Magnolia had announced the release of Magnolia For Documents 1.0, a document-management-system (DMS) based on JSR-170. Magnolia for Documents enables you to easily manage documents through a web-based application, assign customizable meta-data and fine-grained access-rights to each document and store, publish, categorize and retrieve documents efficiently.

Key aspects of Magnolia for Documents include:

Replace Your Fileserver

Magnolia For Documents aims to replace today's typical file server as it is found throughout nearly all enterprises. The idea of a file server is to have a centralized place where documents are stored. While storing works well, retrieving the said documents is an entirely different matter: documents can only be stored in a strict hierarchy, only limited additional information is available about a document, no audit information is available (who changed what, when) and you generally cannot restore a previous version of your document in case you (or someone else) accidentally deleted an important part of your work.

Magnolia For Documents is poised to change how documents are used within an enterprise. Since all documents are automatically versioned, you can easily go back to any earlier version. A version history lets you view a change comment, author and date for each version stored. New versions can be added at any time, and version information is automatically updated.


Extensible Dublin Core Metadata

Meta data, i.e. information about the document like the author, related documents or a summary is based on the Dublin core standard, but easily extensible at runtime. A powerful search interface lets you restrict your search results to documents matching any combination of meta data and full text search. Need all documents you wrote in the last week related to your new product rollout? No problem. Every presentation that resulted in a deal? Simply add a new field to store your presentation outcome, and it will be available as a dropdown in your search interface. All documents written in your New York branch? You get the picture, its as easy as 1-2-3. Magnolia For Documents can easily be adapted to your specific needs, no programming necessary.

Controlled Access

Magnolia For Documents lets you grant access to documents based on roles that you can define yourself. This makes it very easy to make sure that everyone in your company has access to all the information they should have, while maintaining confidentiality where desired. Say your controller should only be able to write to the folder "confidential"? Simply define a role that restricts read and write access to this folder and assign it to your controllers. The sales department? Add a role "sales" that may write to the sales folder, and may read everything marketing has written.


Magnolia Web Content Integration

All documents can be accessed through the Magnolia Web Content management system. A DMS-query-component lets you retrieve documents based on any criteria you wish. This makes it extremely easy to always have the latest documentation an any subject available at your web site - be it intranet, extranet or internet. You want all your latest information regarding your new executive services available on your web site? Simply ask for all documents available in the format PDF, concerning said service (any maybe add status "available for general public" as a meta data field). If someone adds a new document or updates an existing one matching the search criteria, it will automatically show up at the web site.

Matching Your Needs

Magnolia For Documents is available in two separate editions, a "Community Edition" for small to mid-sized enterprises, and an "Enterprise Edition" for mid-sized to large companies. Magnolia For Documents is written in Java, which provides great enterprise integration capabilities, and runs on any standard J2EE server. It integrates smoothly into heterogeneous system environments and runs equally well on all major platforms.

Benefits of JSR-170 (Java Content Repository API)

JSR-170 is a revolutionary new industry standard for content-based applications that allows standardized content reuse between applications. This enables Magnolia For Documents to be used as a standalone solution or - as part of the Magnolia Suite - integrated with Magnolia For Web Content, the leading JSR-170 based content-management-system (CMS). Magnolia's JSR-170 capabilities mean that you can access content across the enterprise through a standardized interface, vastly simplifying content reuse and syndication.


Availability

Magnolia For Documents 1.0 is available immediately. A demo version can be downloaded from the magnolia.info website which is valid for 30 days. Commercial licenses can be bought online.

About the Magnolia Enterprise Content Suite

Free, open-source Magnolia For Web Content - essential part of the Magnolia Enterprise Content Suite - is the leading JSR-170-based content management system (ECM) in the world. It is deployed in several thousand installations worldwide, available in 15 languages and ranked amongst the top 200 out of 100'000 projects listed on sourceforge, the worlds leading open source development repository.

Somebody please explain why we needed a standard for this type of application?

Somebody please explain why we needed a standard for this type of application?

The standard is probably mainly important for the API to access the CMS. This makes is relatively easy to allow for providers of portal products, store software and the like to access a cms repository. So the cms provider does not need to implement for , say BEAs or IBMs SPIs anymore.

This looks useful, anyone know of other similiar open source document management systems?

http://www.alfresco.org

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

Alfresco looks really cool and fresh.
I think I'd use something like this for next content management project?

Anyone having real experience with it (or whatever it was called before)?
How does it seem redarding quality/stability?

You should have a try at Magnolia, it's far more polished and tested than Alfresco.

You should have a try at Magnolia, it's far more polished and tested than Alfresco.

Not sure about this, simply because I had a demo of Alfresco at JBWorld recently. Also, keep in mind, Alfresco is OS and has no licensing cost associated with it.

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo

Not sure about this, simply because I had a demo of Alfresco at JBWorld recently.

Ah .. didn't know that alfresco is jboss, simply because it sounds like :-)

Not sure about this, simply because I had a demo of Alfresco at JBWorld recently.

Ah .. didn't know that alfresco is jboss, simply because it sounds like :-)

Well, it isn't. Alfresco can run as a stand-alone web-application or as a portlet, the latter apparently being developed on JBoss Portal, but people have been able to use it on eXo platform too. It should be deployable on any JSR-168 compatible portal system soon.

Check out Alfresco at www.alfresco.org.