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Intranet Architecture - Best Practices

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by mvegas 1 view

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Our current Intranet hosts a collection of document types. (such as word, pdf, html, excel documents, etc.) There are hundreds of these docs available for over a dozen departments. We currently just have html pages with static links to these docs.

I would like to know what are some of the best practices for managing such data more efficiently, giving the following re-development requirements:

New Intranet shall have a Search feature to query all of the documents available for specified query parameters. I was thinking of storing specific data about each doc in a database and assigning it a document id. Other data would include a description, doc path, and maybe the department assigned to that doc. I would then query the db for the doc description and post results.

Is there a better practice or alternate solution that has already proven to be successful for you?

6 replies

by mvegas

Too vague, please elaborate. Is there a specific feature within SQL 2005 Server that you're thinking of?

by zaferus

The real question is: do you want a hardware or software document management solution? I am not a fan of Xerox, but they make a VERY good hardware document management NAS box that is easy to administrate and indexes everything quite nicely.

For software the question would be budget, and amount of data you need stored and indexed. As well as if a guaranteed search response time is your #1 concern.

Zaf

by onbliss

1) Create search-indexes for those documents. There are plenty of vendor tools available. "dtSearch" is one such. Read about it to see its features.

2) On your intranet website, the search functionality would use the search-indexes to display the summary of the documents and load the document upon request. Browsers can usually load the document types you have specified.

by kozimoto

You don't mention which platform, but if you are using IIS why not catalog all of your MS-Office files using Index Server and create a search page in ASP for your end-users? It works great for us here at Boeing, and you can install Adobe iFilter to make your PDF's searchable. You can even code the ASP page with a drop down to search specific physical folders that you could organize by department. You'll be a hero and save your company a bunch of money using a tool they most likely have installed.

The iFilter info can be found at http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=2611

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