Cracking The Vault (part 1) (
Page 1 of 12 )
Electronic documents are all well and good - but when you work on
them collaboratively, they can end up being more difficult to handle than
ordinary pieces of paper. Multiple versions, competing standards, access
permissions and revision history tracking are just some of the issues that
arise in a paperless office. This article discusses building and deploying
a document management system across your network - and also teaches
beginnners a little bit about designing Web-based applications with PHP and
mySQL in the process.Now, I don't know about you guys, but I don't think the paperless office is a
feasible idea. At least not without a lot more thinking, and a lot more
work.
I'm not being a pessimist here. I love the concept, and, just like
everyone else, my eyes light up at the thought of replacing the mounds of paper
piled up around my workstation with something a little more attractive (a Mr.
Potato Head, maybe?). And so, a while back, a few like-minded colleagues and
myself got together and decided to try and make a go of using only electronic
documents in our daily workday.
Obviously, we already use internal email
extensively, and swap documents over the network - however, since we are a
content production company, our work involves accepting and editing both digital
and printed material, and most people still prefer printing out an article or
report, as opposed to reading the digital version off a computer
screen.
After a very trying eight weeks, a couple of problems with this
approach became immediately visible in our weekly after-hours gripe session. And
so, a skunkworks project was born, a software development effort designed to
make it easier to manage collections of electronic documents in a networked
environment.
All this is, of course, by way of background. Over the next
few pages, I will be describing our unique requirements and the problems we
faced in greater detail, together with our proposed solution. And, after putting
in some thought, I will be guiding you through the process of building a
document management system, with the help of powerful open-source tools like PHP
and mySQL.
The goal here is two-fold: to introduce novice and
intermediate programmers to the process of designing and implementing a
Web-based application, and to PHP's session handling, file upload and database
capabilities; and to offer developers, administrators, corporate efficiency
experts and people with messy desks a possible solution to their
woes.
Lofty goals, you scoff? Well, let's see...
This article copyright Melonfire 2001. All rights
reserved.
