Maarch Framework 2.1/Technical Handbook/Introduction

De Maarch // Wiki.

Sommaire 1 What is Maarch ? 2 Who is Maerys ? 3 Why Maarch ? 4 Need Help ? 5 What’s new in Maarch 2.1 ? 6 Maarch Roadmap

What is Maarch ?

Maarch is an Open Source PHP5-MySQL Document Management System dedicated to long-term archiving and restitution. More then a product, it's a full archiving environment able to handle Maarch is an infrastructure : it provides a standard customisable interface to view and manually add documents to the archive, and comes with a set of tools to :

• Import documents from a file system
• Release images from Ascent Capture
• Export documents with their indexes to a normalized CD/DVDSome others tools are available, and we hope that a lot more will come soon.

Who is Maerys ?

Maerys is a French company created in 2004. The two creators are knowned consultants in Document Management and Output Management. Indeed Maerys lives from consulting services and integration projects around Maarch. Pure IT services around Maarch are provided by a skilled technical team, that enhances at the same time the software with new customer-oriented functionalities. Maerys is then a profitable company with interesting perspectives.

Why Maarch ?

We have built Maarch because we haven’t found in the Open Source world a product that was fulfilling our needs, which consisted in having a simple repository, with a robust interface, and an open SQL database. We are familiar with those big archiving products ( IBM Content Manager OnDemand, Filenet Image Services, Tower, Moebius, etc. ) that share some typical features :

1. full featured ingestion modules, with a lot of connectors/converters for every format (for COLD archiving)
2. disk space balancing (balanced repartition of files in the file system)
3. table compartment to minimize the number of indexes
4. SQL storage of metadata, separate storage of files
5. Java/J2EE distributed architecture

We wanted to build an infrastructure for long term archiving, with easy-to-handle technology, that could perform simple archive-and-retrieve functionalities. Maarch is good enough (for free!) on items 2,3, and 4. As for item 5, we prefered to have a less complex architecture based on PHP, so everybody is able to understand and customize it. Although we already provide some connectors, we don't have yet the full featured COLD ingestion module, but It will surely be present on future releases. As there is already a lot of products in this domain, we decided to let it free of charge, and totally open, but the core is strong, and concepts are new and based on norms, standards, and modern business needs.

Need Help ?

You can ask your questions in Maarch dedicated forum.

We really try to answer as quickly and precisely as possible. For France, we propose consulting and integration services for Maarch. We have a lot of expertise in scanning too, and OCR/recognition. We can also provide training abroad of course, and assist you in implementing Maarch for your needs. Among our customers, Maarch is used as a standalone product, or integrated into a CRM, or an existing intranet. We also have developed vertical applications like archiving stations, mail management for town halls, and public structures in general. Latest developments are to implement Maarch as an OEM engine for products or ASP services needing document management. For now we keep some tools for ourselves, because they are not fully generic and too customer specific.

What’s new in Maarch 2.1 ?

We added new functionalities and changed Maarch data model. It is now more flexible and can adapt to future evolutions :

• Multi-table resource collections
• User groups (a user belongs to one group or more)
• New security schema (depending on the user groups) : you can restrict access to the chosen resources tables, fix the rules for insert or update
• New administrative functions to manage users and groups
• More events on history
• Post indexing module

Maarch Roadmap

All the possibilities of the new Data Model have not yet been implemented. We are now working on new functionalities like integrating a workflow, manage resource groups and more. We are now focusing on business applications on top of Maarch :

• Maarch LetterBox
• Maarch PeopleBox
• Maarch DLM