Paperless office... document management ? (High speed scanner)

[Armelius Cameron]

On Friday, April 01, 2011 11:58:10 am Linuxguy123 wrote:
> While scanning most of the paper in our office will eliminate the
> physical paper, how do we manage the documents once they are on a
> computer ?

With discipline :)

I have been doing something similar. I put the scanned documents (PDFs) the 
same way you'd put the physical documents: into a set of directories 
(folders). So I would scan a batch of document that would go into a directory, 
say the bank statement from a certain bank, do a batch renaming to follow my 
convention (e.g. bankname_MM_YYYY.pdf), and put them in the apropriate 
directory. No need for complicated database. Then I'd do one at a time as new 
document comes in say every month or so. 

I can't search by keyword (that would need you to OCR the document, build a 
searchable index, etc), but I know where I'd put anything on the directories, 
so I never need to 'search'. 

So I pretty much have paperless office. Some paper copies exist only for 
redundancy sake; everything is on the hard drive on my home server, encrypted, 
and backed-up to an off-site location daily. Another nice thing is I can access 
any document I need from anywhere as long as there's internet connection. 

> However, it would be really nice to take it a step further and tie a
> ToDo list and scheduler into the system and maybe even an accounting
> system.  Ie, we scan a receipt into the system and then enter the
> accounting transaction for the receipt and tie the two together.  Or
> create a ToDo item with a link to the image of the document that needs
> to be handled.

Some Todo list program allow you to attach / link  a document to the item. KDE 
korganizer can do that, for example.

AC