📁 Polelo DMS — Electronic Records Management for SA Municipalities
Polelo DMS
Section titled “Polelo DMS”Electronic Records Management System purpose-built for South African local government
Product Overview
Section titled “Product Overview”Polelo DMS is a NARSSA-compliant, POPIA-by-design Electronic Records Management System (ERMS) built specifically for South African municipalities — not an international ECM retrofitted with a compliance module. Core document management (upload, versioning with rollback/compare, metadata, full-text search, email ingestion), records management (file plan, retention, legal holds, formal disposal), and a graphical workflow engine (parallel/conditional routing, SLA tracking) are all native to the product, alongside MFA, LDAP/AD SSO, field-level ACLs, and a REST API with webhooks.
Current release: v1.14.0, live in production at polelodms.co.za, hosted in South Africa.
What Makes Polelo Different
Section titled “What Makes Polelo Different”- Built for the municipal ToR, not adapted to it. NARSSA’s 7-series file plan structure ships pre-seeded; POPIA (consent, Information Officer role, DSAR workflow) is designed in, not bolted on.
- Load-shedding and connectivity resilience. Workflow decisions taken with no connection queue on-device (IndexedDB) and sync automatically on reconnect — built for the reality that mains power loss and connectivity loss happen together in SA municipal offices.
- ZAR-denominated, Category B3/B4-viable pricing. No USD/EUR forex exposure, no per-seat enterprise licensing model.
- We own the product. Customisation is a scoping conversation, not a change order routed through an international vendor’s professional-services desk.
- Independently verified capability coverage. Every claim in our capability matrix is checked against actual code, not aspirational feature-flag naming — see Competitive Positioning for the honest, current numbers.
Key Features
Section titled “Key Features”Core DMS
- Upload, versioning with rollback and compare, rich metadata, full-text search (Meilisearch) with boolean operators (AND/OR/NOT) and multi-format text extraction (Office docs, XLSX, PPTX)
- Email (IMAP) ingestion, check-in/check-out with locking
- OCR (Tesseract) + Office→PDF conversion, MFP webhook scanning, camera capture
- Bulk upload (up to 50 files with shared metadata), lookup-value autocomplete for consistent metadata entry
- Linked/related documents — either-direction cross-referencing between any two records
Records Management
- NARSSA-aligned file plan (now with per-series NARSSA classification codes), retention schedules, polymorphic legal holds
- 4-stage formal disposal workflow with NARSSA disposal certificates
- Physical records tracking — location, format and barcode for paper originals linked to their digital file-plan entry
Workflow
- Graphical, drag-drop workflow designer (Vue Flow canvas)
- Parallel and conditional routing, SLA tracking
- Offline action queue — approve/reject/return a step with no connectivity, auto-synced on reconnect with conflict detection
Security & Access
- TOTP + backup-codes MFA (admin-enforceable per role), trusted-device support
- LDAP/AD SSO with group-to-role mapping
- Editable permission matrix — an admin can toggle exactly what each of the 5 municipal roles can do, effective immediately, no code change required
- Department/regional-scoped visibility, field-level ACLs, password rotation policy
- Full audit trail, POPIA Phase 1+2 (consent, Information Officer workflow, DSAR)
Integration & Reporting
- REST API (Sanctum) with webhooks, Swagger documentation
- Scheduled reports and a custom report builder
- Workflow template export/import (JSON) for reuse across departments or environments
- BulkSMS notifications
Infrastructure
- Automated backup with restore testing and a documented DR runbook
- South African hosting, Docker-based deployment
Target Market
Section titled “Target Market”- South African local government — Category B3/B4 municipalities in particular, where enterprise international ECM pricing is not viable
- Municipal records/registry offices needing NARSSA-compliant electronic records management
- Departments currently on legacy or paper-based systems seeking a modern, POPIA-aligned replacement
Competitive Position
Section titled “Competitive Position”| Dimension | Where Polelo stands |
|---|---|
| SA-built competitors (InzaloEMS, Centrax, MunComp, E-Bono, Collaborator) | Ahead on every dimension — POPIA, NARSSA, modern UX, MFA, LDAP, workflow designer, API, offline resilience |
| SharePoint / M365 | Wins on NARSSA, full POPIA, data sovereignty, ZAR pricing; SharePoint wins on ecosystem breadth |
| Enterprise international ECM (Laserfiche, OpenText, M-Files) | Feature parity on most SA-relevant dimensions; they still lead on scanner-hardware integration (commercial partnership, not a code gap) and PKI-grade e-signatures (roadmap item) |
Full scoring detail, methodology, and an honest account of what’s genuinely open: Competitive Positioning →
Technical Architecture
Section titled “Technical Architecture”| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Backend | Laravel 11 / PHP 8.3 |
| Frontend | Vue 3 + Inertia.js |
| Database | PostgreSQL 16 |
| Search | Meilisearch |
| Cache/Queue | Redis |
| Deployment | Docker Compose, South African hosting |
| Client-side offline storage | Dexie.js (IndexedDB) |
Documentation
Section titled “Documentation”| Document | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Competitive Positioning | Verified capability coverage vs. SA and international competitors, bid positioning playbook |
Quick Links
Section titled “Quick Links”- Production:
polelodms.co.za
Polelo DMS — the electronic records management system built for the way South African municipalities actually work.