Document Types

From two months, I want to blog about document types, that's because of the importance of document types and some people misunderstand document types' uses.

In Oracle UCM, defining document types is very easy just add document type label and description, so some people are thinking that it's just a list of values for Document Type (dDocType) metadata field. That's a big mistake.

The first thing I will do when I am setting with the customer in requirements gathering sessions, I will ask him about business classification of documents in his organization, that classification is document types.

After that, I will verify the list, may be I can find some missing document types or extra document types, I mean I will normalize and optimize document types until I get the final complete list.

Then, for every document type I will get the associated metadata fields. Like if I have document type called "Invoice", I need the following metadata fields [Invoice Number, Invoice Total, Customer Name, Discount, Cashier Name, etc .....].

In the case of Oracle UCM I should not repeat the metadata fields that are associated with more than one document type. After creating the metdata fields in UCM, you should create content profiles and content rules, so that we will have entry, search, information screens for every document type (or for every group of document types).

In some other Document Management Solutions like Sharepoint & Documentum, document types are created in a tree, where for every document type you have different metdata fields and child document type can inherit metadata fields from the partent document type.

Which of the two approaches (flat-like document types or tree-like document types) is the best. In my opinion UCM (I didn't say UCM because I am UCM expert), where UCM offers you the flexibility in managing metadata fields and in creation of content profiles.

In next post I will post about documents types in Oracle UCM.