Ever thought how important it is to be able to find your documents just when
you need them? Every computer user have probably struggled with this at some
time or another. Now, a geek from South Africa and his team is offering a
solution by way of KnowledgeTree.

What's that? Read on...

Neil Blakey-Milner (27) from Cape Town is a bit embarassed by the fancy
title of product manager he carries, at his job at the software development
firm Jam Warehouse. This firm mostly does custom development, using Java
previously and a lot of C# now. They do work for the enterprise level or
business sector, for the world of finance, insurance, FMCG (fast moving
consumer goods).

Says Neil: "There's a very small team that deals with [Free/Libre and] Open
Source software, and they wrote this document management system called
KnowledgeTree for the South African Medical Research Council (MRC)."

Incidentally, the MRC saw the software being written in FLOSS as a positive
thing, so that code in the product could be re-used and further worked on,
when needed to. Says Neil: "They got a lot of ideas from (a similar FLOSS
project known as) Owl, and for a while even used a bit of their code."

Basically KnowledgeTree allows you to take the documents generated by you or
your organisation -- things that you want to keep, and want to know what the
previous versions looked like. Or even who viewed the document, and remember
whom you emailed it to. It keeps a transaction history.

It's a web-based platform. It's written in PHP, and our aim in chosing PHP
was that it is the most common environment, and we wanted to get as many
people as users to use it. Now I'm working on version 3.0, the third major
version. It's hopefully going to be out in February.

Says Neil: "The major drive for that version was to allow people to
customise how things work. The other motive was to make it something that
isn't a troublesome thing to use. We aimed at things like simplyfying the
interface, providing more help-text. We've been aiming at people who don't
necessary know what document management is. So that means making it in a way
that they understand each step of the process. Also we wanted to make it
possible for the administrator to know what options the users are most
likely to use. To make sure they aren't overwhelmed with all the different
things they can do."

To begin at basics: why is document management actually useful?

As Neil puts it: "It means making sure all your documents of the
organisation, or documents you have, are in a single place. Or if a
particular computer has a problem, the documents are in a central location.
It's like a shared network drive. But where the real difference comes is in
terms of having previous versions of the document available all the time.
This enables you to track the version of the document. To be able to find
the document easily. Part of that involves assigning metadata, meaning
information about the document."

Is this really useful to non-profit organisations?

Neil argues that metadata is really useful for searching. You can say, for
instance, that you want to find a document that's part of a particular
project, and written by a specific person. This offer real power while
searching, he notes.

For non-profits and non-government organisations, this has a specific
relevance. Why? For many of them, documents are their main output. Their
work largely involves writing proposals and other forms of documentation.
This means not just traditional (word-processed) document files, but also
presentations, graphics, images, movies and other forms of media.

You can use it for what you have generated, or as a single place to find
information you found useful elsewhere, and to categorise it. Today, Neil
points out, many countries are requiring that organisations -- specially
corporations -- to have certain level of document history and documentation.

For medical companies there are additional requirements for the retention of
this data. But even if NGOs aren't using document management, you're setting
yourself up for losing something valuable -- your own output. In a
knowledge-based system, if you lose the knowledge, then it's gone.

Neil's background is interesting. At the Rhodes University in Grahamstown,
South Africa, his varsity had a computer users' club. More than getting
fancy email addresses and the chance to use a Free BSD system, it also
allowed students to get access to free web space.

Neils recalls: "One of this society's founding members was looking at Free
BSD when it was starting. They got involved with Free BSD and became part of
the core team. So I started using Free BSD quite a bit, and started getting
involved with various programs there. After doing a number of submissions
and commits (contributions by way of writing software), I left university and
tried to find real work. Just when I left university, they made me a
committer -- a developer -- of Free BSD."

In the world of work, Neil first went into administration. But he moved
closer to doing development work, and is now a "full developer".

Site to check http://ktdms.com