DocMan Decommissioned

Pauline Brown
Thursday 3 September 2015

Our new Document Manager replaces DocMan and has been available to approved users from 19 August 2015. It enables better integration with a number of other systems.  Also we are able to better control the ‘look and feel’ of the application to appeal to users.  RIP DOCMAN

Below is an extract from ITS Newsletter September 2002 when DocMan was launched:

“The Univesity’s Document Management System – DocMan – went live on 12 September 2002, for the staff and academic officers of the Faculty Office and Registry.

The DocMan system was the end result of the Regscan Project which began in February this year. The project team from IT Services, Alison Aiton, Natalie Ridge and Kevin Thomson, were given the remit of storing the undergraduate student files in a digital format, easily accessible to the appropriate personnel but also secure.

After the team got over the initial shock that they were going to have deal with an estimated 200,000 sheets of paper, they began an extensive consultation exercise in the Faculty Office, finding out how the different documents are used by the staff and academic officers. Through this, and a thorough analysis of the students’ documents, they were able to determine which documents actually needed to be digitised. As it had been decided that DocMan would have a web interface, a dummy version was devised for a ‘show and tell’ which prospective users were invited to attend, in order to make comments and suggest changes. At this stage the team submitted the ‘user requirements and functional             specification’ document to the users. When agreement was reached, software development began in earnest, with both the developers and ‘customers’ knowing exactly what the software capabilities should be.

Over the summer, IT Services and Faculty Office staff have been working extremely hard to meet the project deadline of the start of pre-sessional week. The documents have been rationalised and scanned, then indexed and stored in an Oracle database. New hardware –   a Panasonic KVS6050 Scanner, a Sun Fire 280R Server with Sun Storedge RAID Array and a Sun Netra Web Server – has been purchased, and commissioned by the Systems Group. The DocMan Web interface, written in the Python programming language, received a very positive response from the users. One of the major attributes of DocMan is that it uses roles to determine who has access to the different categories of documents. It is intuitive to use and has the look and feel of other locally-produced web-based applications. DocMan comes in two flavours: the general user interface where users can view the student documents and can add new documents and notes, and the system managers’ interface where they can control access and make amendments to document information but not to the documents themselves.”

 

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