Could anyone suggest a good document manager that would neatly integrate with my StrataFrame application?  Or, perhaps someone could suggest a good way of handling disparate documents from users (faxes, pdfs, spreadsheets, etc.) that I want to persist with various master records.

Thanks!
Bill

This isn't a quick fix kind of thing.  We wrote an entire document management system that supports scanning, PDFs, Word docs, images, audio, video, etc. and provides annotation markups to the imported media.  This is a large system in and of itself and is something that you just can't "plop" into an application since there are so many pieces.

There are, however, many 3rd party tools that can help you create this part of your application such as PDF rendering/writing/reading components and TWAIN classes to allow you to scan, etc.  We try to use as few 3rd party tools as possible, but if you have the need for scanning there are many 3rd party tools out there: Pegasus (http://www.pegasusimaging.com/), LeadTools (http://www.leadtools.com ), and Accusoft (http://www.accusoft.com/).  We used another company's tool for the TWAIN and PDF rendering (www.atalasoft.com  but will be using one of the aforementioned in the long-term due to some licensing related issues.

Thanks, Trent!

I suppose I could create a document table in SQL Server and store docs in there for each master record.  I do not have a major need for scanning, just pdfs, docs, xlss, jpgs and such.

Bill

Yeah, if you plan to store the documents inside of the database itself, be sure to create a VarBinary(MAX) field.  Also, per our experience, it is also best to create a child table that has nothing but a PK, foreign key to the parent, and the binary data field.  This makes it much easier to bring information back from the server without the media field.

Now that Pegasus has acquired Accusoft any opinions on what is the better choice? They all require runtime licenses but it wasn't clear to me if I could get away with one developer license to develop the scanning module of an application and still allow other developers to reference that module in their code without having their own developer license.

I've been trying to avoid developing my own scanning solution but the general purpose document imaging application that we are currently using really doesn't fit our business processes.

-Larry

I have done a decent amount with scanning and document handling over the years, in the past we stored just the path to the documents in the filesystem, more recently using SF we use a seperate table in the SQL Server as Trent said. Both work well and have advantages and disadvantages in my eyes, I dont think you can make a "bad" design choice here as easily as you might elsewhere. One piece of advice I do have is to make sure you limit the size of the documents, I had "a friend" that omitted the management of the file sizes allowed and he wasnt happy when he saw the size of his databases after only moderate use. Also if you are doing a smart client we have found much increased speeds with the documents in a binary field in the database versus file system storage, especially if using Enterprise server, but it was noticable without.

If you do go down the scanning road, we use Atalasoft for scanning and image handling and have been for the past 2 years, I am considering a change however as their licensing costs have increased a lot to the point that I had to change a recent project to remove all the scanning functionality and put it in a seperate project. I cant even have a reference to it or other developers cant compile. Sorta sucks, but besides that is has been a good product, 100% managed code, no runtime licensing, easy to deploy and backward compatible through even major version releases.

Hope that helps a little.

  

Keith Chisarik

It sounds like Atalasoft is a good product so it would seem it comes down to to what is more cost effetive, higher developer licensing costs with no run time licenses or lower developer cost with run time licenses. Since all of the software that my group developes is used in-house, I have to pay either way.

From the limited reasearch I've done so far, Accusoft sounds like a good choice among the other three but I'm a little apprrehensive sice they have been purchased by Pegasus and who knows what they will do with the product.

I can tell you that they will attach a license fee to every component. I use pegusus which is fine until I have to figure out the licensing cost. I have to call them each time to get a clear understanding.

Whoa!!

My two cents here, you are far better off going with Accusoft or Pegasus.  I had a conversation with the president of Pegasus a number of years ago when we were looking for some of these components and he was a very honorable person with a lot of integrity.  I also liked their products but at the time they were not full speed on .NET and we were requiring run-time royalty free which directed me elsewhere.  We will be moving off of Atalasoft the first chance we get and moving over that direction more than likely.

My major gripe with Atalasoft is their licensing.  I was the only developer using their product and created an assembly that our main application references.  On their 3.0 version, there were too many memory leaks and issues that we could never release the product, but the licensing was as said on their website (they changed their website after a number of converstaions with me).  So we had to wait and upgrade to their 4.0 version which was better on the memory leak side and cross-thread issues, so we moved ahead, fixed our product and were at this point "pregnant" with their product.  Due to other issues within their code, we had to upgrade to 5.0....this is where they hit us hard.  Through this process, they changed their licensing.  We had just finished the product using their tools and they changed the licensing to require any project that even references the assembly which contains a reference to their assembly require a developer license even though that developer doesn't even have Atalasoft loaded on their machine (it would prevent compilation).  They hit us for another $4000 just so we could compile.  So I would not recommend going this direction.

But again, that is just my two cents

Oh, did I mention that I had even helped them with their Microsoft Partner points, given them some ideas to prevent developers from being beat up on their licensing, and even retracted true (but hard to hear) statements on other forums where I had commented on their product just trying to build a relationship with them....and then they nailed us as soon as they had what they needed!  These people are not on my Christmas card list.

Thats crazy isn't it Trent, same experience I had. I was broadsided by this. I had to rip out all scanning and move it to a completely different solution that we now fire up externally from within the main application. I wasnt not going to pay the $4,000. I had to pay $1,500 just to get someone to talk to me so the new version would install properly in VS.

The products works well for us and I am "pregnant" as well but the licensing shenanigans was a real shame.

Keith Chisarik