The importance of good document management

383 Figure 25.11: Substructure common to all projects Tip: Mapping In practice, Open ERP does not create directories or files for every resource. It actually manages this by mapping between Open ERP resources and the FTP interface This approach gives a lot of flexibility because there is no synchronizing to do, nor any redundancy. Changes in either the document management system or in Open ERP will automatically be reflected over in the other side. And system resources are obviously not used up by storing things twice. Once a new project has been defined in Open ERP, the system automatically creates a directory corresponding to the project in the right place in the document management system, and creates a structure type there for classifying documents.

25.9 Searching for documents

You have seen several methods of accessing documents quickly: • From attachments to an Open ERP resource, • Through FTP access to Open ERP, • Using the menu Document Management → Structure of Directories. But if you do not know where a specific document can be found, Open ERP also has a search tool integrated into its document management. To search for a file use the menu Knowledge → Documents → Documents. You get to a document search view that lets you search amongst all the attachments and all the documents in the FTP server. You can search for a file using various different criteria: • The attachment name, • The attachment type, 384 • The filename, • The owner of a file, • The directory that it is found in, • The indexed content Notice here an important advantage for an integrated document management system. Information such as which partner is associated with a document is automatically detected by Open ERP when the document has been stored in a directory. This information is never input by the user – it is detected automatically using the information about the resource when it is being saved as a file. But your search is not limited to these few fields. You can also search on the content in the files. Each file is automatically indexed by the system to give you a search engine rather like Google’s on the whole set of company documents. Note: Supported file formats The Open ERP document management system can index the following file formats: • TXT : text files, • PDF : PDF files, • SXW : Open Office V1 files, • ODT : Open Office V2 files, • DOC : Microsoft Word files. The other file formats are properly handled in the document management system but their content is not indexed automatically. This functionality is very significant. All you need to do is search for a partner name or an order number to automatically get all the documents that are referenced there. And you can use a fragment of text to find the document you need from within that subset.

25.10 Integration with emails

25.10.1 Using Outlook and Thunderbird

Figure 25.12: Sending an attachment that is in the document management system from Outlook

25.11 Working with users’ changes

To make the document management system’s use as unobtrusive as possible the system’s users should easily be able to store all the documents that they produce or receive from their customers and suppliers. So Open ERP supplies dashboards to help system users approve their acceptance of such documents.