Synergise IT

One area of Enterprise 2.0 that I haven’t really explored deeply into is document management. I spent a great deal of time over the last few days checking out various open source document managers and this is my review.

1) KnowledgeTree
This is my favourite. This is a standard document manager that is extremely simple to use. Check out the demo to know what I mean ease of use. There are sample data available for you to play around with.

Knowledgetree has all the standard functionality like check in/out, version control, transaction history and document ID (access the document directly). Special functionality include Microsoft office connector and drag and drop desktop access. One disadvantage is that the content within the documents are NOT searchable. This can be a driving factor why I would not use this product. Natasha from Knowledgetree corrected this error of mine and everyone, I am sorry… KnowledgeTree provides full text indexing on all Office 2003 & 2007 documents, PDF, HTML, Plain Text, Open Office, XML and Postscript Files. Thanks Natasha! =)

You can choose to host it inhouse and the system requirements are:
PHP 5.2.4 upwards
J2SE 5.0 (JRE 5.0)
Apache Web Server
Microsoft Internet Information Server

2) EPIWare
This is also another similar document manager with a just average UI. I feel that this is much harder to use as compared to KnowledgeTree and the UI is not as interactive. However, one big advantage is that the content within the documents are searchable. Disadvantage is that there is no document ID which will make communicating slightly harder.

EPIWare has a wiki included as well but seems pretty hard to use - I haven’t checked it out the wiki fully yet but these are my initial thoughts.

System requirements is really simple the standard Apache, PHP, MySQL

Try it here

3) Alfresco
This is not just a document manager but a pretty full on Enterprise Content Management software (not to be mixed up with CMS - they are two different things). It seems pretty powerful and relatively flexible.

These are the things that Alfresco does.
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
- Document Management
- Collaboration
- Records Management
- Knowledge Management
- Web Content Management
- Imaging

This is a pretty complicated and enterprise grade software. Clients includes American Stock Exchange, Electronic Arts, Harvard Business School Publishing and Activision.

System specification can be found here