Roadmap 4.5

= Introduction = As required by the LogicalDOC Development Program, this document describes the LogicalDOC v4.5 Roadmap.

The Roadmap is intended to be a living document which will see future iterations. This document is the fourth version of the LogicalDOC Roadmap, and is labelled as version 4.5. In order to preserve this document while the underlying information evolves, the pages have been frozen by copying them from their original project hosted locations.

The goal of the Roadmap is to provide the LogicalDOC system with guidance and visibility on the future directions of the LogicalDOC open source community. An important element in this visibility is that the Roadmap help the LogicalDOC development team in determining which features will be accepted during the life of this revision of the Roadmap. In other words, new features must be consistent with the Roadmap. This does not mean that every new feature must be explicitly envisaged by the Roadmap. It does mean that new features cannot be inconsistent with the stated directions of LogicalDOC. In particular, LogicalDOC expects that new features and plug-ins will not cover areas not explicitly described in the Roadmap.

Background
LogicalDOC is an open source Document Management System. The project is focused on buildeing an open and extensible platform able to handle huge amount of documents. The LogicalDOC platform can be used as a stand-alone application or as a middleware component.

LogicalDOC is maintained by Logical Objects, that is also the vendor of the commercial edition called LogicalDOC Enterprise Edition, while the open source is called LogicalDOC Community Edition.

= Strategic Goals = The following are the strategic goals of LogicalDOC.


 * 1) Establish LogicalDOC as a leading solution for document management. At least since 2006, LogicalDOC have been shipping innovative features and a very high ease of use.
 * 2) Maintain global leadership in open source document management. As an open document management platform, LogicalDOC provides support for multiple operating environments. The goal of LogicalDOC is to define for the industry a document management platform which is open source and provides support in many disparate problem domains, across the deployment platforms of choice.
 * 3) Foster growth of the ecosystem, particularly in verticals. The creation of a large community of commercial and open source organizations which rely on and/or complement LogicalDOC technology has been a major factor in the success of LogicalDOC. Each time LogicalDOC technology is used in the development of a product, service or application the LogicalDOC community is strengthened. Our goal in 2009 is to focus our attention on the creation of industry working groups and new LogicalDOC features which focus on particular industry segments such as insurance and finance.

Future Directions
The goal of the Roadmap is to provide the LogicalDOC project with guidance and visibility on the future directions of the LogicalDOC open source community, and to involve the LogicalDOC membership in a dialog about those future directions. In that vein, this section discusses our current vision of the future as a set of future projects that expand the value of the system for all of its members.

Integration of external authentication systems
LogicalDOC must fit the needs of large organizations. In this scenario, tipically users and groups are already coded into a shared directory like LDAP or Active Directory. LogicalDOC should be configured to acquire users and groups so that the adoption of LogicalDOC doesn't require the manual coding of users and groups.

Digital signature (Enterprise Only)
In some industry segments such as insurance and finance it is required to sign official documents. LogicalDOC will support the digital signature of documents through a java applet that allows the user to sign documents directly with his smart-card or other dignature device.

Twain interface (Enterprise Only)
One of the key features of LogicalDOC is its ability to acquire documents from various sources. With the ability to acquire from Twain scanners, we allows the user to digitalize paper documents directly into LogicalDOC. This feature is a sort of Scan to LogicalDOC.

Documents preview
Documents browsing needs to be extended in order to provide an alternative visualisation that shows only icons as a small preview of the first page of each document. In case of image documents, the preview can simply be a thumbnail of the image, for other documents the first page is renderised as a thumbnail image.

Pdf export (Enterprise Only)
A lot of office automation documents can be converted into the pdf format. We can implement in LogicalDOC an utility features that allows a user to obtain the same source document but rendered as pdf. This allows the user to view the document even if he hasn't the editor for the original format. For example a user could open a .doc document without have to install Word on his machine, he only need the free Adobe Reader.

DVD backup and paper replacement (Enterprise Only)
LogicalDOC will introduce a new concept of Export Archive. Roughly spoken, an Export Archive is a directory on the server where LogicalDOC is installed, in which a selection of research papers documents are physically copied. You can than burn this directory into a DVD or other media, in order to have a backup of files outside LogicalDOC. The list of documents included in the archive is easily available through an HTML index file.

This feature will allows organizations to digitally convert paper documentation in it's digital counterpart. Also, in some countries, national laws allow the replacement of paper, that is the complete substitution of paper documents with their digital counterpart preserving all legal issues.

Download
Download the official Roadmap document here