Help finding a Content Management/Document Management Solution

["Andrew Deutsch" <a -dot- deutsch -at- aramiska -dot- net>]

Hi,

Can anyone out there recommend a Content Management/Document Management
Solution?

Where I work
===============
We are an Internet Service Provider (ISP) not a documentation startup
company. Nevertheless, I have several 1000 pages documenting the set up of
our Internet Data Center and several more documenting our Hub which
processes the traffic from the internet backbone/IDC to the Customers via
the satellite and vice versa. These documents are in Office 2000 (Word,
Excel, Powerpoint) Acrobat PDF and Visio graphic formats. Most of the
documents will remain as they are for use as reference documentation. Others
will need to be actively updated by ourselves or subcontractors.

Users
=======
Our Engineers prefer to create their own documentation in HTML (Ascii
source) and use CVS for check-in/check-out control and version control. Our
Marketing and Product Management people create documents in Office 2000 Word
and there is no chance they will want to author in XML.

Documents I create
=====================
I create/update about 3 or 4 new documents a week such as User Guides,
Policy documents, Forms and Contracts also in Office 2000. I have a 100s of
pages company Process documents which need to be updated once a month or
every couple of months, however the updates would need to be done in MS
Office.

Library Accessibility/Revision Control/Single Source
========================================================
My most urgent need is to make the 1000s of reference pages viewable and
searchable from the web. In addition would like to implement an
organized/automatic document repository, automatic version control and
single source methodology. At the moment I use a simple directory structure
for our documents (MS Windows) and an multisheet MS Excel file with my own
manual document numbering system. At the moment, everyone can access the
Documentation directory on our file server to read and copy documents. There
is an MS Excel spreadsheet showing all the documents, their revision,
location and status.
If only a number of people will be using a Content Management tool, how will
the others (200 employees in the UK, Begium and The Netherlands) view our
documentation and version information as described above? We have an
Intranet which is accessible from all 3 sites - can I use that?

Results
===========
I was asked to find freeware, but I didn't get very far.

I think that I will have to integrate several items:
1) a document authoring, revision control and management tool
2) an intranet site with a search engine to make all the documentation
accessible and searchable by everyone.

I have been running in circles around XML and Content/Document management
for several years now forever evaluating tools.
I would like to get down to implement one!

I would be very grateful for any advice you may have.

Thanks
Andrew

Andrew Deutsch - Aramiska, Broadband Reality - Documentation
http://www.aramiska.com, t: +31 (0)499 365474; m: +31(0)6 5202 6971
De Waal 40, P.O. Box 989, 5600 AZ Eindhoven, The Netherlands




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