Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hermes: An open-source document management system

hashicorp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 172 posts

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#61

Post by tremon »

revskill wrote: post #32
frostysocks wrote: post #31

The single, killer feature I'm looking for in a document management system (besides collaborative environment that we're used to from gdocs) is a way to stamp versions and have those be reviewed independently, with git like diffs across them. Think gerrit for docs.

Then a webui over git itself is better solution ?

For official documents, you want more than just change tracking. You also want formal approvals and per-document versioning, and repository-wide tags and Acked-By: lines just don't cut it.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#62

Post by senectus1 »

imran-iq wrote: post #28
kkoncevicius wrote: post #20

Maybe a slow day for me, but from the homepage and video it isn't clear - does it do anything that cannot be achieved with plain Google Docs?

It seems like it manages some metadata around google docs, but google docs is doing all the heavy lifting (creating/editing/sharing documents). Which begs the question, why? By titling itself as a document management system I would assume it would be something like paperless-ngx[0] or mayan edms[1]. The latter of which has a built in workflow system[2]. But by being tied to google docs you can't really self host the…

I just put up a paperless-ngx system at home in docker.

its amazingly simple and easy to use. It's rapidly becoming my fav self hosted service. Now you get my backlog of documents scanned and destroyed.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#63

Post by satya71 »

formkiqmike wrote: post #12
croo wrote: post #2

I read through the project as I worked with several document storage solution before and still lookin for an ideal solution. Filenet is horribly overpriced from IBM, Alfresco looks nice but have serious performance issues (my experience is from 2020), SharePoint is only nice if everything is Microsoft... Apache Oak is an abandoned project with a lot of things that seems to be in it but didnt get finished (e.g. CMIS p…

If you're not adverse to cloud file storage, FormKiQ Core (I'm a co-founder) is an open source document management system that runs on AWS and is designed to allow custom integrations. https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core

This looks very nice. I wish the price point for Formkiq Pro were a little more palatable for a startup.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#64

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Alfresco was supposed to be the OSS alternative to documentum/stellent/etc closed source systems.

It was basically a freemium model, which means that a complete OSS solution is out of reach.

This basically looks like the same thing. I guess Hashicorp is slightly better at OSS, but... I dunno.

A DMS needs:

1) storage (duh)

2) metadata

3) permissions enforcement

4) search / indexing

5) rendering to pdf and pdf signing services

6) workflow engine for document lifecycles, versioning, approvals, rendering

7) a bunch of virtual filesystem interfaces like CMIS, maybe JCR, webDAV, SFTP

8) a decent web client

9) a decent integration API

It's quite the laundry list. A "modern" one should probably be cloud-aware (so docs can be stored in cloud object stores, utilize interface with the various semi-document features of S3 or other object stores, etc.

IMO it should also be implemented perhaps as a non-cloud self-hosted option atop Cassandra or some other scheme with good global replication and scale.

Honestly I don't understand why a consortium of governments and businesses with high regulatory requirements don't simply get together and develop a common platform for this. They'd rather give billions of dollars to Documentum or Oracle. If they want support, SOMEONE will provide paid support, like Postgres

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#65

Post by cduzz »

tnolet wrote: post #11

Sounds like Mitchel got distracted. I get it, internal company wiki entropy is a hard problem.

Every 24 months make the existing wiki read only, make a new (different / incompatible) wiki and make users copy what they want to the new one.

After 2 epochs make the legacy^2 wiki available only upon request that is active only for a week at a time.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#66

Post by xpe »

deepsun wrote: post #57
denysvitali wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not mature, but if you fancy contributing I've started DMS.rs a couple of years ago: https://github.com/DMSrs/dmsrs It's written in Rust but I never managed to continue the project sadly :(

I can't help but notice the fact that language choice is put first. For document-organizer almost any language would work fine, there's no need for super-optimized memory management. Much more important would be language+ecosystem security and speed of safe development, IMHO.

> For document-organizer almost any language would work fine...

Maybe yes, maybe no. Despite what many say, when digging into a specific domain and topic, I don't find "almost any language" is approximately equal when it comes to the effort and joy of building and maintaining a project.

(A theoretical explanation: It would be statistically very interesting if this were the case, since that level of uniformity would not be expected across all domains and topics.)

(Personally, people have particular preferences of varying intensity. Once a software developer has learned ~5ish diverse languages, I tend to think languages, their ecosystems, and their community are viewed with more nuance.)

Also, open source projects tend to involve a whole broad set of motivations.

Thanks to the author for sharing this! I aspire to have the same gratitude even if it was written in Cold Fusion.

> ... there's no need for super-optimized memory management.

This is not the only benefit of Rust.

Note: I can see hints of constructive criticism in the above comment... (But what are the specifics? Probably not rewrite in another language, methinks. To change the README?) ... so I'm offering constructive criticism as well. I can also see what might be armchair quarterbacking and overlooking of personal motivations.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#67

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

faitswulff wrote: post #43
PenguinCoder wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utterly misleading to call this self hosted document management then, and defeats the purpose. Here's a front end to Google docs you can host, but you still need access to the internet, Google docs, and Google sees all your docs anyways. No thanks.

Full text search also provided by Algolia, so you’ll likely need an Algolia API key and account as well.

wat? ...what does Algolia do that Lucene can't?

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#68

Post by waynesonfire »

croo wrote: post #2

I read through the project as I worked with several document storage solution before and still lookin for an ideal solution. Filenet is horribly overpriced from IBM, Alfresco looks nice but have serious performance issues (my experience is from 2020), SharePoint is only nice if everything is Microsoft... Apache Oak is an abandoned project with a lot of things that seems to be in it but didnt get finished (e.g. CMIS p…

I moved to owncloud.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#69

Post by jll29 »

mattbee wrote: post #22
corytheboyd wrote: post #14

I don't know what it is about the name Hermes for software folk, it's apparently irresistible. I've heard the name used by three different companies for internal projects just in my own circle in the last year. This concludes my useless comment. This is just a joke, that you learn what Hermes means at one company and have to unlearn that when the next Hermes enters your life :p

To me it's the University of Cambridge's email server (RIP 1993-2021). I see a few alums keep use their hermes ID as they a username outside of Cambridge (like mjg59).

Rest in peace, hermes service.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#70

Post by ddyevf635372 »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #17

> Hermes uses Golang for the backend and Ember.js for the front end. It uses a PostgreSQL database for storage and Algolia to power its search capabilities. It also leverages several Google Workspace services for creating and modifying documents, sending email, etc. Great. 50 million incompatible parts combined with duct tape that is no better than Jira workflows with Google Docs, and less flexible. I can't wait to s…

Ember.js is an excellent choice. Check out the codebase how clean and easy to follow. It is just beautiful as always.
Post reply on HN