On Wed, 2003-07-02 at 08:20, Rock wrote:
>
> Everything related to a customer or potential customer is referenced by
> a customer number so I think that would simplify the solution. I want
> everything including but not limited to the following: Initial
> correspondence, proposals, art work, sales contracts, A/R documents,
> payments and all correspondences.
>
If these are all just documents, then it can be a "simple" matter of,
like someone said, setting up a directory structure and relying on
employee training and enforcing policy to make sure everyone follows the
structure.
Otherwise, I would honestly recommend looking at commercial workflow
products that support linux. You could probably roll your own, using a
certain amount of commercial and freeware tools, but this sort of thing
is one of the harder classes of problems to solve via computer, because
a lot of it is based on enforcing workflow and policy, and trying to
make people do things a certain way through software is not an easy
task, particularly when they're already used to doing things their way.
The companies that write this kind of software have spent a lot of money
on Industrial Psychologists doing lots research to define and solve the
problems in this space, or at least come up with "90%" solutions to
implement.
If you want to try to hack something together yourself, PostgreSQL and
MySQL both support limited "full text" retrieval if you're storing
documents in them. Oracle has much more advanced "full text" indexing
and retrieval that supports a much larger set of document types, along
with a host of other content-based retrieval methods such as audio and
video indexing and image-based retrieval systems.
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