Product Review: DocMaestro DocDepot

Are you considering purchasing ISPA’s DocMaestro DocDepot product? I guarantee that you can build something better in a few months with a couple talented, dedicated ColdFusion developers. I am appreciative that ISPA’s staff took the time to demonstrate their product for me, but I was also very disappointed in the product. Let me tell you why.

Before we get into my criticisms, let me describe the product I will be discussing. DocDepot is a solution built to organize and archive documents. The government obviously has tons of documents to organize, and putting these documents into digital format is definitely a good way to make them maintainable and attainable. I will not claim that document management is an easy problem to solve or else I’d be selling such a product myself! But I will claim that it would be more effective to build a comparable, relevant solution in-house than to buy DocDepot.

The biggest issue I had with this product was the search piece, probably the most important part of the whole DocDepot software package. The sales reps spent so much time bragging up the full text search feature, and I didn’t see anything special about it. DocDepot runs on ColdFusion MX and uses the Verity search engine, which is bundled with and integrated into ColdFusion MX. I was immediately interested in how ISPA used Verity for this feature, and I am glad I asked some questions about it. For those of you who don’t know much about ColdFusion and Verity, it is ridiculously easy to use and develop search systems with. This is true at least at a basic level. Buy a couple Ben Forta books, ask a few questions about it on CF-TALK, and you’re solid.

Unfortunately, ISPA did not use any of the advanced features of Verity that would make it worth purchasing their product. I could see how their demo could wow an audience of those unfamiliar with search technology, especially those unfamiliar with ColdFusion and Verity. But those wanting to put more power into their search system with Information Architecture concepts like preferred terms, variant terms, and related terms are out of luck. DocDepot does not have any kind of mechanism for building vocabularies, and it is closed-source, so an in-house developer could not go in and tweak this functionality into the product. Verity allows for Boolean searching, perfect for these vocabulary-related IA concepts, of the which could be dynamically built with some simple database queries and CFML. Out of the box, DocDepot knows nothing about Boolean searching outside of forcing the user to write their own Boolean searches.

For those of you saying, “Huh?” let me give you an example. A lot of documents the government produces mention addresses. Many street addresses contain the word “road,” “Rd,” or “Rd.” I believe that their demo search involved searching for an address that contains the word “road.” If it didn’t, I asked them to search for an address with the word “Road.” Then I asked the people running the demo to search for a variant of the word “road,” like “Rd.” The search brought up entirely different results! There is no way in the real world that we could ask those producing documents to use preferred terms for everything. Imagine all the frustrated users trying to search for documents. The only way around this would be for the users to know to run searches that look something like this:

123 Someplace (Road OR Rd OR Rd.)

Those of you who are grounded in reality know that people expect search to be like Google. If a company like ISPA wants to claim to produce a product with an excellent search feature, then they need to do the work to produce an excellent search feature.

I will also quickly mention that if you purchase DocDepot and want any kind of custom workflows built into the system, you must hire ISPA staff to come in and build the software for you. After you’ve invested in a license of ColdFusion and the pricey DocDepot software, you then need to hand more money over to ISPA to make the software applicable to your end users’ workflows. Ouch!

So my solution? Gather some ColdFusion developers together, hand them a few books on Information Architecture (imagine that!), and have them learn every inner working of the Verity spider, ColdFusion Administrator indexing service, <cfsearch> tag, <cfindex> tag, <cfdirectory> tag, <cffile> tag, etc. And have them leave the source unencrypted and well documented. Or find a better product that will not punish your users.

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