Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hi,

I run an office system on Lotus Notes for years.
This consists of two databases. One with teh contacts and one with the letters. It is possible to show all letters, contacts or nearly any combination of it.
The problem is - this system is no longer suported and I am looking for quite some time to find another way to manage my letters.

Does anyone know of a way to make something like that with open office or any other system?

Thanks for any infos and help!

best regards
Peter

Because your question is so very thin on details (for example, exactly what you mean by "letters"), I can't be sure, but I think what you're looking for might be a Personal Information Manager, or PIM. Please have a look at this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pe ... n_managers

Does that help?

Sorry, if I am difficult to understand.

A letter is a document, which one writes and it consists of the address and the message itself.
My old database stores the addresses in one table and the messages in another table. It is some kind of an early document managment system for new documents and not for transforming old dusty papers in little bits, like the ones I find today are.

Now what I am looking for is a system, which lets me insert or choose an address, asks me for an apropriate template for my document - letter, notice, fax, ... - let me write the message itself and stores it. When I come back in thirtyfive years and I want to know, whom I wrote to years ago, there is an search function to do so.

I never looked at the PIMs very much, because the system should be used by different people - so it is not personal, at least in my understanding.

Hope this makes my question easier to understand.

PIM's at least some of them can be shared. You should check them out.

I'm like 51% sure of this, but I think Notes is a simple relational database.
I don't think anything else can read it directly, but you might have a few options.
(a) Buy the new IBM version of Notes and hope it's backward compatible.
This is an XML format and there's a good chance OOBase can read it.
(b) Export the whole thing as comma delimited files, then any other database can read it with a little field formatting.
(c) I did a google search and at least one person found a way to get MS (outlook or access) to read Notes.
(d) You might be able to select all records then copy and paste to another database.
This works surprisingly well between Excel and Access.

I recommend DocumentLite. This document management system is simple and very useful.

By the way, it is free (open source).
The software has many useful functional opportunities.
Software tools are used to process, index, and store, distribute and dispose of the documents.

http://document-workflow-management.com

A Writer template together with your database table makes a serial letter. OOo Base is the bridge between your database and office documents. You can create a serial letter and choose only one address record from the database.

There is an extension
http://extensions.services.openoffice.o ... oconnector
to allow OpenOffice work with the Opensource Alfresco document management system
http://www.alfresco.com/

Perhaps this will meet your requirements.

Lotus Notes handles messaging, contact management and basic document management, and with Domino you get more advanced document handling and workflow management. Migrating to a different platform may be as expensive (at least in the short term) as upgrading to a Lotus version that's still supported.

That said, there are a few OS alternatives that may serve your needs. They generally come in community (free, no support except user community forums) and commercial (company supported) versions. I tried a couple (fairly superficially), and here are my impressions:

Alfresco (previously mentioned) looks promising, though I never tried it.

Citadel is a standalone product, with its own mail-server and database. It's ready for connection to your favourite mail washer (spamfilter) if you need that. It handles just about any kind of messaging you can think of (mail, forums, RSS newsfeeds, IM) and you can group services (in "rooms") as well as users. Good authorisation granularity and LDAP support.
On the downside: IIRC it has limited capability for document handling.

eGroupWare connects to your mail server, and needs a database preinstalled and ready to connect. It seems to have all the features of Citadel available, plus better document handling and a workflow engine. Didn't test the user authorisastion capabilities much, but I believe it was OK, and also that LDAP is available.
On the downside: Database and e-mail are not integrated, so you need to set those up first. Most services come as "installable modules", which requires a bit more work to get your system up and running. (That's not all bad, though. With a limited set of services, you have more of a lightweight system, which will probably be noticeable if you don't have the latest of hardware installed.)

It's been a while since I tried them out, so things may have changed, and my memory may not have kept the details perfectly. Bear that in mind when making a decision.

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Just tell me how can I manage?

Hello!

Can I manage my documents with the help of google drive or there is any other easy way to manage documents?

adam123 wrote:Hello!

Can I manage my documents with the help of google drive or there is any other easy way to manage documents?

That depends on what kind of management you need. Google is good at keeping single documents searchable by content, tags, category and other metadata.

I don't think you can easily get the kind of distribution management the OP of this thread outlines simply by using Google Drive or Google apps.

Describe your management tasks/requirements. If your system is inherently different from what is described in the first posts here, you should start a new forum thread/subject.