Document Management Systems

Business Application

Businesses all over the world are now turning to properly managed and organized electronic document management systems. However, the Internet technology available to host such systems often fall short of providing one of its basic needs and that is uploading capability. The internet is limited by bandwidth and uploading large files of more than 2Mb becomes a problem on hosted shared servers.

The 2Mb upload limit is almost standard on most websites using PHP based systems for instance. The controlling php.ini file has a limit setting which ranges from 2Mb, 8Mb,16Mb and 32Mb and most are set at the lowest of 2Mb. This is understandable for web hosting providers using shared servers. Any larger and it would reduce overall performance of the servers for all the other website owners using that same server.

If you are using a dedicated server then you may be able to change the upload capacity to what ever you wanted to as it is your server and performance issues will only be with yourself. However, users would still be restricted by their own local Internet access bandwidth.

Company Intranet Document Management

If you are hosting your documents management system on your local office servers using a LAN (local area network), then bandwidth may not be an issue and your system may not be restricted. However, if your company uses WAN (wide area network), as most large companies do, then network speed suddenly becomes an issue again as the remote offices network speed may be as little as 512Kb. This makes for potentially slow download and upload speeds and may also impede the company's main operating system which uses the same network.

What is the solution?

In my opinion there are a few potential solutions for Electronic Document Management Systems:- Blue are advantages / Red are disadvantages

1. Host your DMS on your local Intranet using LAN technology.

• This would be adequate and provide a reasonably secure environment in which to keep your system.
• Using Open Source software may be an option providing you can find commercial support for such software and keep it in house on a LAN or WAN intranet network. Security risk is increased significantly here if you use open source software on the open Internet even though there are ways to cloak such websites.
• Backup would probably occur naturally along with the company's other operating systems data.
• This solution may be ok for a small company based in one office but for larger companies with many offices this may not be the answer.

2. Host your DMS on an Extranet or Sub-domain

• This method is based around the intranet concept apart from the fact that it can be accessed via the Internet with your browser just like an ordinary website.
• Security has to be a serious consideration as this method may be open to malicious acts, so the use of FREE open source software is not advised here.

3. Host your DMS on an external dedicated server (an ordinary website).

• This may be the only answer for the larger company with many remote office locations. There are many benefits of using a third party web hosting service.
• Your company only has to provide resources for the management of the actual website system and not the hardware and backup.
• The cost of having your website hosted by a third party could be far less than the cost of providing all the necessary resources yourself locally. Your third party hosting company could provide all the support required to run a documents management system effectively and maintain the servers.
• Look into the company's backup facilities, are the backups kept offsite, do they archive data onto some sort of hardcopy media such as tape, CD or DVD?.
• Security of any system run over the open internet always has the potential for hacking and other malicious acts.

• There are website companies who offer this kind of service. One should investigate any such company thoroughly before committing themselves to using them.
• You must satisfy yourself that the services they provide offer speedy performance
• Make sure that they use the latest security technology
• Look into the company's backup facilities, are the backups kept offsite, do they archive data onto some sort of hardware media such as tape, CD or DVD?.
• All this is available at a cost of course.

Legal Requirements

One must remember that in the United Kingdom there are many legal requirements you must comply with if you are dealing with electonic data relating to people. The Data Protection Act of 1998 provides information about the management of personal data.

• Ability to upload documents quickly - This is usually governed by the the users available network connection speed. Over any kind of network, file size is the biggest issue.
• Fast system - A web based or intranet based system would need to be optimized for so that the content pages load quickly. Restricting the use of images in the application will reduce page loading times, if images are required, then making them very small will also reduce page loading times.
• Indexing - Ability to configure the systems indexing capability to maximize document find and retrieval.
• Version Control, (check in check out). - When a file is checked out by a user it can still be read but not updated until it has been checked back in again. Document versioning should be automated if possible.
• Document Search and Retrieval. - This needs to be easy to follow and make full use of the aforementioned indexing capabilities.
• Document Monitoring - Ability for users to monitor folders and files by selection to stay informed on updates additions, deletions and other document activities.
• Document Events Log - to record update actions on documents.
• User Control - Effective user and user group management structure.
• System logging - simple background logging facility to record system activity including user activities, logging in and out, failed login attempts etc.
• Login Lockout - most systems these days have some sort of user lockout mechanism. This will lock the user access after several failed login attempts. This discourages password probing.