Please bear with me; I may have a hard time trying to explain myself fully...

Essentially, at work we are currently in the process of applying for ISO 9001 accreditation - (which if you don't know, is a stamp of quality assurance that some major architectural projects require of their consultants/consortia) - to achieve this we have had to tweak and refine (principally) our office protocol documents & file management - all of which now needs to be rigorously registered and controlled in manner to allow more efficient auditing.

Presently I am only involved at a level of critique – being one of the outspoken few who likes to pick at proposals made by higher powers, more because I’ll have to use these systems once their in place more than anything else. My main concern with the first proposals are that they rely heavily on archaic, clumsy, manually-driven formats – ie. simple, non-queriable (sp?) Excel spreadsheets for document control and lengthy Word documents who’s only navigation “feature” are a few hyperlinks, etc.

Fortunately though, the whole premise of being an ISO 9001 company is a pledge to continually improve the systems in place – so whilst it’s too late for our first pass at the review body (at the end of this month) I’m thinking of what to propose for the future.

After the long introduction, it’s quite an ambiguous question; what would you do / use?

For starters, I’ve already looked at building an access database to replace the excel document register (to allow us to query, generate reports, print lists, batch edit, manage receipts & sends etc) and have long thought an indexed pdf would be a better alternative for the master document…

But since yesterday I’ve been thinking a web-language-driven system might offer us better control of the innumerable segments of info we have to manage…

For example, is there a language/method where if:

Company name
Company address / contact details
Associates list
Staff list

were to change; one would only need to edit one point source of info, which would then immediately filter down through every document?

What of linked-to supplementary documents (ie. our Terms & Conditions, latest news etc) – could these all be standalone, unformatted .txt files (or fields in somewhere?) that get “pulled” in, formatted and presented as finalised document? I guess that might be easy enough through HTML & CSS… but what of querying abilities (search for project by name/number etc, search for policy #xxx01sa etc) – and direct linking / integration with related documents (such as .xls / .mdb document register above) – or could even something like that be worked into a web-browser frontend with a database of some kind running?

Any pointers or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Sharepoint's been suggested on my duplicate thread over on TA; but I've not got Silverlight at work to watch the site demo's to see if it's what we're after... but I've seen it mentioned by some of you lot before... any thoughts?

I was going to recommend Sharepoint for the management but it wouldn't allow bulk changes (e.g. changing the address on all docs at once) on documents.
With the search server installed you can check docs easily.

Also allows check in or check out

That's not good.

The other suggestion so far has been a web-browser frontend to an SQL database.... But I've no idea what that really might mean - despite my efforts to read up on it.

The only way I know of doing this, is using an EDRMS such as live link but the costs are mind boggling.

Each "document" is then made up of a series of XML sections or snippets and is only assembled when it is previewed or printed.

You'd also have to spend a significant amount of time setting your taxonomy up to ensure that it all hangs together.

Well that is basically what sharepoint is

A web front end of sql or mysql would work but it's a lot more development to make.

Don't you need to keep changes for ISO9001?

You could use sharepoint, upload master word templates and use them for new docs.
Or mailmerge out of sharepoint contacts.

Sharepoint is used on the Ferrari site

It sounds like a source with check in/out and some form of macro to update each doc from a set file for addresses etc

My first thought was SharePoint, followed by a professional document management system. Those will allow you to scan, store and index printed documents easily as well, but they are a fairly hefty investment for small businesses.