[CVALE] DocMGR

[Kristian Hoffmann]

Hi,

Terry's post reminded me that there are a few of you out there trying to
make a buck administering Linux installations for business clients.
That said, there's an open source document management system called
DocMGR that seems to be pretty promising.  I have a couple of clients
that have spent many thousands of dollars on similar commercial.  In
most cases, the monetary difference is made up by promises in OCR
accuracy, which never seem to be met.

Anyway, I gave DocMGR a shot in our office under a couple of different
scenarios.  Without too much trouble, I had our HylaFAX server
automatically importing incoming faxes as PDFs.  I also was able to get
a networked MFD to email scanned documents as PDFs, that were then
imported into DocMGR using a nifty PDF-attachment-stripping perl script
that I wrote (which I'd be happy to share if anyone has a use for it).
There are a few bits in DocMGR that I think could be a little more
flexible, such as the currently fixed number of "custom fields" that can
be stored per document.  But overall, it seems to be quite capable of
converting the average business into a "paperless" one.

Unfortunately, the biggest hurdle was not technical, but social.
Although it took me less than a week to install, test, and integrate
DocMGR, the resulting procedure and policy changes, along with the
accompanied training, were probably going to take at least a month to
accomplish.  For that reason, the project was put on hold pending
previously scheduled programming.

For those of you using Linux in a business environment, I'd suggest
taking a look at DocMGR.  If anyone has other open source alternatives
to DocMGR, I'd love to hear about them.

Regards,

-- 
Kristian Hoffmann
Fire2Wire System Administrator
khoff at fire2wire.com