DMS for Exchange

[Provogeek]

I have a customer who is going to be migrating to Exchange, and I need some help to locate an equivalent document management solution before I can start the real planning of this migration.

Customer is a lawfirm that currently uses GroupWise, and is highly dependent on the DMS as well as the shared folders built into GroupWise. As far as I know, Exchange does not offer a DMS feature, nor have I seen a shared folders option.

What I want to be able to provide this customer with is something that allows them to have a shared folder functionality that they can file both email messages in as well as documents. Both should leverage the drag and drop functionality of Windows. Being able to stay in the Outlook interface would be a huge plus.

Does anyone have some good suggestions?




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Brent Schmidt Senior Network Engineer
Keep IT Simple[/color red]

http://www.kiscc.com

Novell Platinum Partner Microsoft Gold Partner
VMWare Enterprise Partner Citrix Gold Partner

 

[58sniper]

You're not going to get that without using Public Folders, which is generally (although not yet officially) considered a deprecated feature. Document management solutions for Exchange are generally SharePoint based, and that is the direction Microsoft usually recommends.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[ntinlin]

Make sure you look at the compliance/archiving side as well, as a law firm.
Presumably you'll already have some form of solution for that for groupwise.

I know Pat is a supporter of NearPoint rather than traditional journaling type archiving tools but not sure how that works against public folders with non-emailed items. Very well presumably?

 

[58sniper]

It works against everything, including PFs. Journaling doesn't get all data, so I generally won't recommend anything journaling related. I do like NearPoint for a couple of reasons. It doesn't require add-ons for the Outlook or OWA client; it can be accessed by by Outlook, OWA, and web enabled phones; it doesn't induce the added I/O that journaling based solutions use. And many, many, more. But I don't want to sound like a sales person (even though I once worked there) - I like the product as a good technical solution.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[Provogeek]

Archiving is not an issue, already have a solution recommendation in place for the impending migration. I am mostly seeking a DMS suggestion that closely resembles DMS use in GroupWise.

I have been looking at SharePoint, and have started fiddling around with it in my virtual lab. From what I have seen so far, it seems to be web based. Users upload documents, and users download documents all from a web page. This handles the check out and check in process that I need, but also adds an extra step the users will most definitely object to. They are accustomed to simply opening and closing of documents from with in the GroupWise client (check out and check in are transparent to the user).

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Brent Schmidt Senior Network Engineer
Keep IT Simple[/color red]

http://www.kiscc.com

Novell Platinum Partner Microsoft Gold Partner
VMWare Enterprise Partner Citrix Gold Partner

 

[58sniper]

You can open, close, and save documents from within Office apps. SharePoint libraries show up in the browse list.

SharePoint also allows for external access, and mobile access.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/