How many employees/books do you have? I know it sounds
pretty arcane :), but we actually set up a small
book/video library with checkout cards. Works pretty
well.
I have the same problem.
3.5 GB of book, all formats (pdf,chm), some times i have
ISBN and picture.
I don't know what can with all this materials.
Hi Roy,
If I assume that your team works based on confidence
(and the contrary would be very surprising), then why
don't you use an Excel sheet on a shared drive? You
probably don't have so many books and so many employees
that you need a real database to handle all of them. Of
course, this requires a little discipline. But you need
that as a developer, anyway ;-). Several other tracks: a
simple web service combined with an InfoPath form (nice
little application that I would be very happy to develop
just to learn new stuff :-); or FlexWiki with a topic
for each book; or .Text with a feed for each book :-);
...
I know this is not *my* company, but... As a
demonstration of what SharePoint is capable of, as a
consultant, I created a simple book library management
system using a custom list in SharePoint. Because there
is no limit to the number of views that can be created
against a list in SharePoint, and since security is
flexible, I was able to create a means of allowing users
to see at a glance which books were1 available, which
were checked out, to click on a given book to create a
reservation for it to be picked up at a later time,
etc... Since this was just an example, I was not around
long enough to see how it has worked over time...
However, I do think that SharePoint could serve this
purpose. Not free of course, but if your company already
has Windows 2003 licenses, then it is included...
I'm sure this isn't what you want to hear, but if
checkout & categorization are the basic
requirements, I would think you could build one quickly
in Smalltalk hooked to a simple db.
At the time we had a big-assed Excel document on a
shared folder. :P
Why don't you go to IKEA and buy a bookshelf. Then put a
sheet of paper on the side or top of the bookshelf.
When someone takes a book out, they write the book title
and their name down beside the book title.
When they return the book, they cross the entry out. :)
cut each page out of each book and use them to wallpaper
the corridors.
that way everyone can browse and you'll never lose any.