MyDMS

Welcome to the new home of MyDMS, hosted courtesy of SourceForge. The MyDMS project on SourceForge is a continuation of the work started by Markus Westphal (original site). For those not familiar with MyDMS, it is a web-based document management system, an application to store and organise all manner of electronic files. MyDMS includes support for version control, document meta-data, hierarchical folders, user management and access control.

For more information regarding MyDMS, please refer to the about page.

There are a couple of issues still outstanding with the installation of WordPress onto the SourceForge servers. Specifically, the registration process relies upon email to send out the initial password to newly signed up users, but SF does not allow outbound email from its servers. This means that new registrations will not receive their password. I will fix this soon so that users can register with the site (but it probably means displaying the initial password on-screen during the registration process).
Until this is fixed, the site is closed to new registrations.

Secondly, the Akismet anti-spam plugin is not accepting my WordPress API key, so in order to protect the site from comment spam, comments have been disabled for now. I’ll also be looking into alternatives in order to get the site operational as soon as possible.

A new beta has been released in preparation for 1.5.0, featuring dramatically improved search performance and faster page load times. This is a stable beta and we encourage users to try it out.

MyDMS 1.5.0b was in fact released on the 17th of May and has been available for download from SF.net. The release of 1.5.0b pre-dates the existence of this site, however, so it is being retrospecitvely announced here. Right. Done that.

[Release Notes] [Change Log]

There’s a small bug in the database creation / update code for the 1.5.0b release. An extra index is being created on the tblDocumentContent table that should not be there. It is simple to fix and should not affect the running of MyDMS, but it will cause warning messages to appear, at least in MySQL. The solution is simply to delete the index.

Read the rest of this entry »

Found a register_globals dependency that was missed during the initial code conversion. The file affected is op.ViewOnline.php, and a fix has now been applied to CVS. If you are affected by this bug, edit $MYDMSROOT/op/op.ViewOnline.php and change line 19 to read:

$arr = split(":", $_GET["request"]);

Alternatively, you can grab the latest code directly from CVS.

I now know why the Akismet spam filter that ships with WordPress isn’t working: the SourceForge firewall is somewhat restrictive and blocks all requests originating from the web servers. Should’ve read the setup guide a bit more thoroughly…

Which means I’m looking into alternatives. Should have something up and running by the weekend, at which point I’ll open up the site to registrations (for both of you ).

Just a quick note to say that the site is now accepting registrations. Comments have been enabled for registered users.

Play nice, now.

This was supposed to be a status update, but I got a bit carried away, so here’s something completely different: the tale of how I became involved as a developer for MyDMS.

My employer, Sun Microsystems, generously allows me to develop MyDMS as part of my day-to-day work. The improvements I have been making are directly related to features required for a project management platform that I maintain. My involvement with MyDMS is quite accidential: while evaluating options for a document storage and management platform, I stumbled across a small internal repository that embeds MyDMS. The person who had set it up had wanted a simple tool with a small footprint to manage project documentation. Unfortunately, usage had spiralled on the system and performance had degraded to the point where it was extremely painful to use.

I offered to look into the problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

The project is still active, and I am making progress with the document work
flow (I’ll post more about that later). I’m a little behind the original
schedule, which was to have a working beta by the 1st July 2006. It’s now
looking more like the 10th July before all the features are in place. I’m
pretty sure it will be worth the wait.

The development is running late because it is close to the end of Sun’s
financial quarter and we’re in crunch mode fulfilling orders for our customer
ready systems programme. Normally, I expect to split my time more or less
evenly between managing the delivery of compute grids (and other complex
solutions) and writing software to support our processes. But at the end of
quarter we quite often get a rush on orders which means that, for me, the
software development has to take a back seat. Busy, busy, busy.

The next release of MyDMS will feature a document work-flow for managing document review and approval. This is what I have been working on since the release of 1.5.0b a few weeks ago. I’m making reasonable progress — reviewers and approvers can be assigned when uploading a new document and the “View Folders” and “View Documents” pages now display status information. There are some significant changes to the database in order to support this new feature, which I’ll describe in a future post.

Related information: process flow diagram [PDF]

Read the rest of this entry »