Externalizing document management
After pure data, binary documents are the second most important objects to keep safe in an information system, and they should be managed in their own application (please never serialize documents into a database: that might be the worst thing you can do as an architect/developer). Such applications are called electronic content management applications. Sometimes, content management systems are also used, but this naming often is associated with web content such as articles and pages. EDMs are usually used for handling PDF, Word, and Excel files, bitmaps associated with your business, and so on. They include metadata management, versioning, the capacity to virtually classify and reorder documents, and many other value-added, document-specific operations. In the following sections, we will explain our choice of an EDM implementation and show how we install it.
Choosing the right standard, not the right implementation
After all our talk about standards...
