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Ask HN: Easiest document management system for a small business?

3 points by brightball ↗ HN
My wife's small service business has a long time admin who's retiring and to this point, everything has basically just been on his laptop. His duties are being spread to other people at the company who are being promoted but it's not all going to one person who can just be handed "the laptop".

These people bounce between 2 small offices. Ideally, I would like to have some type of document management system that can help them keep things in sync but restrict access on a per-person basis. I was initially thinking Dropbox but one of the computers is a front desk computer that other people will sub in on from time to time. For documents like Quickbooks, for example, I'd want password access every time the file was opened.

Any suggestions? I haven't looked at these systems in about 8 years.

9 comments

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znt
My friend runs this company called Documentica, I can put you in touch if you are interested: http://documentica.com/

I think they have released version 1.0 now.

cdnsteve
Use Google apps. Comes with drive for uploading stuff, word, excel, presentation stuff that allows real time editing. Always in sync.
ausjke
owncloud seems a good fit.
saluki
Go with Google Apps . . .
SeaDude
I setup all smally businesses like this with a Google Apps account. Gmail (with your business domain if you have one), Drive for all docs and sharing. Its really easy to administer.

Its $5/month/user. Ideal for up to 10 people with insensitive (google eyes) content.

srpeck
As Microsoft-hesitant as I am, Office 365 handles this use case well, bundling a lot of additional functionality into their subscriptions (Email, Office, etc.) that decreases the administrative load on a small business. SharePoint with a well-maintained access control list would cover what you mentioned.

If you have truly sensitive information and/or regulations involved, you can layer RMS (Microsoft's DRM solution, could be additional purchase depending on subscription level) on top of SharePoint and get document-level encryption that follows files around and enforces your ACLs elsewhere. It uses your identity instead of a per-document password, which is a nicer UX.

brightball
After researching this a little bit and because we're almost entirely a Mac office, I'm going to evaluate OS X Server for it. It LOOKS like it will give us what I'm looking for.

With a $20 price tag, I'm going to give it a shot first before I go the Sharepoint / 365 route. That will be next on the list though.

We're currently using Rackspace hosted email ($2 / user) so the Rackspace Sharepoint might be a good fit for us.

Thanks for the info.