Document Managment type program

[cable]

I've been given a system/process that needs updating and I'm a little unsure about the best route.

The system needs to track the process of developing promo leaflets, through out the different revisions. It needs to store all the revisions and associated docs for at least 6 years, and some indefinitely.

As a rough estimate there could be around 18k promo's a year, on average the promo has around 150 pages, ie ~3mill docs!

Obviously thats alot Speaking to people one of them suggested a document management packadge. Now I've been googling around, and I'm not sure if they are suitable! Although there is a lot of documents I don't need to do much with them, cept store where they are. I don't need to full text search them, I don't need to annotate or anything, I don't really need a complicated index either. Though one thing I guess an off the shelve packadge would give is compression and also a single combined viewer. So we would be paying for a packadge that we only use a small part of!

Currently I'm thinking of a SQL backend (which can cope with a 16mill row table can't it?), an Access frontend and some disk space

The reason for the Access (97 for now, will be going to 2002 within 18months) frontend is so I could use its filter by form facility, which I would have to do my self if I used something else.

Anybody have any comments?

 

[FoFa]

This is doable in Access, Sql might even be better. What we have done and found is to store a reference to the document inquestion. And just store the document in it's own form on a server somewhere. Storeing BLOB's always seems problamatic in a DB, but can be done. Storeing a reference works great however. We usually use a commondialog routine to allow the std. window OPEN/SAVE routines, and use a PARM table to store each users preferences (like where do I store MY documents) so it can default for them the next time. Just my 2 cents worth.

 

[cable]

what's a BLOB?

But yea a table which contains the reference to the location will be all thats needed.

I can do the organization of the physical location on the server (the users in this case wont care)

 

[FoFa]

BLOB = Binary Large OBject
basically a way to store none text type data like an .EXE or .GIF or .JPG or .DOC stuff like that in a field within a database. Today they are called different things depending on the DB engine, but are all basically the same from a users perspective.