I am working for a big company in the Oil & Gas industry and was hired to do Document Control. We are looking at purchasing a Document Mangement System, which will allow us to file drawings and documents electronically, and retrieve them with ease, create transmittals and such...
What is THE BEST system out there for this?? I am huge on organization and consistency, but also need something that is user friendly for those that will not be working with the system on a day to day basis....
also... needs to be a good system as we are going for ISO....
Sorry to say, there is no BEST system - all require some sort of compromise - be it cost, user friendliness, and system maintenance (Marc accurately terms it "administrate.")
See this post for some suggestions on Document Management System (Software):
Look here
Yeah, that's one link, but this
one probably gives a better overview
Good point. I have also seen browser based software that will ONLY work with Internet Explorer because it is reliant upon MickeySoft Active X.
One of the biggest problems I have found with 'big' software packages is often they are relatively complex to administrate. Note that I'm not talking about every day user experience, but actual administration.
The simpler your solution, the better. But again, there are many factors to consider. Have you written down your actual needs?
Oh, and don't let a sales person simply 'demo' the software on a PC they bring. Make them show you, or get a guarantee in writing, that it will run on the systems and network you have in place. I've seen many companies end up making significant unanticipated hardware and network upgrades when the software was installed on their system.
Marc makes good points here. I'm seeing better and better systems which are accessible world-wide via internet rather than being resident on an organization's own computers. The trick is the "software" is continually maintained by the software seller, but the data resides either on computers owned by the organization or by their customers, suppliers, and storage rented at server farms. A few clicks of a mouse to establish identity, and thus access rights, and the individual user can drill down through a menu to access any document he is entitled to and, conversely, be completely blocked from any he is NOT entitled to, no matter where in the world its computer is located as long as it is connected to the internet. This means a user could conceivably access documents on his own server, a customer's server, or a supplier's server simultaneously just by clicking through a menu. The menu actually is a "query engine" which parses the menu choices into machine language queries of the various databases, seeking out the individual meta tags associated with each document.
The mistake most companies make in adopting a system is "penny wise and pound foolish," concentrating on initial cost instead of net value in use. A good consultant can make the bosses with ink in their pens understand why they should go for net value in use.
Bottom line:
No easy "one size fits all" answer - system may have to be tailored, not just an off-the-shelf version and it is important to really consider the impact of dealing with "legacy documents" (ones created BEFORE the document management system is put in place.)