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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?"
Forget about buying "paperless office" software. This is a dumb idea that only serves to filter money into some unimaginative software company's pocket. If you need to save your corespondence, save it to a directory(folder). Make a rule or standard for filing and naming these documents - hell, in the old days companies would hire 'secrataries' to do this sort of thing - they didnt have to be intelligent or usefull either - just organized. The cost of hiring a secratary wasnt too bad either - still isnt. The problem with these "paperless office" or "document management" systems is that: 1. They are overkill. 2. They are usually proprietary 3. Its one more thing for the average employee to f*ck up. 4. New employees will have to learn this system 5. It costs money 6. If you have a problem with it, you better hope the software provider is capable of fixing it 7. It makes your data less mobile - If you decide to go with another system 10 years down the road, you will have to figure out a way to translate the data from the old system to the new system. My Advice, K.I.S.S. - Keep it simple stupid!
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