CentOS - Sep 2007 - Document Scanning and Storage

I'd like to start scanning our boxed up documents. I'd say about 30,000
files total.
Mostly to eliminate the boxes of paper we have. 
I'd like to scan them, store them, Have some sort of index, and be able to
retrieve them on multiple machines. I think PDF would be the desired format.
I'd like be able to set some permissions as well. (not a deal breaker...)
I've searched Sourceforge, and have seen knowledgetree, myDMS, contineo,
etc, but really would like to hear from someone that is using something
similar.
Of course, I use Centos, so.....
Thanks,
Dennis


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Depending on how complex a management system you want you could write a small
custom management system using only a few php files and a db backend (I would
suggest postgres).

Geoff

Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Dennis McLeod" <dmcleod at foranyauto.com>

Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:08:50 
To:<centos at centos.org>
Subject: [CentOS] Document Scanning and Storage


I'd like to start scanning our boxed up documents. I'd say about 30,000
files total.
Mostly to eliminate the boxes of paper we have.
I'd like to scan them, store them, Have some sort of index, and be able to
retrieve them on multiple machines. I think PDF would be the desired format.
I'd like be able to set some permissions as well. (not a deal breaker...)
I've searched Sourceforge, and have seen knowledgetree, myDMS, contineo,
etc, but really would like to hear from someone that is using something
similar.
Of course, I use Centos, so.....
Thanks,
Dennis



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CentOS at centos.org
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On Wed, Sep 12, 2007, Dennis McLeod wrote:
>I'd like to start scanning our boxed up documents. I'd say about
30,000
>files total.
>Mostly to eliminate the boxes of paper we have. 
>I'd like to scan them, store them, Have some sort of index, and be able
to
>retrieve them on multiple machines. I think PDF would be the desired format.
>I'd like be able to set some permissions as well. (not a deal
breaker...)
>I've searched Sourceforge, and have seen knowledgetree, myDMS, contineo,
>etc, but really would like to hear from someone that is using something
>similar.
This is not a trivial operation.

I was a principal in a company that developed a Linux based system to do
this about 8 years ago, with a product good enough that it made national
news when Bill Gates' home town of Medina Washington bought a system from
us, not a Windows based system.

The scanning can be done pretty nicely using a scanner with and ADF
(Automatic Document Feeder), and xsane has the ability to number pages
skipping numbers so one can can both sides of two-sided documents in two
passes.  The biggest issue is probably doing the OCR conversion to get text
for indexing.  We used proprietary software from Vividata for this which
worked pretty well.  I haven't looked seriously at gocr or other open
source OCR software for Linux so don't know how well it would work.

I've been using the ReadIris OCR software on Macs recently, which has some
very nice features such as handling multi-page PDF files well.

If I were to tackle this today, I would probably do it using Plone since it
handles things like indexing and organization well.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

Breathe fire, slay dragons, and take chances. Failure is temporary, regret
is eternal.

1) Lease a good copier/scanner that handles large scanning capacity and can scan
to PDF.

2) Get a good batch OCR program that will take an image-based PDF and create a
PDF text overlay (so the PDF can be full-text indexed).

3) Buy a good document management program, preferably one that can do
drag-n-drop
document sorting/indexing.

You can get all 3 from Ricoh, they have a very good copier/scanner with a
proprietary but easy-to-use document management system (based on FreeBSD) that
is completely web based and completely integrates with the copier/scanner. A
good product for a SMB.

-Ross


> _____________________________________________ 
> From: 	centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] 
On Behalf Of Dennis McLeod
> Sent:	Wednesday, September 12, 2007 7:09 PM
> To:	centos at centos.org
> Subject:	[CentOS] Document Scanning and Storage
> 
> I'd like to start scanning our boxed up documents. I'd say about
30,000 files total.
> Mostly to eliminate the boxes of paper we have. 
> I'd like to scan them, store them, Have some sort of index, and be able
to retrieve them on multiple machines. I think PDF would be the desired format.
> I'd like be able to set some permissions as well. (not a deal
breaker> ...> )
> I've searched Sourceforge, and have seen knowledgetree, myDMS,
contineo, etc, but really would like to hear from someone that is using
something similar.
> Of course, I use Centos, so> ...> ..
> Thanks,
> Dennis
> 
>  << File: ATT1682181.txt >> 
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