Document Management

[Matt Graham]

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"
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Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see