Best way to implement a document server

Question

I want to implement a task managing service which will have some documents associated to it. Essentially it will have task and each task will have none or several documents (word, pdf,s mp3, images, whatever.) I thought of implementing it with two different servers one to manage the tasks and another too handle all the documents. For the tasks I want to use Postgre but for the other server I don't even know what I should be looking for or what solutions do exist. I don't necessarily need anything fancy like full text search just the ability to get a file easily and hopefully store some meta data about it. I would prefer something open source. So basically my question is how would you implement this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The file system should work fine for this. Depending on the file system, you can add the metadata to the files themselves or store them in the DB.

Answer 2

You might want to check out Alfresco http://www.alfresco.com/.

Answer 3

You didn't specify what platform you wanted this implemented on (though you did mention a preference for OS :-) ). But if windows is an option, how would you feel about sharepoint? If you look purely at the requirements you've given (tasks + documents + simple search). Sharepoint provides all of these features.

Just providing different options.

Answer 4

Check out Xerox's Docushare. Not cheap, but there' s a good chance it can be used to do what you want.

Answer 5

I've implemented Knowledge Tree Community Edition a few times. I've run it on Windows as well as on Linux servers and it works quite well. It even integrates into Active Directory (via LDAP) for authentication.

You can easily get plugins for full-text indexing of pretty much any document. It supports checkin/checkout, meta data, etc. I don't know about the tasks section of your request but seeing as how it's open source, and you can connect to a standard database, I don't see why you couldn't integrate a few hacks.