Futurile

OpenOffice has been gaining momentum in the wider world, but document management is an important piece of the jigsaw that's missing. Every office produces a mountain of documents that need to be managed, and commercial systems are often far too expensive. A Free Software alternative would be a great opportunity to make headway amongst small businesses.

There are lots of great revision control systems in the free software world, in fact there seems to be an overload of options. All the same problems that something like Subversion solves exist for knowledge workers who use Word and Excel. Just one example is that often the largest part of project co-ordination is document management. It's a constant stream of boring administration ensuring that team members can:

• Access the documents they need
• Have added all their project documents to the repository
• Are using the latest version of a document
• Integrate all their changes into the documentation

If you can't afford a proper document management system there aren't that many options. Wiki systems such as Writely and Jotspot can be useful but aren't a complete solution. It's difficult for users to learn a completely new program and they often resist. Wiki syntax is fine for straightforward document but can't fully replicate the capabilities of an office suite. And the users have to be on-line to edit the documents.

Searching today turned up lots of ways to publish office documents through a Content Management System (CMS). But I couldn't find anything that was designed for keeping documents synchronised and doing real revision control. There are some references in the OpenDocument applications wiki page, but none were very promising.

Ideally the user would use a document management system from within their office suite. So in OpenOffice when you checked in a new version of a document it would tell you if there was a later version and show you any conflicts. The downside to this sort of integration is that it limits the content types you're managing, and means that each office suites would have to implement a different system. Perhaps a system could be based on something like iFolder, and then plugins could be written for each individual application – potentially any application could provide a form of revision management.

I'm really surprised that there isn't anything out there for doing this. What do you think, would document management be a good free software application? Are there any that I missed? And why do you think there aren't any well known options?

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