[gentoo-user] Document management solution [possibly a bit off-topic...]

[gentoo-user] Document management solution [possibly a bit off-topic...]

[Steve [Gentoo]]

I think I want a "document management solution" - though I'm not sure 
that everyone understands the same idea by the term.

I've got a filing cabinet full of paperwork which is an absolute 
nightmare to cope with.  One of the key problems is that the documents 
want to be indexed in different ways.  All the documents are dated, but 
they can be further sub-divided by subjects - lots of documents 
appertain to several subjects.  I frequently require to find either a 
specific document, a sequence of related documents or similar.  I rarely 
need the original document - but often want  a copy or just to check 
some detail or other.  Some documents are multi-page, some single 
page... all can be easily scanned.

I'm interested to establish software which minimises the burden of 
managing these documents - probably as scanned images.  I'm familiar 
with the Dj-Vu Libre library and think that format is fantastic - though 
a less ambitious format would likely suffice (even at 200dpi grey scale 
jpegs  I get ~10,000 pages without needing more than one DVD to back 
up...)  A significant burden is in scanning and storing all these 
documents - and this makes a good UI essential - preferably allowing a 
single click to scan a document (incidentally can anyone recommend a 
good, cheap, sheet-fed scanner?) before page-preview (cropping/rotating) 
and assignment of "subject" classification and date-stamping.  It would 
be useful if there was an OCR pass in order to extract plain-text and to 
index that - though this feature is not essential.  There would need to 
be a friendly UI in order to establish all the documents matching a 
given subject classification (or group of classifications) - to preview 
on-screen and offer an option to print... preferably in-order... maybe 
with a watermark dating the copy?

Is anyone aware of any existing packages - preferably for Gentoo, but 
any open-source solution would suffice.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions :-)

Steve

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Re: [gentoo-user] Document management solution [possibly a bit off-topic...]

[A. Khattri]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Steve [Gentoo] wrote:

> I think I want a "document management solution" - though I'm not sure
> that everyone understands the same idea by the term.

This might be overkill:
http://www.alfresco.org/

Or maybe something like ScrollKeeper would suffice?


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Re: [gentoo-user] Document management solution [possibly a bit off-topic...]

[Steve [Gentoo]]

A. Khattri wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Steve [Gentoo] wrote:
>> I think I want a "document management solution" - though I'm not sure
>> that everyone understands the same idea by the term.
>>     
> This might be overkill:
> http://www.alfresco.org/
>   
Alfresco is what I'd have called a content management system - as 
opposed to a document management system.  I'm interested in managing 
archives of documents I have received from other people (in dead-tree 
format)...
> Or maybe something like ScrollKeeper would suffice?
Scrollkeeper seems to target electronic manuals etc. (as far as I can 
tell) - It doesn't appear to be focused on scanned documents.  The 
typical sort of documents I need to manage include monthly and quarterly 
invoices and statements etc. from a wide variety of vendors.

Like Alfresco, I'd say that Scrollkeeper looks more like a content 
management system than a document management system...



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Re: [gentoo-user] Document management solution [possibly a bit off-topic...]

[A. Khattri]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Steve [Gentoo] wrote:

> Alfresco is what I'd have called a content management system - as
> opposed to a document management system.  I'm interested in managing
> archives of documents I have received from other people (in dead-tree
> format)...

If there was something that scanned the document, performed OCR on it,
checked the OCR output and then built an electronic repository for you I'd
recommend it. Until then, Alfresco is the closest thing Ive seen that is
open source. If you're willing to do your own scanning and OCR'ing then it
will do the rest.

BTW, I would call things like Mambo or Xaraya, content-management tools -
Alfresco is a slightly different kettle of fish.


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Re: [gentoo-user] Document management solution [possibly a bit off-topic...]

[Nick Rout]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 16:52:54 -0400 (EDT)
A. Khattri wrote:

> On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Steve [Gentoo] wrote:
> 
> > Alfresco is what I'd have called a content management system - as
> > opposed to a document management system.  I'm interested in managing
> > archives of documents I have received from other people (in dead-tree
> > format)...
> 
> If there was something that scanned the document, performed OCR on it,
> checked the OCR output and then built an electronic repository for you I'd
> recommend it. Until then, Alfresco is the closest thing Ive seen that is
> open source. If you're willing to do your own scanning and OCR'ing then it
> will do the rest.
> 
> BTW, I would call things like Mambo or Xaraya, content-management tools -
> Alfresco is a slightly different kettle of fish.

