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

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