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Hermes: An open-source document management system

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Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#71
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…

iManage (filesite, desksite etc) is popular in legal and is mature. I assume it’s pricey.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#72
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm one of the co-founders of FormKiQ. We had originally expected startups to work with Core (the free version), but based on feedback we're looking at some changes, including a startup program. Let me know if you'd like to discuss how this could work. Thanks!

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#73

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?

The hardest part of documents within a business is not producing documents but rather creating a useful library. Google Docs is a place where great documents go to die. Notion’s success (for example) is more about it making it possible to create a useable library of documents than it is about being an editor with neat widgets. I don’t know if Hermes is going to be particularly successful given it’s competing with thi…

I take your point. You said "creating", but I think you might mean "creating and maintaining". The editing / curation / reorganizing is quite important too. Related tasks include: editing, tagging, categorizing, verifying accuracy (and telling the audience this!), general updating, cross-linking, and retiring.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#75
post #65
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.

Sounds like an experiment worth trying. Have you?

Also, it sounds these ideas have been learned from many painful lessons?

IMO, document management's root problem can be well understood with behavioral economics: a nice library is a public good. Maintaining it is costly. More people need this to sink in.

So, with this realization, we should design accordingly, with _all_ necessary organizational and behavioral levers in place.

This is what social software means to me. ^

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#76
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…

It probably depends on what you trying to archive. I have some experience with FileNet. It worked quite well for over two decades but required some attention. But we had some volume (~150k pages scanned and CI pages per day) for the time and the system was highly customized. Today it is easier to accomplish the technical and regulatory requirements with the available systems. But for a larger volume, long archival times (20++ yrs) and guarantees for reliability and imputability it's still a task that require it's attention.

I've seen some inhouse developed system due to the high price tags, but these had there issues too. With long archival times I would always recommend something as "KISS" as possible, even for smaller environments. Supporting special features for a long time can we demanding task on its own.

One thing I'm missing especially is a standardized API like you have SMPT for email systems.

The same with file formats originally used for archival (e.g. PDF/A) have much to many revisions with too many features.

We had quite good success with conversation of complex data formats to TIFF (limiting to basic features of this format) or plain text at the time of the archival together with the original format.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#77

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?

The hardest part of documents within a business is not producing documents but rather creating a useful library. Google Docs is a place where great documents go to die. Notion’s success (for example) is more about it making it possible to create a useable library of documents than it is about being an editor with neat widgets. I don’t know if Hermes is going to be particularly successful given it’s competing with thi…

I have lost count the number of times I’ve searched for a doc in Google drive and found nothing.

It’s shockingly bad given that Google literally is a SEARCH company.

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#78

Full Text Search in Google Docs is a single reason enough for me to try this product. If they create document collections that can be hierarchically ordered, I will ditch Confluence and its million variations in a split second.

We hate Google drive’s search. Feel like there’s a product idea there?

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#79
post #78

Full Text Search in Google Docs is a single reason enough for me to try this product. If they create document collections that can be hierarchically ordered, I will ditch Confluence and its million variations in a split second.

We hate Google drive’s search. Feel like there’s a product idea there?

Oh absolutely, anybody who implements a nice wrapper on google drive with FTS and tagging and hierarchical ordering will be something I will strongly support my org to buy

Re: Hermes: An open-source document management system

#80
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…

> SharePoint is only nice if everything is Microsoft...

Respectfully, I’d never describe Sharepoint as nice.

It’s been hell since the first time I encountered it 15 years ago.

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