Earlier Document Management Efforts

Microsoft has addressed document management issues in several of its products over the last two years, providing partial answers to the problem. Those efforts include the following:

Word 97 and 2000. Word has the ability to track versions of a document, but the feature is rarely used because it cannot be enforced as part of a structured change control process. Word’s ability to save documents in HTML makes it easier to save the documents in a browser-readable format, but publishing them to an intranet Web site is still difficult.

Office 2000 Server Extensions (OSE). OSE introduced the concepts of “Web folders,” “Discussions,” and “Subscriptions,” all aimed at making it easier for authors to self-publish their documents and for readers to locate documents with a browser. OSE was a basic document management and search system for workgroups, but because it was built on top of the SQL Server–derived Microsoft Data Engine, it did not support a flexible metadata attribute scheme. OSE did support searching on the standard Office document property attributes, such as author, subject, and keywords, but it lacks a way to add additional attributes or create pick lists of attribute values.