Hi,
This is a little long winded as I wanted to try and provide as much info as I could. Apologies in advance.
I'm investigating using DNN as an extranet platform for a volunteer based government emergency services agency with approximately 70,000 members across 2500 locations.
Document management is a very important part of what we are trying to achieve and I've been playing around with the trial version of DMX for a couple of days. By all measures it appears to be a superb product and I'm very keen to be able to use it but there are a few permission type things which im struggling with and I was hoping someone would be able to advise me on. It's quite possible I've been approaching things the wrong way but It could also be that my needs are so specific that I need to customise however I'm hoping to avoid that if possible.
My issues can be broken up into view permission issues and add edit permission issues and for ease of use I'll address them separately.
View permissions:
We use a decentralised document management approach where each of our locations can add documents that are for that location. We also have a hierachical system where documents added at one location are visible to all members based at locations that are below it. To further complicate the issue a specific user may belong to more then one location. Our structure looks something like this:
HQ
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Region 1------------------+-----------------Region 2
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District A-----+------District B District C-----+-----District D
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Team 1--+--Team 2 Team 3--+--Team 4 Team 5--+--Team 6 Team 7--+--Team 8
By way of practical example, a document posted at the HQ level needs to be visible by members at all locations whereas a document posted at district A would be visible by members at District A, team 1 & team 2 only and a document posted at Team 1 would only be visible by members of team 1.
Documents must have at least 1 (and may have more then 1) categories/tags associated with them. Some of these categories may be sub categories of a master category.
For each organisational level within the agency (ie: HQ, Region, District and team) I would like to have a page which displays the appropriate documents posted based on that users permissions. Ie a member who is in region 1 would see region 1 documents whereas a member from region 2 would see region 2 documents.
Additionally if possible I would like these to be filterable based on category so that a member in district A could view all documents posted to region A or only view the documents within region A posted to a specific category. If a document is posted to a sub category I would like it if for the purpose of the filtering it was rolled up to the relevant master level category. Eg a document put in the Community engagement >> open days category would appear under Community Engagement.
As well as viewing documents based on the organisational level that they were posted to our members also would like to be able to go to another page and view documents based on the category it belongs to. So for example a member at team 2 could go to the community engagement page and there they would be able to see documents with the tag community engagement that were posted by team 2, District A, Region 1 and HQ. It would be preferable if there was some kind of field on the document so that the user knew which location created the document.
Adding/ Editing documents
When it comes to the admin side of things we use a decentralised model again and only a small proportion of our members will have permission to add documents (typically 2 or 3 per location). I need to be able to give people the ability to add/edit documents to specific locations only. So for example I may give a user the ability to add documents to team1 but not district A.
For adding and editing documents the main thing that I need to do is make it as simple as possible. Alot of our members struggle to even turn on a computer so the easier it is the better. Basically all they need to be able to do is add a new document and maybe upload a new version of an existing document. If they are able to delete documents that would be nice but not if it means the interface needs to be more complex.
Ideally what id like is that they select the document they want to upload, choose which location they want to post it to (if they can post to more then 1), enter the title of the document, a brief description and select the relevant categories and hit upload.
On the subject of categories I would like to be able to select which categories appear at which level of the organisation. For example it would be appropriate for a “commissioner” category to be selectable at the HQ level, but I would not want that category to be able to be chosen by a team.
Thanks for taking the time to read over all this, and im sure i probably haven’t explained it as well as I would like to so if there are any questions or clarifications needed please don’t hesitate to ask.
It would be most appreciated if someone could help me work out what on my list is doable and guide me in the direction of how to do it, if it’s possible. For things that aren’t possible I’d also appreciate any advice if it can kind of do something in that general direction, as we may be able to modify our processes a little. I’d also appreciate knowing if im barking up the wrong tree and customisation is the only option.
Sorry about writing war and peace.
Matt
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