ISO 9001-Compliant Document Control? 152
SmoothBreaker writes "Coming into a new company, I have been tasked with sourcing Document Control software to meet ISO 9001 standards. From everything I can find, ISO places no requirements on the software itself, aside from maintaining control of documentation and process. This was discussed eleven years ago. I'd like software that allows intuitive use for our less savvy users, and in a perfect world, graphical access to previous revisions of a document. I've used Microsoft's SharePoint, which the higher-ups like simply because it's Microsoft, but thankfully they trust their Tech Department to find the cream of the crop. What experience do you have with this kind of software, what would you recommend using, and what should I avoid?"
Re:I'm going to get flamed all to hell for this... (Score:5, Insightful)
ten minutes in, and I'm already modded down for saying I've been satisfied with a MS product... typical
Re:Compressed files with timestamps (Score:3, Insightful)
Avoid tainted assignments. (Score:5, Insightful)
"what should I avoid?" You should avoid taking on politically dangerous and thankless tasks that make no contribution to the bottom line as your first assignment at a new company. Seriously, the tech issues here are secondary. First, figure out the politics. Next, make sure your second assignment contributes to the company's bottom line. Sorry to sound like a grumpy old fart here, but hey, I'm a grumpy gray-beard that has seen this movie before and I don't like the ending.
Re:What ISO 9001 is (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm going to get flamed all to hell for this... (Score:4, Insightful)
They care that it works with the corporate standard which is IE6.
Fixed that for you. Sigh! What a sad world we live in.
Define your requirements (Score:3, Insightful)
Since 9001 doesn't really define anything in terms of requirements you'll probably want to spend some time putting together what it is your organization wants to do with this content. Does your organization need/want a content management system? You're referencing revisioning on documents, so I'm guessing yes. Is this going to be a one off for the engineering/manufacturing folks? You could so something like this in subversion and have reasonably simple versioning of your documents. A wiki model works if you're just trying to do knowledge capture but I'm guessing you've got structured documents you need to manage. If you've got people who are fairly technical and can handle the caveats that come with something like that it's cheap and easy. However, these types of implementations frequently turn into folks in marketing or somewhere else saying "well we have FOO over in engineering we can probably use it too", next thing you know you've got the whole company using something that was kind of cobbled together for one group. Sounds like you've already got SharePoint, it's usable but I'm not a big fan of it as a content management system. Works decently as a collaboration platform. I haven't seen their latest stuff and I know they're trying to make moves in that direction so it might be better, but at last view I was underwhelmed. It's very platform specific, the search functionality was poor, it was difficult or impossible to get a good metadata model together and security was goofy.
Try and look towards the future and see if your organization is going to need to take it up a notch in their content management needs. How complex is your security model going to be? How much content are you expecting to manage? Are you going to want a full text search capable system or would a metadata search be good enough? Think about a metadata model for your organization, then research the topic and rethink it. A good or bad metadata model can completely change the fate of a content management system implementation.
What I've seen of Alfresco I like, it's free software so if you're budget constrained or just value that type of thing you've got that going for you. Someone else mentioned Knowledge Tree for a FOSS product, I haven't touched that so I can't comment. If you're going to go commercial I really think Oracle has a great product with their UCM platform (used to work there), but it's gotten god awful expensive and they suck as a company to deal with. Documentum seems like a massive resource hog and maintenance intensive from what I've discussed with people who've done work with it. I had an install of TRIM under my care at a previous gig, HP owns them now, and that had some quirks but was generally good. If you're focusing on records management capabilities this probably deserves a closer look as that's what they kinda specialize in. OpenText is pretty highly regarded, but I haven't touched it or known anyone directly who has.
Re:What ISO 9001 is (Score:5, Insightful)
But the ISO 9001 standards aren't fixed. Basically you document what you are going to do, show that you've trained your staff to follow the process and show that the staff are following that process. You can easily do 9001 document control standards with a pen and a filing cabinet. Yes, there are some specific requirements: you must define a way to show that the currently accessible document is the most current one, etc. But 9001 doesn't require you do it any specific way.
In fact, if you simply buy a piece of software and say, "The software enforces the process" a good auditor (hah!) will fail you. The whole point of 9001 is to document a process, train your staff to follow it, and show that you are following it. You can buy a canned process, train your staff in that process, have tools to help you, show that your are following that process. You will pass 9001. But you will have a fucked up process because it almost certainly won't follow your company's natural workflow.
I suspect this is why the parent suggests that maybe looking for a tool rather than working on the process is a bad idea.
* About the "hah!" comment: I don't believe there exist good 9001 auditors. Or rather, if they exist, they don't work much. It is in a company's best interest to hire incompetent auditors. That way they pass the audit. I say that having done the job myself once a long time ago :-P
Re:Avoid tainted assignments. (Score:2, Insightful)
"what should I avoid?" You should avoid taking on politically dangerous and thankless tasks that make no contribution to the bottom line as your first assignment at a new company. Seriously, the tech issues here are secondary. First, figure out the politics. Next, make sure your second assignment contributes to the company's bottom line. Sorry to sound like a grumpy old fart here, but hey, I'm a grumpy gray-beard that has seen this movie before and I don't like the ending.
+1 on this.
My wife started in a new job a year ago and was handed the responsibility for a project that was to build a QA system and was named after the database software that had been randomly purchased by the previous project manager (now fired). Not surprisingly, a year later the politics are now apparent, and my wife hates her job. I can only say: Take dbc's advice.
Re:Nuxeo (Score:2, Insightful)
Mod parent up.