An Adaptive Distributed Document Access System

Abstract

More and more documents are stored dispersedly in geographically distributed branches.People often have to work over networks slower than LANs. How to keep the consistency of document states, and how to guarantee the performance of document accesses are the major problems for most enterprise, especially for the administrator of information management departments. To solve such problems, traditional mechanisms suggest a central server with a large storage containing all documents in it to provide the document access service. To satisfy enterprises’ needs, this paper is proposed to provide an efficient and high performance distributed document access system for geographically separated users. With our proposed method, enterprises can upgrade the document management efficiency based on currently existent network topology and architecture. The high performance distributed document management system (DMS) is composed of two major modules, and they are the logic document index management module, and the file server module. Logic document index management module serves the adaptive distributed document access mechanism and meta-data management which is independent of physical document storages, and guarantees the consistency of document states. The file server module manages the mapping between hierarchical logic indices and physical storage directories. Besides, it supplies cache management functions with the same performance as local document access no matter where users are physically located.