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Paperless Office Solutions Under Linux?
sholgate asks: "I've been asked to look into implementing a paperless office under Linux. We receive emails, letters, word documents, PDFs etc and need a way of converting and storing them in a way that provides easy searching and accessing. We've been offered two Windows solutions, one based on Canon ScanFile and the other using Lotus Notes. My office went with Canon back in 1995 and now has a load of unreadable CDs as the original software was DOS based doesn't seem to work under Win98/XP. We now face paying for conversion to the new system plus new license fees. We are primarily Linux/Unix based here so Windows is inconvenient and history has shown that a closed product is not a good solution. I favour having a directory browsing system based on thumbnails (such as nautilus or konqueror) and searching with grep, but I can see the benefits of more complex systems that store a database of search terms etc. Have other Slashdotters thought about paperless offices? What answers did you come up with?"
Why would you want an office without paper? What are we going to do with all those extra trees? Columbo always used a pen and paper....
Every attempt I've ever seen to go "paperless office" have been failures - if all you end up with is a set of unreadable CD's a few years later, you've done very well so far. Personally, I think a paperless office is about as useful as a paperless toilet.
-John