THEORY AND PRACTICE

Ask Lowell: PDF Management

by Lowell Rapaport

We have a library of about 55,000 PDF documents and a sales force of about 550. We need a system to deliver this content to sales reps in a quick, transparent manner. Our sales reps need to be able to work offline to search their documents (4,000 documents per rep) and assemble multiple documents into packages that can then be printed, emailed or faxed to a customer. Can you point me in the right direction?

Don Coakley
Business Analyst,
The Berry Co., Dayton, OH

Your document volumes and user community sound small enough to take advantage of a low-cost document/content management system. Products such as Domino.Doc from Lotus (www.lotus.com) or SharePoint from Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) will give you the basics built on infrastructure you may already have in place.

Other low-cost options for content management include 80-20 DME from 80-20 Software (www.80-20.com), Bellevue, WA, and Basis from OpenText (www.opentext.com), Waterloo, Ontario.

If you're truly dealing almost exclusively with PDF files, you might also look into the Document Server from Adobe (www.adobe.com), San Jose, CA. This server converts PDF documents to browser-compatible formats like JPEG, GIF or HTML.