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?"

Comments

Zope

[jalet]

Zope might be a good start for you :

http://www.zope.org

HTDIG

[Skord]

htdig has support for msoffice docs and pdf's, and sounds a little cheaper than a google search appliance (although I'm sure a shiny yellow solution does a good job).

I've never used a modem in linux, so I have no idea what the telephony capabilities are.

I tend to agree with most of the replies here however. I tried my hardest to save a tree here and there and the other system administrator here prints EVERYTHING out. Until you can fire all the idiots and be left working alone, I'd skip on the "paperless office" idea and spend more time working on projects.

Printer Ink = $$$

[awerg]

HP makes 40% of their money in Printer cartridges. Printer stuff is consumable. That means I use it up and buy more.

I have spent more on printer paper and ink than all my computer hardware put together in the last 5 years.

Paperless office is a dream.

Re:Printer Ink = $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

To show how times have not changed. When I worked for a government agency in Canada in 1985 our annual budget for printing (we had a separate budget for printouts from our data systems) was in the order of $85,000. Oh, that was just for paper, doesn't even include ribbons or printer maintenance.

Solutions

[dth]

There are a few solutions. Basically what you're looking for is a nice front end to a virtual filesystem, with some bells and whistles.

Take a bunch of paper, scan it, index it, file it. Additionally, do the same for non-scanned work (email, doc, pdf, ...)

Windows wise, Doctrieve (now Redmap networks, look for a similar product) is a good solution. Theres a range of products, all providing more or less similar functionality (some more bells here, some less whistles there...) Non-windows wise, theres an opensource one called DocMgr which provides similar functionality, albeit a bit immature.

OCR is really the big issue here with scanned work. I've only dabbled with OCR under linux (using GOCR) with limited success. Bad OCR == bad indexing == useless searching.

I'm currently in the process of writing something similar targeted for the higher-end market. If you're interested in testing or evaulating, drop me an email.

You sure it was Lotus Notes they offered?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it was more likely Lotus' product Domino.Doc, which has some very nice document revision, tracking, and indexing abilities. I think it was also tied in to Adobe Acrobat Distiller, and thus generated PDF files for everything you had in the system.

Domino does run on Linux (and damned well). In fact, the newest version, 6.0, just went public on Monday of this week. Lotus has a strong history of supporting Unix platforms with their server product, but I'm not sure if Domino.Doc works/is available for the Linux platform.

Domino.Doc is designed to work completely from the web, but the audience I've seen it used for were more the parts of corporations that had long lists of document handling requirements (like legal, HR, trademarking, etc). Might be overkill for your situation.

The key thing here is templates, and a database to store things in. That breaks down when you start getting in to presentations (like PowerPoint), and further breaks down when you get into spreadsheets (because frankly, if you can use a template, then you should just put the spreadsheet into a database somewhere).

I'd give Lotus a look, because they have a good client that runs on both the new Mac OS X, and on Windows platforms. The servers come in a variety of flavors, but Linux is on the list. Surf the Lotus forums at http://domino.lotus.com and see what you turn up.

Re:Google search appliance

[BornInASmallTown]

Yikes! Having evaluated Google along with many other search vendors and open source search tools for the enterprise, I can say that this would be a bad idea long term. The Google search appliance:

• is closed
  
• requires an ongoing fee for no new functionality
  
• has a hard limit to the number of indexable docs
  
• can't really do anything that open source tools do

I would recommend trying a combination of an open source search engine like Lucene along with its contributed filters (PDFs and other document types). You can also use open office document filters for MS Office docs where necessary.