As you noted, ISO 9001 document management requirements are quite loose. I had been cheer leading the concept of using a wiki as a DMS in my workplace for the past few years. It never gained much traction, I expect due to a significant lack of understanding of those included in the package selection process. The limit of our corporate IT department's skills is upgrading Lotus Notes every possible time it can in the hopes that SOMEDAY the whale (dead) will actually start to swim... No, seriously, the folks that chose our new DMS wouldn't know the difference between a SQL server and a toaster.
Anyway, the bullet-proof audit trail created by Mediawiki (and any wiki, really) makes satisfying internal and external audits very straightforward. Proper ISO required access restrictions can be delegated using some of the very useful security extensions.
What is a DMS for anyway? Do we really want to be managing documents? or
content and information? The "here comes everybody" philosophy has significant implications for traditional document management in the manufacturing world. The typical response of a manufacturing plant to these requirements is to assign all DM duties to too small a group and wonder why the damn thing never gets done. Documents are chronically out of date, nobody even has the soft copies anymore...
But what if the documents/articles could be updated by those who use them? What if everybody was part of the DMS? Page staging with the flagged-revs extension, watchlist email notification to keep maintainers in the loop. A DMS that spreads the load to all it's users instead of monopolizing a few? That's where classical DMS needs to go. Badly.
Yah, Mediawiki sucks for input. But for output? Can't beat it.
Oh, our company chose
Intelex over
ETQ for our system. I try not to take it personally.
