Practical Design and Implementation of Web-Based Document Management Systems

This paper presents the design and implementation of two web-based document management systems customized to serve the need of an international organization. The systems were designed to replace a paper-based process that gradually became unmanageable due to the increasingly large volume of texts and the need to distribute the documents to geographically remote locations. Features of the new systems include online recording of forms and texts, automatic email notifications and reminders, electronic authorization, database query functions, a secure mechanism for web access of documents for approval and future references. We describe the design principles and introduce the functional modules in each system. Besides technical issues, a paragraph is devoted to discuss the factor of user behaviors in the process. Both systems were implemented on Windows and UNIX platforms using open-source software such as PHP4, MySQL, Apache, etc. They have been functioning online for more than three years and have processed over 1,000 documents without any problem.