Curious to hear if this will ever gain any traction. This request comes up very frequently because many customers already have their own document management system and would prefer to link to it rather than upload a copy into Archibus. This way, they would maintain their single source of truth and retain the security settings from their existing system.

This should be prevalent across any document field. For example it's pretty common to use sharepoint or other consultant tools for project management where it makes more sense to link to a file instead.

For lease management, most can agree that overtime, lease agreements are better stored within sharepoint for version control etc, so a link to the location of a file would be substantially better.

Octavian, I agree with your use case. It would be ideal if the user could enter a URL in place of uploading a document in any document field.

I agree with James' comment, for our group, we currently use URLS in work request descriptions (including those created through preventative maintenance schedules), to provide additional reference materials such as inspection sheets, floor plans and other key reference material needed for a particular request. It is easier and more practical to use cloud based documentation so that we don't have to fight with multiple versions/managing out of date documents. Since the URL text in the descriptions aren't converted to links in our version of Archibus, our users' need to copy the URL text into a browser which is unfortunately less streamlined.

Since the ability to enter URLs into text fields/ linking URLS to text is so common in other applications such Microsoft Office, Gmail, ect, I find that I commonly use this function on a daily basis for a wide variety of functions. As a result I can see this being used in other modules of Archibus as well.

Thank you very much.
To make sure that I understand the idea: Instead of attaching documents to equipment, work requests, etc., the FMer should have the alternative to enter an URL to an external document management system (either cloud - ex. Google Drive or enterprise).

Octavian,

That is a great, yet difficult question. We have customers that use their own Enterprise Content Management system to store documents (and images) for the ls* tables, eq table and activity_log table. I am not sure you will be able to get consensus identifying a single form or table to start with. I think a global approach, similar to the doc_* tables would be best (if possible).

In your opinion, what would be the top candidate forms/views for this feature? (ex. Lease Portfolio Console - Add/Edit Lease)
This can help narrow down the effort.

Agree on this one. The overwhelming majority of my clients don't actually want to store documents in the ARCHIBUS database, reference documents are limited to very specific use cases. Generalizing URL based document links would help a lot to prevent having to build out custom URL fields.

This is a great idea. We can use to attach links to SOPs, etc