Today Vikas, my techie friend, called me up to discuss he dad's need to manage a few thousands of documents that have accumulated over a period of 10 years or more. All these documents are important and most are legal in nature that needs to be crossed referred.
Vikas being a techie, like me, fell into the technology trap. We get carried away by the cutting edge technologies, without caring for the problem at hand. Once we get into the cutting edge, we bleed our resources dry :)
So, he saw my logic, when I told him that I had tried and failed to implement such state-of-the-art document management software for small enterprises. even these small enterprise, who may have a part time computer maintainer; is not equipped to maintain a sophisticated (read complex) document management system. Best is to use an appropriate technology.
Go for an HP scanner (Don't go for all-in-one types, just a simple scanner). Use its document scanning software, that has image to text capability. Use it to convert the scanned documents into PDF formatted files. These file are search-able using free PDF reader from Adobe.
Store them in a hiarchical directory structure, if you need to annotate use
OpenOffice.org software (its free and open source) to create a master document that links other pdf documents, and save it also as a PDF.
Archive these files in a DVD. Anytime you wish to search, just open the adobe pdf reader and search the scanned documents stored inside the DVD as pdf file.
Thus you don't need a system admin to maintain the archive. But if your need grows with the growth of your organization, then use
Alfresco , also an open source Java based document management system. Its best of the breeds. I think I will take this up in another post.
(c)
www.Ashish.Banerjee.name
