Not having JDE as a document manager tool for Attachments

[joealliegro]

Our company is trying to avoid using JDE as a document management tool.
We think that using JDE for large attachments can be a detrimental to performance and storage.
Besides, there are better document management tools out there and JDE was not designed for that.

Which solutions have you guys provided to your companies/clients on this topic?

We are thinking to allow only text as attachment and this includes the URL to a particular document type: .pdf, .doc, .xls, .csv, .cad, .jpg, etc.
The server in charge of that would have to be able to run all the related applications for the document types supported.

We have encounter several issues with this approach. One of the problems is security. How to transfer the security matrix from JDE to that tool?
The purpose is that these document can only be accessed via JDE by users. Direct access to the document manager server is for admin only.
Also, the link between URL in JDE and the current location for the server can never be changed/compromised by any transfer or purge, etc.

Please criticize this solution, weaknesses and strengths.

If you have a better model that has been implemented, I am all ears.

Thanks!

 

[Larry_Jones]

Joe,

I agree with you. JDE's Media Objects are not a good document management tool.

However, the ability to let users link file documents to JDE documents (Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, etc) and easily find/view those documents is quite powerful.

We here are a relatively low transaction volume company, however we do make extensive use of JDE's Media Objects. We have close to a million entries in our F00165 table, about 1/4 of those are file attachments (the rest are text).
Some scanned file documents (Quality records, packing lists, etc) are automatically attached to the related JDE documents via a custom script. Other are attached by users on the fly.

I do think there are packages that provide much better functionality and a couple also integrate into JDE. But they cost quite a bit of money and what we have works for us.

A couple questions for you:

When you say "large attachments can be detrimental to performance and storage" how large are you talking about? Our largest is just under 100Mb. Our largest OLE Media object folder is ~350Gb. So far we're not experiencing any performance issues - can you share where you're experiencing performance issues?