Product Spotlight

circaDoc

The Document Management System for Large Files Over the Cloud

Document Management Systems are everywhere. Some of them fantastic, most of them mediocre. However, most of them share the same set of disadvantages:

• Files are assumed to be relatively small, and therefore downloaded often

• File previews are typically created on the client side -- downloading the file locally before generating a preview of a file you might have accidentally clicked on

• Your client paths and filenames sometimes must mimic the server paths and filenames, forcing you to use esoteric names like 'f00028359'

• File dependencies are not detected until loaded by your application -- meaning you have to mentally keep track of relationships between files and be sure to copy them locally

• Multiple sites are either not supported, or transferring files easily among sites is a manual endeavor

• The GUI is not customizable to make sense to different users

• Command line tools or COM interfaces are scarce, if any, and do not support a majority of the functionality of the GUI

• Administration consoles are subpar, or difficult to update large numbers of users simultaneously

circaDoc aims to rectify these problems

circaDoc is designed from the ground up with the following goals in mind:

• WAN-friendly

  Everything between client and server is done via HTTP and FTP. Bandwidth is treated as a valuable resource, meaning less traffic goes over your WAN

• Highly Configurable, Yet Robust

  Wherever a fork in the road exists, circaDoc strives to provide options instead of limitations. Not happy with the GUI look? Tweak the formatting. Need to change one property on thousands of users? Call one of the many command line tools or COM interfaces. Server getting hammered by a user? Throttle their share of bandwidth. Want to run custom code on certain file types? Write a .NET plug-in for our extensibility framework. And those barely scratch the surface.

• Bandwidth-friendly

  MD5 hashes are used to detect outdated files. Client caches are timestamped and recorded by the server so negotiation is minimized. A diff file can be served out for some file types instead of the file in its entirety. Proxy services may be purchased for even better performance for remote clients or sites.

• Archiving

  Archiving is not an afterthought -- we don't just blow away database records like some solutions do. The default Archival service allows you to move your older files off your expensive and ever-shrinking production servers to more economical storage locations...yet keep them searchable. If the optional Advanced Archiving service is purchased, the records can also be moved from your production SQL server to the Advanced Archiving server

• Network Shares -- No Problem

  Some files you need as part of your work are no doubt large, and rarely change. Most Document Management Systems will force you to copy these to your local drive. That is not always feasible in today's world of relatively small laptop drives and large files. Keeping several jpg files that are 1 GB+ just makes no sense when your app needs to reference them, but they rarely change and are in actuality rarely opened. circaDoc lets you control your client path separate from the server path (and separate from everybody else's client path), so you can select at the file level where files go.

Interested in trying circaDoc out and seeing if it's possibly a solution for your company's document management needs? Drop us a note and a sales rep will be in contact with you shortly.