OpenKM: An Open Source Document Management System

OpenKM is an Open Source, Web-based  DMS (Document Management System) that can be used as an alternative for commercial DMS solutions such as Sharepoint, Hummingbird and Documentum etc. OpenKM is available in three editions such as Community(Free), Cloud and Professional. You can find the detailed comparison of three versions here. It supports multiple operating systems such as GNU Linux, WIndows, Mac OS X and Solaris.

Why DMS?

As you might know, Small-Medium and Enterprises has lot of documents, images and other information electronic formats. One of the great time consumer on your organization is focused to end user information location.

DMS will help both enterprise and SME in-terms of the following criteria.

– Reduced Storage compared to paper documents.

– Flexible Retrieving and Indexing.

– Fast and improved flexible search for documents.

– Security and Disaster Recovery.

– No loss of data and Digital Archiving.

– Controlled and Improved document distribution over E-mail, Web.

Open KM Features

The list of complete features is given below. Some of the below features will not be available in Community and Cloud editions. You should upgrade to Professional edition to obtain the complete list of the below features.

– Web-based Open Document Management System

– Automatic key extraction

– Thesaurus, categories, keyword cloud and metadata navigator

– Integrated TWAIN scanner

– OCR integration

– Microsoft Office AddIns

– OpenOffice Add On

– AutoCAD preview

– Watermark ( text – image )

– Digital signature

– Generate new documents with wizard ( templates + forms )

– Cryptography ( encrypt and decrypt documents )

– Google Apps Synchronization

– WebDAV

– Workflow (jBPM )

– Mobile interface ( iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. )

– Programmable automatic cataloging

– Complete activity log

– Webservices API

– Extensible frontend API

– Integrated with LDAP and Active directory

– Zonal OCR

– Antivirus integration

– Dicom preview

– OpenMeetings integration

– HTML Editor

– Forum and Wiki

– Zoho integration

– Joomla explorer component

– 2D barcode reader

– CAS authentication

– Expiration of documents

– Dropbox integration

Download And Install OpenKM

I tested this installation on Ubuntu 13.04 desktop. I am not sure about the other distributions.

OpenKM requires java, so let us install it with the following command.

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk openjdk-7-jre

Download the latest community version here.

Set executable permission.

$ chmod +x openkm-6.2.4-community-linux-installer.run

Now run the following command to begin installation.

$ ./openkm-6.2.4-community-linux-installer.run

The following screen should appear. Click Next to continue.

Setup_001Accept the License Agreement and click Next.

Setup_002Select the installation directory and click Next.

Setup_003Now OpenKM setup is ready to install. Click Next to begin installation.

Setup_004Now OpenKM installation has been completed. Click Finish.

Setup_005Access OpenKM Web Console

Click on Start OpenKM link either from your Dash or Menu. This will start the OpenKM service.

OR

Enter the following command to start it from Terminal.

$ %INSTALLAION_DIR%/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

In my case, OpenKM installation path is /home/sk/openkm-6.2.4-community/. So i started the OpenKM service using the following command.

$ /home/sk/openkm-6.2.4-community/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

Now you can access OpenKM using http://localhost:8080/OpenKM. Default user is “okmAdmin” with password “admin”.

OpenKM Login - Mozilla Firefox_008This is how my OpenKM Administrator console looked.

OpenKM - Mozilla Firefox_009In this administration console, you can create users, roles and assign roles to users, etc. There are two important roles called ROLE_ADMIN and ROLE_USER (these roles are case sensitive). All users must have either ROLE_USER or ROLE_ADMIN. This allows them to connect to the OpenKM server. Any user with ROLE_ADMIN will be able to view the whole repository without limits, and have the Administration tab enabled.

Access OpenKM Web Console From Remote Computers

By default, Tomcat only listens for connections on localhost. If you want to access OpenKM from other computers modify the file $TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml, adding the address=”0.0.0.0″ attribute to the Connector if it doesn’t already exist.

<Connector address="0.0.0.0" connectionTimeout="20000" port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" redirectPort="8443"/>

For details about OpenKM administration, i suggest you to visit the OpenKM Documentation page. OpenKM has good collection of manuals including Administration, user guides and migration guides etc. to getting started with OpenKM.

Uninstall OpenKM

To uninstall OpenKM, first you have to stop the OpenKM service.

$ /home/sk/openkm-6.2.4-community/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

As i noted above, /home/sk/openkm-6.2.4-community/ is my OpenKM installation directory.

Now uninstall OpenKM with the following command.

$ /home/sk/openkm-6.2.4-community/uninstall

Setup_003Now all files including shortcuts of OpenKM will be deleted.

References:

OpenKM Official Site

Sourceforge