Re: [gentoo-user] Document management solution [possibly a bit off-topic...]

[Eric Crossman]

On Fri, 2005-09-30 at 10:36 +1200, Nick Rout wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 16:52:54 -0400 (EDT)
> A. Khattri wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, Steve [Gentoo] wrote:
> >
> > > Alfresco is what I'd have called a content management system - as
> > > opposed to a document management system.  I'm interested in managing
> > > archives of documents I have received from other people (in dead-tree
> > > format)...
> >
> > If there was something that scanned the document, performed OCR on it,
> > checked the OCR output and then built an electronic repository for you I'd
> > recommend it. Until then, Alfresco is the closest thing Ive seen that is
> > open source. If you're willing to do your own scanning and OCR'ing then it
> > will do the rest.
> >
> > BTW, I would call things like Mambo or Xaraya, content-management tools -
> > Alfresco is a slightly different kettle of fish.
>
> Yes I know what Steve is after, and I'd love to find a way. I was put
> off by Alfresco being called "Content Management" because all of the
> content management systems I have seen end up bioding something that
> resembles [name your favourite news website]
>
> A closer look at alfresco reveals that it does look more like what Steve (and I ) are after.
>
> I am a lawyer and I handle hundreds of documents every week, from email
> through pdf (both made from an electronic source and therefore has all
> the text available, and scanned) openoffice (one enlightened client!),
> word, excel, html, faxes, letters (on paper, ya know!) you name it
> someone will send me something in it!
>
> It'd be great to have a metadata system where I could give everything
> some keywords:
>
> client name, file number, matter number, subjects, useful as a
> precedent, useful case etc etc etc so that in future I can :
>
> pull up every document on my computer, my secretary's computer, my mail
> server (including attachments), my file server, my palm pilot, relating
> to a particular client
>
> pull up every document about company debentures
>
> find the case i downloaded and stored somewhere about liability of
> guarantors in a consumer credit loan
>
> find the seminar book for the seminar i went to on asome new area of
> law.
>
> find a letter written by Joe Bloggs sometime in 2003.
>
>
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > --
> > gentoo-user@g.o mailing list
>
> --
> Nick Rout <nick@×××××××.nz>
>

I'm not sure if what you're describing exists right now in the open
source world, but I can tell you that it certainly does in the
commercial world. I used to work in the "metadata" department for a
startup here in upstate NY, USA that built a web based application
targeting lawyers such as yourself. It was written in PHP/MySQL but the
database was being migrated to Oracle due to the rapid growth in the
database tables. 

Unfortunately though, in the migration to Oracle, they elected to create
a "dynamic" scheme to support adding custom metadata fields as requested
per client. It was great for flexibility but the performance was
horrible even on quad 3 ghz xeon boxes with maxed out memory. For us
programmers, it also made the easy queries difficult and the hard
queries near impossible. 

Eric


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