interwoven ( http://www.interwoven.com ), a commercial document management system. TWiki is mainly used for internal collaboration and documentation, e.g. as a repository for engineering projects; whereas the commercial system is used to manage part of the external web site.

Also, eRoom ( http://www.eroom.com/ ) was in use by a larger company we acquired. It was discontinued after the merger and replaced by TWiki.

Log in is not a problem because we authenticate against the Unix login, and all employees do have one. We defined many TWikiGroups, and have fine grained access control over 85 webs.

Many TWiki webs are open to all employees; some engineering webs have a view restriction, mainly to keep the sales front from from selling stuff that "ain't thar". Some official webs are maintained by a few webmasters, those webs have a read-only skin with no edit link.

What is missing in TWiki compared to a commercial document management system is a sign-off process for attached documents. This can be simulated by pointing to a specific version of an attached document.

-- PeterThoeny - 05 May 2002

Peter, you mention that you use TWiki alongside Interwoven. Are the two systems linked, or separate? We're looking into using TWiki for project and document management, but we want a central repository for all documents.

-- WesPerdue - 23 Oct 2004

Wes, FYI, when I was with Motorola we used TWiki to manage FrameMaker documents held in a ClearCase document repository. IMHO this created large amounts of unnecessary grief. We should have scrapped FM, moved the documents to TWiki topics, and built a ClearCase store interface module for TWiki. KISS.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 23 Oct 2004

So, is it best to save each document in a separate topic for easy searching or categorized sets of documents where one topic is used for one category of docs? How do you guys do it?

-- ChristianChuFook - 07 Nov 2004

personally i prefer one managed document per TWikiTopic, but then I was migrating the documents into TWikiTopics (rather than as attachments). but it really depends on where you are trying to go in the end.

-- SvenDowideit - 08 Nov 2004