Document Management - Moving File Repository

I think adding support for “basic” FTP, i.e. unencrypted, will not happen. Simply put, we are not allowing it because we want to fulfill certain “quality standards” (there are a lot of details that I don’t know well enough, and also don’t want to discuss here), which are very high in a cloud setting.

What we want to look into though is to use some sort of BLOB storage in the cloud, like Azure Blob Storage or similar. There are plans to do it, but I would not dare to say in which release such an option can come. I hope “soon” though… We have some customers who want to run the solution in the cloud and where they want to keep the database size down.

As of right now, the options are to NOT import all the type of documents you want to (for example images, video or audio might fill the database quickly, at least if the volumes are large) and manage them in some other way, or you could try some approach where you keep links to the files in IFS, and the links (URLs) will point to the location where the file really is. This works for simple viewing of documents, in many cases, but it is harder to “edit” such documents in a simple manner from IFS.

/Mathias

Make use of the inbuilt functionality to transfer between respository. This will amend all of the pointers for ant existing files.

As @Srikanth said, you lose the ability to search “inside” the checked in files if you keep the files outside the database. Another advantage is that, when you backup and restore Oracle, you also get the files in Docman included, and there is no risk of getting things out of sync. And, if you care about traceability (who accessed what document), you get almost 100% guarantee that you can track document usage if the documents are stored in the database. When keeping the files outside the database there is in theory always a risk that someone access the files without going through IFS.

Also, when you keep the files outside, and if you sometimes clone your PROD into TEST, there is a risk, if you don’t change the “pointers”, that users testing in TEST will overwrite production documents.

But yes, a growing database has its problems. How quickly it grows of course depends on what kind of files you check in. You can use a mixed approach though, and have some files on FTP and some in the database. And, as others have mentioned, you can also migrate from one repository to another if the size becomes a problem.

​So, if database size is not a problem, either because you don't check in that many documents, or many large documents, or because you have a backup and recovery strategy that can handle it, then database storage is the most functional, most secure, most convenient and most reliable option, in our view. These are some of the reasons why it is currently the only option in IFS Managed Cloud offering.

Agree with @david.harmer , ftp is the way to go, no loss of functionality.  We had the same problems with database bloat and backup length so made the move to ftp a couple of years ago.  IFS consultants and/or Partners should never have a customer setup the documents to go direct to the database, it is ok only until Doc Man is used prolifically.