Business-Suitable Document Authentication System? 130
Posted
by
timothy
from the sign-each-pigeon-as-it-flies-by dept.
from the sign-each-pigeon-as-it-flies-by dept.
ram.loss writes "The company I work for has decided to go paperless for all memos and internal correspondence. In addition to the central administration, the company has three more or less autonomous, physically separated divisions; that means we do not have a common IT infrastructure across all of them. Since I am the only resemblance we have to an IT department at my division, I have been commissioned with evaluating the available technology to manage and authenticate all correspondence, although it is not my area of expertise (I have a CompSci degree, but for many years have specialized in transportation modeling software). My initial thought was to use a document management system like Plone (this is the system I'm familiar with); from what I have read, that would take care of the management part, but what about authentication? We need each document to be signed, and a fully auditable system that keeps track of who signed what document, who received it and when. It also must take into account the handling of external correspondence in the future, where a recipient outside the company must have the means to return an authenticated document as a response. I'm aware that I'm leaving out a lot of details, like how the documents will be signed, the legal implications, etc., but for the time being I'm only interested in the experiences of the Slashdot crowd with such systems, and hopefully finding out enough information to hand over the matter to (or hiring) somebody more qualified, once I know what to look for. Has anybody out there used a similar system? Am I in way over my head?"
What? Are you trying to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like you have serious requirement overload. You need to go back and ask them what they ACTUALLY want.
For example, what is a "document?" Who is signing it? How long should the audit trail be? How many millions are you investing in this needlessly complex internal system?
What you're after simply doesn't exist and likely never will. Even if it did implementing it would be hugely expensive and time consuming.
What I don't understand is how this can replacing a paper system? Paper systems lack almost all of the features you requested... So clearly do do not NEED this stuff and thus we came around full circle to requirement overload.
Re:SharePoint (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if you're standardised on MS Office. They do not have a common IT infrastructure.
How big is the company (Score:1, Insightful)
If this is a large company, don't cheap out there. Budget the right amount of money and buy what's available and implement it properly. That means baking it in seamlessly with the business process
It's okay to do that y'know. Sometimes saving money costs the company too much money.
Re:Memos and Correspondence.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I crazy for suggesting email?
Yes. Email is great for certain document-management applications, particularly where you need everything time ordered, but it has a few key drawbacks:
* very poorly searchable (particularly if stuff is in PDF or images, as it's likely to be if it's correspondence coming from outside), which is a huge issue for some applications.
* no support for automatic workflow management.
Plone and the other suggestions here are all much better at these two than any system built on e-mail.
Re:What? Are you trying to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't agree more. As a comp.sci. major, you should be able to ask the questions of: What, why, where and who (and today probably also, how much).
You need to get a decent requirement spec going, and from then on choose the system you want. There's no need to spend more money and time on features or systems that wont be used. Buying a fully fledged EDHS would be nuts if you can make due with a common fileserver and an intranet bulletin board system. Also, you might want to look at the business you're supporting, maybe there's an industry standard that might be handy to keep up with if you suddenly need to cooperate with, buy or be bought by someone else in the industry.
Also, you'd want to mimic the current working processes as closely as possible. There's nothing more deadly to a project than employees unwilling to adapt to new systems. So make the system cater to their needs instead of making them having to do things differently. Include key personel in the implementation or descision process, so that they feel that their needs are being heard and met, so they will welcome the new system. Social engineering isn't just a skill for politicians, it's one for developers too ;)
Re:SharePoint (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't cheap out and try to put together some homebrew solution. Remember as Click and Clack the Tappit Brothers [cartalk.com] say, it's the cheap man/women who spends the most.
I am afraid...I see trouble ahead (Score:4, Insightful)
Since I am the only resemblance we have to an IT department at my division, I have been commissioned with evaluating the available technology to manage and authenticate all correspondence, although it is not my area of expertise (I have a CompSci degree, but for many years have specialized in transportation modeling software).
