DocLink is an integrated document management system from Altec headquartered in Laguna Hills, California.
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Plone
Score10 out of 10
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Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.
It's a great tool that works well to automate processes and, once set up, reduce admin time on things like tracking the approval process. However, it can be challenging to initially set up because it requires an understanding of the process in the first place. We have a team of business analysts who work for us so one of them was assigned to understand our own internal processes and then set up the relevant workflows. I think without this we might have struggled. We also each use the expense receipt feature which is great. You can in a receipt and using OCR the expense forms are automatically populated. You do need to manually check it but this saves a lot of time in filling in forms. As we now have a workflow in place it is straightforward to submit your monthly expense report for approval straight afterward. The document tracking feature is good too - who has seen, worked on, or needs to see the document. It means we were able to stop using Slack.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).
DocLink is VERY user-friendly! The daily functions are easily taught to non-financial individuals. It's easy to understand and easy to manipulate with a simple, functional layout. The Administrative module is not too complicated, but it would be more effective if there was a more thorough "help" section or an online forum for users. All of my knowledge is self-taught, trial and error, but it would be helpful for a new user to have an online resource to address questions or issues.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.
The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.
Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.
DocLink is quite reliable and effective. Scanned documents are easy to read with very slight loss of integrity. Pages load quickly with occasional lag loading very large files. We use DocLink with MS Dynamics SL, and the two systems perform well together without much interruption or ambiguity in the process. One issue we have is in relation to the number of licenses and issues we have when a session will not close upon exit, thus suspending an available license rendering it unusable. Although very infrequent, IT has had to manually "end" a session to clear the license.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.
Document sender u can only send one at a time, doclink sends mass emails all at once and can archive all your documents, making it a complete solution.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Now set up it has significantly reduced admin time for everyone. I would say on average 1-2 hours per month per staff member spent on expense forms and submissions.
Cancelled paid version of slack as no longer needed.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.
