In 2001, Stephen Lawrence, Jr., was looking for a document management application for his department at the University of California, Davis, to help with ISO 17025 compliance. “There really wasn’t much out there at the time, so I figured I would try to piece something together,” he says. Thus OpenDocMan was born.
OpenDocMan is a simple browser-based document management system designed to help organizations that need a centralized location to store their digital documents. It was written specifically to have the required features for the ISO 17025 standard for testing and calibration. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles in it to muck up the core features, Lawrence says, but one nice feature is an automated upgrade tool. When a new version comes out, admins just need to click on the appropriate upgrade link for their current version and the upgrade tool takes care of all the changes needed for all versions as far back as 1.0.
OpenDocMan lets you have a group of “approvers” that review each new file, and each edit to a file. Those in this group can approve or reject each change. The application uses document permission settings that allow fine-grained access control, so each individual user can have his own rights to a file, and each department can also have its own levels of access. The software also includes functions you can turn on to turn the URLs into a hash value, thus making them more secure, because end users can’t then edit a URL to access other files or pages.
You can add any file types to the list of allowed files in OpenDocMan’s config file, so you can configure the system to accept any document format your company needs. You can – and should – use comment and description fields when you add a new file to make it easier to search later on.
Most of the application was written in PHP and JavaScript using Vim, and more recently using Zend Studio. Version 1.2.5.5 came out this week. Lawrence says version v2.0, in the planning stages right now, is going to be a re-write to:
* Move to MVC design, possibly using Zend Framework or something similar
* Utilize templates for all HTML using Smarty
* Create a new default user interface theme and allow for third-party themes
* Migrate the existing JavaScript to use the jQuery library
* Add a database abstraction layer – possibly ADOdb
* Add an API system to allow for third-party modules to be written to expand the core features
Lawrence is happy to accept help from creative folks who might want to create a new logo or some new themes. “I could also use another PHP pro to help with the 2.0 re-write.” If you’d like to help, you can find him on the OpenDocMan forum.