OpenKM: Document Mgmt the Open Source way
OpenKM is an open soure and free solution for electronic document management that provides you a lower cost alternative to other paid EDM solution. A proprietary version of OpenKM is also available which have all the features of the OpenKM community edition like professional support, webdav integration, workflow, preconfigured OCR, etc. The dashboard of this EDM software provides you very extensive details about what is going around. For example, it shows you all the recently checkout documents, last uploaded and downloaded documents, subscribed document and folders, etc. The installation of this platform independent solution is easy, but you need to make sure that you have installed the correct version of JDK on your system. We have provided OpenKM with this month's DVD , just install JDK by executing the following command under Debian or download the appropriate file from Sun JDK website.

The Statistics/ Report viewer in OWL gives you the option to generate customized reports such as, who uploaded which document.

# aptitude install sun-java5-jdk

Next unzip the zipped OpenKM file and run the following command to start OpenKM.

# OpenKM-3.0-RC1_JBoss-4.2.2.GA/bin/run.sh

Now as the OpenKM server is started, open its web based console on any client machine by typing out the following line in the address bar.

http://:8080/

Login in using username and password as 'admin', on the right side you can see the entire folder list, and on the left side all the file in a particular directory is listed along with details like size, update date, author, etc. For viewing the dashboard, click on the 'Dashboard' link on the upper right corner of the page. OpenKM lets you view video and image online i.e. without downloading the file to your desktop. For this, navigate to the file which you want to view, right click on the file and click on the 'image viewer' option in case the file is of image type or play if it is a video file. For adding document, you can find option under the file menu, through which you can download document as PDF, send as links and export as zip files. The last two options send as links and export as zip helps a lot in saving or rather lowering your bandwidth usage of your organization. Under the 'history' tab, you can view all the details like who uploaded, downloaded, and modified the file and also on which date.

Free Document Mgmt for your Intranet with Owl

The SharePoint 2000 server also provides you calendaring. This option helps in organizing your events and share among different users easily.

If you are looking for fast deployment of some document management solution for your intranet and that too for free, then Owl can be the best. It is especially meant for publishing different types of documents onto the intranet, so that people within your organization can have fast and easy access to them. It is available in two different flavours; first is Owl Ultralight which is just for managing document which doesn't need any backend database. Whereas in case of the second, 'Owl' gives you multi user environment, manage group, notification, customizable user interface and much more. For installation, you need to provide the database username and password along with the database name in the configuration file found in 'conf' folder. Once this is done, you need to import mysql-tables.sql into your database to create tables (use phpmyadmin for this process). Once the tables are created, access the login page by typing out following on the web browser; http:///owl , and after that providing username and password as admin. Now let us see how you can you configure Owl DM solution to send notification or alert to the users. For this, login with administrator privilege, navigate to the 'Site feature' menu and then scroll to the 'Owl system e-mail setting' section. Then check the 'Use SMTP mailing method' option, define SMTP port as 25, define maximum attachment size, provide the address of SMTP server that you will be using for sending mails. Provide the sender address at 'From Address' text box and SMTP username and password for authentication. Provide a subject for the outgoing mail and also mention the reply address which will be used by users to send any feedback or comments. Once all these things are done, click on the 'Change' button provided at the bottom of the page.