Gooii collaborates with American pharmacy association to create bespoke document management system
Document management systems are designed to enhance our clients’ productivity and efficiency
Gooii is working with the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) in America to design a new bespoke document management system (DMS).
NABP is an international non-profit organisation whose members are the boards of pharmacy. It has a diverse range of programmes that help protect public health across America. One of its offerings is a subscription service that provides access to a database of state pharmacy laws. The resource is intended to help licensees and stakeholders maintain compliance with state requirements.
What makes an effective document management system?
An efficient DMS is essential for organisations aiming to streamline their document handling and improve accessibility. Creating a bespoke system enables our clients to focus on managing documents for their subscribers and allowing them to search within their database. A good DMS needs to have an intuitive user interface, robust search functionality, efficient document indexing and effective integration capabilities. They also need to have regular, built-in data backups and a robust disaster recovery plan.
Why NABP approached Gooii to develop a bespoke DMS
Gooii is well versed in handling large data sets and helping our clients present them in a clear, concise way. We develop streamlined, intuitive User Interfaces (UI) that can be understood by both researchers and laymen. They also enable users to quickly search for specific terms and documents.
NABP’s existing document management system lacked certain functionalities, which required manual, time-consuming processes.
Having seen our software development first hand with the Archives Hub system we developed for Jisc, NABP got in touch to discuss the possibilities of Gooii developing a system with similar functionality. They particularly liked the hierarchy viewer on the right hand side of the Archives Hub system, because of how easy it is to use and navigate. It helps users to visualise the hierarchical nature of the data.
Read about our work for Jisc’s Archives Hub
The brief
NABP asked our team of developers to build a bespoke document management system that will enable them to effectively manage and organise the thousands of legal documents in their database and for users to easily find the information they need.
We are building both the internal and front-end systems for its 90 single and multi-user subscribers. This will allow users to search and download documents, organise them into collections and share them as links.
NABP also needs to ensure that when an administrator uploads a new document, the contents of the document are indexed and downloadable PDF versions are created.
How we’re going to create the new document management system
Using a CIIM to index documents
Gooii is working with Knowledge Integration and their Collections Information Integration Middleware (CIIM).
CIIM is a middleware solution – software that works between an operating system and the applications running on it. The CIIM can extract, collect and synchronise data from back-office systems and present it to users in the super quick Elasticsearch database. We used CIIM and Elasticsearch for Jisc’s Archives Hub and knew it would work perfectly for NABP. This is due to its ability to index documents and publish them to Elasticsearch, as well as its capability to create PDF versions of uploaded documents.
Working with our clients’ cloud technology
NABP uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud technology, so we’re developing the project using different AWS elements, such as Amazon Cognito. Amazon Cognito is an identity platform for web and mobile apps. It will help us add user authentication to NABP’s system. Amazon Cognito enables you to authenticate and authorise users from the built-in user directory, your own organisation’s directory or consumer identity providers like Google and Facebook. Developing these access control functions and other essential security features are crucial for document security.
We’re also using Amazon Lambda. When a new document is uploaded, or an amendment is made to a document, a Lambda function will be triggered and will tell the CIIM, causing it to re-index the new document’s contents.
Gooii is also working closely with NABP using the following pieces of software:
- Re-frame to help manage UI state and side effects on the client side.
- ClojureScript to transcode Clojurescript into javascript.
- User interface builder REACT 18 to build reusable UI components,
- We’re using the Tailwind css framework with shadcn/ui library to build the front-end website.
- Amazon’s DynamoDB database to develop user-generated content such as collections of documents.
NABP is currently developing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that we’ll be able to integrate with the front-end website and back-office system. While this is being worked on, our team of developers are working hard on the admin dashboard and functionality to upload documents to an AWS cloud storage platform. We’re also working on making the search function available to subscribers, as well as an admin user interface that enables files and folders to be manipulated.
We’re proud to be part of a project that makes data more accessible and we’re excited to create a new bespoke system that will improve the way our client documents its data.
DMS play a vital role in modernising document-related processes and enhancing the efficiency of a business. They are especially crucial in industries and sectors where document-intensive workflows are prevalent. If you’d like to discuss Gooii creating a DMS for your business, please get in touch.
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Article by
Franz Evert
Franz is a Technical Director at Gooii and has over 20 years’ experience developing commercial and open source database driven software in many languages. Franz’s other skills include project management and client liaison and he’s passionate about high web standards and internet security.