What is the best option

To collate and deliver information

[Lobo]

I have a fairly large client spread over a number of countries ..

The project is to collect information from all the relevent sources and / or extranet companies and deliver them to the relevent departments in a useable and easy to understand format...

This also includes a photo library and a video/CDrom database..

I was hoping to bounce that off you guys, to get an idea of what the best solution may be?

What would be the best process of collecting, sorting, updating and making accessible to different groups the information.

Making it easy and efficient for people or staff in other countries to supply/save that information.

Hope that's clear enough? any ideas / thoughts or contributions well appreciated..

[txbakers]

Sounds like a simple database driven intranet portal.

People can upload data, and access from anywhere in the world.

[Lobo]

Possibly, .. I'm thinking more producing reports on the fly, or improving communication, automatic redirection..

Best method of tagging images for search.

Best methods for flagging information that is for one particular person or department.

toying with a Wiki concept to allow staff or members to add information in directly.. or finding the best way to have the information sent correctly etc etc ..

Stuff like that mate..

Even using PHP and MySQL, the best way of structuring that database ..

Just a little more detail or options to go in with ..

[Lobo]

anyone got some good reading on information management , for instance?

[aspdaddy]

If I were you I would start by writing a couple of sentences that summarise the goals of the project and then identify the budget, timescale, maintenance requirements, and approx volumes of users,sites,images,transactions etc.

Until you have done this you cant really start to demo products or decide to write your own. Once you have the basic info on budget/time you can begin to write specific requirements and demo soime systems. There are plenty out CMSs that will do such as Portal Server. Make sure you have good objective criteria before demoing products or you will be distracted.

I would include stuff like support available, 3rd party tool support, access to existing users, total cost of ownership.

What would be the best process of collecting, sorting, updating and making accessible to different groups the information.

The best process is the one you cant afford! You probably want a system that supports integrated authentication for multiple domain trusts (if you want to keep anonomous www users out) and then let the sites nominate content editors. Also you ned support for integrated 3rd party reporting/export tools such as SQL Reporting Services or Crystal Reports. If the sites are large and only have DSL access then support for merge replication will help with response times and download speeds for video. Alternatively you could install an intelligent web cache on the edge of each site to prefetch and save content.

[Lobo]

That is good sound advice thanks..

You are correct in the budget assumption, I had looked at IBM Lotus family but realistically that may be too expensive not to mention trying to crack a nut with a sledge hammer...

I have found Knowledge Tree an open source document management system which could well work, as well as a Zope - Plone - Zwiki combination..

But in order to pitch these some of the points you make do have to be ironed out..