From what you say, I can conclude that your company's staffing is anaemic in the IT department. Because of this, I suggest that you abandon this project for the time being as you build up man power and expertise in IT. Hire more folks so that they can get to know the business logic and flow of information at your company then kick start this project.
Take a clue from Munich with its Linux migration efforts.
Bottom line: A drastic change in the way you work will create lots of headache for you given that as you say, "...Since I am the only resemblance we have to an IT department at my division...".
I worried for you, but wish you the best at the same time.
All Good Suggestions For the Most Part... (Score:4, Insightful)
...but everyone is ignoring the pink elephant in the room.
No common IT infrastructure? I'd tell them to attack that before implementing anything new company wide. Without a common IT infrastructure you'd have to get a poll for exactly what each division has (does each division have a common infrastructure, I hope so) and pray that each division has standardized on something whether it be *Nix, Windows, Mac or whatever. Once you have that, getting an electronic document handling system will be much easier as you'll have only to worry about file formats from one office suite (and possibly PDFs).
As for signing of documents, PDF is the only format that handles that internally, though I guess you could get people to get their own PGP keys, though I think the hassle would not be welcome.
To summarize: /.ers :p
1. Get company to implement standard IT infrastructure company wide
2. Get IT department to implement EDHS
3. ???
4. Profit! --- very important to companies, apparently less so to
Re:Lotus NotesDomino (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, notes immediately popped into mind because you can track when and where a document was as well as who did what to it. The problem with notes is that the domino management is yet another thing to learn and if you're not using it for email its another chunky client on the desktop.
Re:SharePoint (Score:4, Insightful)
Please, enlighten me why sharepoint costs $50,000? I have several customers who run it on a single server, that also has other duties (unless you have a very large number of users, sharepoint server uses little resources). You will need licensing of Office and Windows for every employee, but the majority of offices in the real world already have that. At the end of the day, sharepoint is just a web server, it does not need anything special from the hardware. So lets say 2 redundant servers, about 2.5k each. Licenses for server 2008, iirc around $700 each. If they are a Windows shop already (and if not, then sharepoint is a bad idea_ they already have CALs and office licenses for all their users, so that's not an issue. Lets say $1k for some sort of backup solution. So before labor, and there's a ton of competition in the sharepoint world so labor is fairly cheap, we are at what, $7400 in "dedicated hardware and licenses" for a solution that could probably serve a few thousand users quite well depending on the nature of how they use it. I'm assuming of course the actual documents are stored on a separate file server/SAN hardware already. Seeing how his whole division has no real IT staff, I doubt they even have that many users.
There's a lot of things not to like about Sharepoint, it's a proprietary solution with the usual problems proprietary solutions have. But it integrates quite well with Office and is easy enough to use and customize the secretary can figure it out. To be honest, I would probably not recommend Sharepoint for his situation simply because when amateurs try to maintain a Sharepoint installation things tend to go horribly wrong, mostly because the patches and upgrades can be a bit of a clusterfuck if you don't carefully follow the steps to prepare for them. Where you came up with $50,000, especially without even knowing the number of end users, is a mystery to me.
Re:Lotus NotesDomino (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the famous last words ought to be "but then he'd be using Lotus Notes". Having to use Lotus Notes is not a pleasant experience for anyone and I don't think you should increase the amount of misery in the world, which is what you'd be doing if they switched to notes.
Re:What? Are you trying to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a trap.
What your bosses want to do (go fully paperless, including all correspondence, contracts, worksheets...) is a very big project, that requires much thought, planning, management support, time, and money.
By asking you to do it on the cheap, your bosses show that they really don't understand what this is about, and when the whole thing blows, it will of course be your fault.
The one vital thing you must do is findexamples of companies of a comparable size / business that did it, with a broad idea of what it took it terms of money, time, manpower, glitches... Don't even touch the technical side, products... until you have those case studies. Pass them on to your bosses, and see if they want to go ahead.
As for getting a hold of such examples, try classmates, business partners, ask the bosses where they got the idea from, ask slashdot that question (instead of the technical one), ask potential providers for references (if you're an MS shop, MS may help)...