Would you be willing to express your opinion on IFS Document Managament here in the Community?

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Mathias Dahl
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@TERKRTI 

Hi Kristian,

This post is not really about questions and comments about Docman. It’s purpose was to check if IFS Community would be a good place to ask customers like you questions :)

I will reply to your questions, but the next time it would be great if you could just post a new question in this forum.

Does IFS have any plans to support more detailed control of document placement in IFS document management? Today, a file location can be set by document class, but implementing further control to keep documents in selected locations based on user/user location/user company could help compliance towards various legal requirements (EAR, ITAR, GDPR).

There are no such plans at the moment, no. You can create an idea for that in the ideas section of IFS Community if you like. Right now, in IFS Cloud 22R1, we have the same options as before, plus support for the new IFS Cloud File Storage service which allows us, to begin with, to store documents in Azure Storage. That is probably not for you though, since I suspect you rather want “local” storage (which will come as an option later on).

Going forward we want to get rid of the existing document repository concept in Docman and let IFS Cloud File Storage handle it all. If and when we do that, my view is that it needs to be at least as configurable as the Docman repo concept is today. Your question above is very valuable when discussing that.

In Document Basic->History Settings we could wish to be able to track who has opened a file.

You can already do this, since several releases back :) Read up and the File Operation log (which also exists as a form) and/or SOX/Sarbanes Oxley support in the documentation and you will see what it is about.

/Mathias

 

/Mathias
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Hi @Mathias Dahl 

I’ll do that. I came across your post after having just discussed those two topics with a colleague, so I couldn’t resist to ask :) 

Thanks for your reply! Consider this an elaborate like :)

BR Kristian

Mathias Dahl
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Hehe, thanks! :)

Whenever you have a question, just follow the link below and then create Start a new topic at the top of the page:

https://community.ifs.com/document-management-docman-248

 

/Mathias
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Hi Bjørn,

Thanks for your input. I agree on much of the above. There have not been any revolutionary changes to Docman for some time now. Still, we're tweaking it, slowly and have recently done a huge platform change where we had to rewrite our whole file handling back-end and invent that Aurena Agent thing. Not a small feat, let me tell you that. From a functional standpoint however, things are pretty much the same...

I agree that the object connections are one of the strongest points that we have. And it's a generally capable DMS that supports a full spectrum of use cases, from very light use (users who only see the attachment panel) to advanced use of all sorts of crazy features we have in there.

And yes, we have got quite a bit of questions about "collaboration" and how Docman can support project work with external parties. We're currently thinking if and how we could leverage MS Teams for this, in some way, and SharePoint. Another option is to extend our B2B offering in some way. We also want to add in some sort of support for external digital signatures (think: DocuSign).

When we have something ready in these areas, I'm sure you will hear about it :)

I have a few questions on the above:

Dynamic access it another example were functionality i lacking, though here it has been some development.

Can you elaborate on what this means? Is it about "external access" for collaboration, or is it about Docman's access rights? Or something else?

I know many also struggles with storage

Could you elaborate a bit on what this means, too?

In IFS Cloud 21R2 we have released IFS Cloud File Storage, a new file storage service which Docman uses as a new repository type. By using that, in this first release, you get access to Azure Blob Storage. I have a vague feeling that is not something you would be able to leverage though...

Thanks!
 

Hi Mathias.

I like your ideas of extending using Sharepoint and B2B, DocuSign similar support could also be good!

 

By dynamic access I mean e.g. through object connections, where access for document file is turned on and off depending on access to object. Ideally we should have been able to write our own SQL code here, which would take the access control to a totally new level, and for many companies reduce number of document classes they have today.

 

Issues with file storage is that DB is getting to large when all documents are stored in DB. Currently FTP and Share locations both miss possibilities of storage selection except Document Class. For us better control is a requirement based on replication to offshore units that must be sorted other ways if not in DB. As you can guess, I would again love possibility to enter a custom SQL query to decide location, as I don’t see it possible for you to span all customer requirements in any other way.

 

Kind regards,

Bjørn

PS, don’t be afraid to give me a call if you would like a deeper discussion or more details on how we are solving it. I can share more directly to you than to the general public. 

Bjørn T. Hetland
Roshan Shashendra
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Subscribed 😀.

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Hi @Mathias Dahl

Thanks for your prompt reply, as always.

Yes, I’m aware we can items as customizations. Our needs are often different than what standard can cover,  and changing faster and more dynamically than what is suitable for customizations, though I’m sure we could have closed some gaps.

My suggestion for SQL code was not to define the EDM storage, but to chose which of the already defined to use. An option I’ve heard many asking for, and that could work great for us as well, would have been separate database(s) to store documents, so that the rest of IFS could have been backed up/copied/restored much faster.

I don’t know the BPA (don’t think it’s available on App 10 that we have to use), but at first glance it seems to be a brilliant function that I look very much forward to get!

Kind regards, Bjørn

Bjørn T. Hetland

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