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Posted

Dear Folks,

I am probably getting ahead of myself as I'm just now getting the bugs worked out of a basic contact/client/staff/project management DB. However, I'm already dreaming of the next step. Please let me explain.

My office, part of a state agency, provides our clients (cities throughout the state) inexpensive graphical advice on architectural/planning/historic preservation issues. Most projects are done by a single employee, using a variety of graphics applications as well as some hand drawings.

Our method of storing the files, both when in progress and when completed, is not well organized. Currently, an employee will keep all work-in-progress files on his or her desktop and then we try to remember to save final versions to a single networked machine when we're done.

There are two issues we face with this method: timely backup and version control: we back up from a single machine to a portable drive for off-site storage and we rely on the employees to keep a clean directory without files like "projectx_final_version2_red."

What I'm getting to is that I'm wondering if we can add some sort of workflow management to our database. From what I have read the Troi plugin would allow management of files from within FM7. Even without the plugin, we could certainly show related documents in conatiner fields. But how do we make sure employees follow a strict protocol? For one thing can we set things up so that FM7 will keep a container field synnchronized with the contents of a watched folder? I suppose we could even force folks to create files in other apps from within FM7 so there would be a log of things, but this would get more cumbersome with scanned hand drawings.

I know I've laid a lot on you here. I haven't even asked many direct questions. I only hope that anyone who has dealt with similar issues can tell me how they confronted them.

Thanks for reading,

Evan

Posted

I created a fairly simple little document management file. The files were embedded in FileMaker as files, in a child table. If you wanted to work on one, you'd export it out to a shared folder (which would exist on both the host and client drives, so you could set up the export/import), then moved to the user's desktop (or a known folder location). The export would be a generic name, then renamed sequentially according to the parent record.

Then you could work on the file, save the changes, then reimport it, embedding as a file, into another child record. It still requires the user to click a button to get the file out, and put the modified version back in. But it's fairly painless.

I did this with AppleScript, but the same thing can be done with Troi File. I don't know exactly what the "shared" folder is on Windows, but I'm sure it's there. Also, either tool can get a list of files in a folder, if you want/need to some checking. You could also have a named folder for each person in the shared folder, where the files could also be stored.

This topic is 7180 days old. Please don't post here. Open a new topic instead.

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