The problem
The Ministry's day-to-day ran on paper. Reports were saved onto the computer as folders, with the documents themselves filed away inside. It was a flat structure, with no reliable way to see where a report stood in its approval workflow, or who was holding it up.
I sat down with the Ministry's IT Administrator across several meetings to understand the actual shape of the problem: what was slowing them down, where documents were getting lost, and what a working solution would need to do on day one. Those conversations shaped everything that followed.
Building the system
I led the small team that built the Document Management System. After further discussion with Dr. Rami and the team on the right foundation for a project that had to be reliable and maintainable long after we handed it off, we settled on:
- Object-oriented PHP for the application itself
- Bootstrap for a clean, functional interface staff could pick up quickly
- MySQL to hold documents, their metadata, and their history
The core of the DMS was workflow, not just storage: every document carried a status as it moved through the Ministry, and the system made that status, and the full trail behind it, visible at every step.
Deployment
Once the Ministry signed off, I deployed the system to their servers myself and saw it into production use.
Recognition
The project was later featured on LBCI, one of Lebanon's national news channels, and I received formal recognition from the Minister of Labor at the time, Moustafa Bayram, for the effort behind it.
The signature and official seal are redacted below to keep them from being lifted and reused elsewhere; everything else on the certificates is untouched.
