Chapter 2.  Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS)

One of the most essential enterprise content management systems nowadays is the electronic content management (ECM) system. Companies resort to this kind of web ecosystem to provide solutions for managing their legal documents, hospital records, e-mails, billing invoices and other collaboration-related files. These software solutions store all those unstructured data, to promote paperless transactions that help companies minimize their costs when managing huge cabinets of documents.

The ECM solution is the integration of different sub-components including record management, document management, workflow and process management, collaboration solution, and security modules. Some of the popularly known ECM platforms that are used by many companies worldwide are: EMC Documentum, Alfresco, Apache Lenya, Liferay and OpenCMS.

The chapter will particularly focus on the implementation of uploading and downloading files that is considered the main feature of a DMS. To discuss the process of creating this feature, a software specimen called Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) will be created, to guide the reader on how to start with DMS using the Spring MVC 4.x specification.

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

• Configure a Spring MVC container for file uploading
• Implement and design uploading of files
• Use a MultipartFile interface
• Create file validations
• Learn the different solutions for file uploading using Spring MVC 4.x
• Deploy Spring MVC projects
• Encrypt and decrypt stored files