cattaDoc is based on ideas from WorkSAFE.
WorkSAFE was developed by a Danish company from 1995 to 1998 as a generalisation of experiences from systems developed primarily for the public sector in Denmark. I had the privilege of being in charge of this development, but most of the ideas came from my very creative colleagues at the time.
The ideas materialised in a product with process flows - we called it workflows at that time - based on the state-transition paradigm as the dynamic motor, with focus on the relations between the objects - and with the "book" user interface.
However, for various reasons the company abandoned WorkSAFE in 1999, and many of us who were engaged in the product have since left the company.
The need for proper document and project management still exists and only few seems to invest in this field, so after a couple of years I decided to make a new document management solution to cater for my own needs as a consultant. cattaDoc was born, and I have used it since 2003. From version 4, project management was added to cattaDoc.
Others have expressed interest in cattaDoc, and consequently it is made available as an open source solution.
WorkSAFE was developed on a totally different technological platform so there is no code reuse from WorkSAFE to cattaDoc. Only some of the ideas are reused.