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

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.