Re: Document Management

Top Page
Attachments:
Message as email
+ (text/plain)
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Matt Graham
Date:  
To: plug-discuss
Subject: Re: Document Management
After a long battle with technology, Carlton Brooks wrote:
> I am looking for a program to handle all my family/business documents.


How many documents are you talking about? Explain "handle"; what do you want
to do with these things once you've got them in this system? Be specific.

> I would like to be able to scan in the document/invoice etc and have
> some control over where to store it. Is there a program out there that will
> help me do this?


There are a number of Document Management Systems out there, some of them
Free. The only one I've played with seriously is knowledgetree, which has a
metric ton of features, most of which are probably completely unnecessary for
what you're doing. Scanning a paper document and creating a PDF (or
whatever) is a separate process from "managing" that document, and would be
done by a separate package (Gimp, possibly, though there's probably something
else out there for making PDFs out of multiple images more easily). I
believe the vast majority of managing systems really require
Apache+MySQL/Postgres running.

If you have fewer than a few thousand documents, and they all can be
classified in at most one category, use a directory tree. Seriously. It's a
lot less complicated and you can start immediately. If you have more than a
few thousand, and there's a lot of metadata associated with the documents,
and you need multiple users with different access rights, that's when a
management system makes a bit more sense.

You didn't mention OCR. The state of native Linux OCR is years behind the
times compared to OS X/Doze OCR software. So if you need to OCR stuff,
you're probably going to need another machine or a VM. HTH anyway,

-- 
      "To avoid being eaten, the puffer fish blows itself up"
      -- Debbie Maizels
  My blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress/
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list - 
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss