Drupal for Documents

One place where Drupal is week is document management. However, after doing a little digging, I've decided that Drupal is actually not so bad as it might seem at first.

What is a document management system (DMS)? Basically, it's a repository that allows you to upload and organize documents. It should include the ability to store document revisions so that older revisions can be reviewed and restored. It needs a workflow system so that various authors and individuals can collaborate. It needs an orderly way of organizing and fetching documents. It needs a permissions system for managing who has access to the documents. It needs to be able to store metadata about documents (log entries, categories, authors, bibliography, price structures, or anything else that might be useful as a sticky note on the document).

Drupal does several of these out of the box. There's a module for everything else. However, there are still a number of minor shortfalls that keep it from being very robust as a DMS. All of these could be addressed pretty easily. Anyway, this is my summary of what needs to happen to make Drupal act as a capable DMS.

So, as is, this is how I would set it up:

1. Install Drupal.
2. Install the Pathauto module.
3. Install the Category module and turn on the menu and pathauto extensions.
4. Install the CCK module.
5. Turn on the built-in upload module.
6. Create a new CCK content type named "document". Include any metadata fields you need.
7. Configure the "document" content type allow file uploads and make sure that "Create a revision" is the default action. You probably want to uncheck "Promted to front page"
8. Create a new container (i.e., the category module's replacement for vocabulary) named "documents". This should be hierarchical with single parents (at least to start). Select the "document" content type to require a setting in this hierarchy.
9. Configure the Pathauto module so that document nodes are located at "Workflow plugin. I have not yet taken the opportunity to evaluate that module, so I don't know how it works or how well. Personally, I'd like to see a system like Relationship module---again, I have not evaluated this module and I'm not certain how well it works.

   There are a few weaknesses here.

   1. No Browser. There isn't a nice document browser. The category menu will work, but it's a bit of a kludge. It would be nice to have a configurable view that could show the hierarchy, show some metadata, etc. Preferably something with a nice AJAX interface.
   2. File Storage. This "DMS" will store document revisions just fine, but all of the documents will be stored in a single directory. This is probably fine until you start storying a few thousand entries. Unless your file system scales well in such a case (very few do), your storage is going to start slowing down. This isn't acceptable since a DMS should be able to store as many documents as you have disk space for without blinking.
   3. No search. What's a DMS without a decent search of the documents themselves? A likely solution to this would be to integrate a 3rd party search tool, like Nutch. There is, actually, a Nutch module for Drupal, so this might be another easy fix.
   4. No file typing. The system only vaguely understands different file types. It would be helpful if it really understood the difference between PDF and Word and OpenOffice documents and could perform specialized operations on each. Even just being able to identify them on a rudimentary level would be a start.
   
   

   Anyway, this is a pretty interesting problem. I find it very interesting that the various Drupal modules cooperate well enough together that this kind of enhancement is practically available as long as you glue everything together just so. I'm intrigued by the possibility of finding and using additional modules or improving or adding a new module to help fix the deficiencies I've noted here. I have a couple projects where it would be nice.

   Cheers.

   Update April 4, 2007: Please see visit the document management
   group on Drupal Groups to discuss this further.