Yes I know what Steve is after, and I'd love to find a way. I was put
off by Alfresco being called "Content Management" because all of the
content management systems I have seen end up bioding something that
resembles [name your favourite news website]

A closer look at alfresco reveals that it does look more like what Steve (and I ) are after.

I am a lawyer and I handle hundreds of documents every week, from email
through pdf (both made from an electronic source and therefore has all
the text available, and scanned) openoffice (one enlightened client!),
word, excel, html, faxes, letters (on paper, ya know!) you name it
someone will send me something in it!

It'd be great to have a metadata system where I could give everything
some keywords:

client name, file number, matter number, subjects, useful as a
precedent, useful case etc etc etc so that in future I can :

pull up every document on my computer, my secretary's computer, my mail
server (including attachments), my file server, my palm pilot, relating
to a particular client

pull up every document about company debentures

find the case i downloaded and stored somewhere about liability of
guarantors in a consumer credit loan

find the seminar book for the seminar i went to on asome new area of
law.

find a letter written by Joe Bloggs sometime in 2003.


> 
> 
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Re: [gentoo-user] Document management solution [possibly a bit off-topic...]

[Eric Crossman]

On Fri, 2005-09-30 at 10:36 +1200, Nick Rout wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 16:52:54 -0400 (EDT)
> A. Khattri wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Steve [Gentoo] wrote:
> > 
> > > Alfresco is what I'd have called a content management system - as
> > > opposed to a document management system.  I'm interested in managing
> > > archives of documents I have received from other people (in dead-tree
> > > format)...
> > 
> > If there was something that scanned the document, performed OCR on it,
> > checked the OCR output and then built an electronic repository for you I'd
> > recommend it. Until then, Alfresco is the closest thing Ive seen that is
> > open source. If you're willing to do your own scanning and OCR'ing then it
> > will do the rest.
> > 
> > BTW, I would call things like Mambo or Xaraya, content-management tools -
> > Alfresco is a slightly different kettle of fish.
> 
> Yes I know what Steve is after, and I'd love to find a way. I was put
> off by Alfresco being called "Content Management" because all of the
> content management systems I have seen end up bioding something that
> resembles [name your favourite news website]
> 
> A closer look at alfresco reveals that it does look more like what Steve (and I ) are after.
> 
> I am a lawyer and I handle hundreds of documents every week, from email
> through pdf (both made from an electronic source and therefore has all
> the text available, and scanned) openoffice (one enlightened client!),
> word, excel, html, faxes, letters (on paper, ya know!) you name it
> someone will send me something in it!
> 
> It'd be great to have a metadata system where I could give everything
> some keywords:
> 
> client name, file number, matter number, subjects, useful as a
> precedent, useful case etc etc etc so that in future I can :
> 
> pull up every document on my computer, my secretary's computer, my mail
> server (including attachments), my file server, my palm pilot, relating
> to a particular client
> 
> pull up every document about company debentures
> 
> find the case i downloaded and stored somewhere about liability of
> guarantors in a consumer credit loan
> 
> find the seminar book for the seminar i went to on asome new area of
> law.
> 
> find a letter written by Joe Bloggs sometime in 2003.
> 
> 
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > 
> > -- 
> > gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
> 
> -- 
> Nick Rout <nick@rout.co.nz>
> 

I'm not sure if what you're describing exists right now in the open
source world, but I can tell you that it certainly does in the
commercial world. I used to work in the "metadata" department for a
startup here in upstate NY, USA that built a web based application
targeting lawyers such as yourself. It was written in PHP/MySQL but the
database was being migrated to Oracle due to the rapid growth in the
database tables. 

Unfortunately though, in the migration to Oracle, they elected to create
a "dynamic" scheme to support adding custom metadata fields as requested
per client. It was great for flexibility but the performance was
horrible even on quad 3 ghz xeon boxes with maxed out memory. For us
programmers, it also made the easy queries difficult and the hard
queries near impossible. 

Eric


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