[TYPO3-dam] Proposition for a "new" feature: DAM REAL FullText Search(like Indexed Search)

[Pascal Voitot]

Hello,
I'm currently studying DAM features as Document Management System...

First of all, I want to tell that I don't know all the constraints of the DAM
project so excuse me if I say stupid things :)

Concerning DMS, my references are SharePoint, Alfresco, KnowledgeTree etc... or
other similar systems with storage of documents in database. But these systems
are really heavy to deploy and they involve a complete migration of existing
document repositories to the new chosen system. For a company managing lots of
documents, it can be really frightening.
Due to this, lots of people prefer to keep their simple DMS which is "Windows
File Explorer with nice filename/directory references and cron mass-storage
solutions"...
In fact, what they want is to keep their existing system and to have a layer
above their classical file manager (which is most often windows explorer) with
some more capabilities such as classification/search etc...
Maybe they will go to a solution such as Sharepoint later but not now! These
people often only need a simple
category/metadata/versioning/relation mechanism/strategy to be able to classify
docs and very important: a FULLTEXT SEARCH to retrieve a doc from its content
and not only from its metadata.

I'm interested in the DAM because it allows to manages documents without moving
the files in a DB... But there is one thing I really miss in your DAM: FULLTEXT
INDEXING/SEARCH is not supported for the time being. DAM indexes documents,
retrieves metadata from document headers, file info, title, guess category and
even indexes the text content of the file BUT we can't search in this
content... And the search results are not quite the ones we could expect from a
search engine...

>From my point of view, I find it terribly frustrating to have almost all the
solution but one thing :)
In fact, I don't understand why it is not one of the main features of the DAM.

Furthermore, typo3 offers one nice indexation engine: the indexed_search
module... Isn't it possible to link DAM and indexed search and to have some
sort of "DAM search engine" which could be used to search for documents in the
backend and also in the frontend?

I know the indexed_search is made for FE indexing but there is a "crawler"
module which performs indexation in background so maybe it is possible to link
DAM with it! This is only a suggestion :)

Do you intend to add this feature to the DAM?
I might look at the code to see if it is possible to implement it but I prefer
to have your advice before!
I think it could interest lots of people (at least the ones I know :)) and
provide a simple and free DMS solution which is not only a DMS solution :)

waiting for your answers
best regards
Pascal Voitot