Hi all,
I would like to hear some other opinions on attachment storage. We are discussing whether we should store attachments in sharepoint or to setup our own in house VM to handle Epicor Kinetic attachments. I am not really for storing things in the cloud, but if it is easier and more convenient then I guess why not. Was there other ways you did this? I would like to hear. I also have to come up with a file structure scheme that makes sense but I figure location was the best part to start.
My first answer is SharePoint ! (Because I use it lol, and we are O365)
(We are also cloud.)
Then you have ECM, which I wish I had too.
I don’t use local storage anymore, except for backups.
ECM? What is that?
Something my boss won’t let me have.
ECM is what used to be called DocStar.
I’m not the person to ask about that.
nooo why would you inflict this on yourself? Just get ECM with or without IDC. Fully integrated with Epicor. And the documents are audited/versioned. So many great things about it.
What’s the price of ECM?
Question for your account manager . . . .
Agree. I had ECM at my last company, and BPM’s and AutoPrint rules play very well with it and have widgets for it. Nice to have it pull together all documents, certs etc. and send a “Package” of docs pulled from ECM to customer or at time of shipment. One of the better integration pieces they did, out of many poorly implemented add-ons, ECM is solid.
ECM is GREAT. And not expensive at all. If everyone in your company will access the attachments via Epicor, you can get away with 2-3 users and maybe a few viewer licenses. For that little cost, you get all kinds of features - workflows, datalinks to get/use/store data in any accessible SQL database, image processing, email, DocuSign integration, etc. etc.
I would be happy to do a quick demo for you and your team like I’ve done for numerous folks here. Do a little Q&A and show you a sample of all the things it can do. Message me if you’d like to.
Just piling on for ECM, especially as it has a proven integration. Have several clients using ECM, and very happy.
We initially started using SharePoint and it is a big overhead when it comes to security in terms of setting up user groups and granting access to the document libraries.
You are also reliant upon the SharePoint strategy of your company. We were initally on-prem and are just about to move to Azure
Ultimately we have gone for a secure file server approach.
I have just tested successfully the repointing of the existing attachments to the file location.
As with all things, it comes down to requirements, if you want full document tracing/ version control, then SharePoint or ECM are options, if you just need a secure place to store things like PO, invoices etc, then a file server maybe the best and easiest option.
And taking on the EdgeClient as a dependency? The native browser can’t access those files unless you stand up a webserver in front of them. When we tried this, we were having trouble getting the user’s security to pass through the web server.
I don’t think our company has received a single quote from Epicor for anything that we could describe that way 
You make me want to get a quote though. I’ve never even bothered since many of the things I’ve had quoted were out of our price range. It does sound really nice.
I’d do it… Without AP Processing, PackageWorks, or the API/Dev license, our annual maintenance cost is about $6k for 5 users and 10 view licenses. I can’t find the original SO and “mileage will vary” of course…
You pay by user and not by GB of storage? That surprises me
Ah - I’m on prem. Storage is my problem - but also another attractive feature!
If you get IDC to go along with it (it’s also really cool and useful if you just want to scan stuff in and have it OCR and ECM-Workflow process it for you), then you pay by the PAGE. You buy blocks like 300k or 1 million…
There is an overage fee if you go over a certain amount of storage.
This is all great info. We are trying our best to just build around Epicor but if ECM can also allow use to dump data into Epicor easier than using a DMT tool then that’s also a benefit. We have a lot of data that an on prem server would be nice to go with. Decisions, decisions.
Thanks for this - we are still on classic, so it hasn’t been an issue, but looking forward we have browser ux in the pipeline.
Something by else to ponder on the great migration.
We just purchased ECM and are trying to get it implemented - we didn’t get the IDC however. Currently we have Epicor set up to store the file on a separate file server.