Sharepoint vs. Livelink

mgauf

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May 9, 2008, 2:04:45 PM5/9/08

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I am in the process of researching a new document storage technology
for a client's policies and procedures. Both Sharepoint and Livelink
have been raised as options.

What I am looking for is a robust & expandable document storage/
retrival system that will accommodate both a menu-based navigation as
well as an advanced search engine mechanism.

The clients want top be able to upload, policies, procedures, work
instruct., and process flows so that they can be shared thru the
Intranet. The ability to thoroughly tag/mark the documents to ensure
the best possible search results is also a key. At this time, the
documents will be uploaded in pdf form.

Also, some of the admin. section must be user friendly in order to
deal with differing user levels of techno-knowledge, particularly if
more than 1 person will have upload permission.

I have reviewed demos of both from their respective websites,
performed a web search for comparisons of the 2, and talked to people
who swear by both, but I have NOT been able to take a test drive for
myself.

I am looking for critical, honest assessments, particularly for the
aforementioned purpose.

Thanks Mike

Peter Brooks

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May 10, 2008, 4:45:45 AM5/10/08

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I think that part of the problem with sharepoint is that it only runs
on dos systems (XP, Vista and so forth) so if you have anybody using
macs or other real machines it doesn't work.

That might help make up your mind.

Asher

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May 14, 2008, 2:23:23 AM5/14/08

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Mike,

Take a look at www.docpoint.biz for a stable and feature rich document
management solution.

We have been using it for the past 4 years. We started with 4 users,
and with time the system has spread to over 180.

It has tagging, OCR, automatic indexing, office integration, version
management, pdf conversion, and lots more.

Hope this helps.

Asher

Milind Joshi

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May 14, 2008, 1:51:39 PM5/14/08

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Mike,

It all depends.

Is your customer a Windows shop? Do they have investments in .Net? Do
they have internal resources who know Microsoft technologies well? Do
they use IIS, MS-Office, and MS-SQL server? Are they aware that
Sharepoint needs programming just to get it to do anything useful in
Document Management?

Same with livelink... focus on what the total costs and efforts are in
getting it to work for your customer.

If they are not strong with development and may not have the budget to
hire contractors, I would suggest buying a system that is an EDMS to
start with - there are any number of them out there... Alfresco,
FileDirector, and many, many more. We found that smaller organizations
focused on EDMS tend to have better and more feature-rich products
than products from behemoths, just because the focus is on EDMS and
not on "having a complete does-everything platform for the Fortune
2000".

The idea is to make a functional non-technical feature set that the
customers are going to use tomorrow, in 3 months, and 6 months.
Anything longer that that, even the customer wouldn't know what
features they need. Then, take each product and check if the feature
is supported by that product. Then drill down to budget and
architecture, finally choose the one that meets IT approval the most.

Hopefully this helps.

You may not find a head-to-head comparision on any 2 competing DMS
products, but if you end up doing one, I would appreciate getting a
copy of it.

Regards,
Milind Joshi
IDEA TECHNOSOFT INC.
http://www.ideatechnosoft.com