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stephand commented on Hermes: An open-source document management system   hashicorp.com/blog/introd... · Posted by u/shcheklein
AtlasBarfed · 3 years ago
Alfresco was supposed to be the OSS alternative to documentum/stellent/etc closed source systems.

It was basically a freemium model, which means that a complete OSS solution is out of reach.

This basically looks like the same thing. I guess Hashicorp is slightly better at OSS, but... I dunno.

A DMS needs:

1) storage (duh)

2) metadata

3) permissions enforcement

4) search / indexing

5) rendering to pdf and pdf signing services

6) workflow engine for document lifecycles, versioning, approvals, rendering

7) a bunch of virtual filesystem interfaces like CMIS, maybe JCR, webDAV, SFTP

8) a decent web client

9) a decent integration API

It's quite the laundry list. A "modern" one should probably be cloud-aware (so docs can be stored in cloud object stores, utilize interface with the various semi-document features of S3 or other object stores, etc.

IMO it should also be implemented perhaps as a non-cloud self-hosted option atop Cassandra or some other scheme with good global replication and scale.

Honestly I don't understand why a consortium of governments and businesses with high regulatory requirements don't simply get together and develop a common platform for this. They'd rather give billions of dollars to Documentum or Oracle. If they want support, SOMEONE will provide paid support, like Postgres

stephand · 3 years ago
Indeed this laundry list is a great description of the services that are needed to manage documents. There's probably one more to add to the list (document generation, i.e. starting from a template like a generic NDA or an employment offer and generating a new document by inserting data like company name, expiration date, etc, into the template). Since this thread talks a lot about how to provide these features on top of Google Drive and Google Docs, you can have a look at my company AODocs (www.aodocs.com) which provides a cloud-based Documentum/Alfresco/etc alternative, using Google Drive as the underlying file storage.

u/stephand

KarmaCake day1February 2, 2023View Original