How can I manage my paper documents using my computer?

January 9, 2005 12:42 PM

Document management. I get a lot of paper documents (bills, letters, invoices, etc) and want to catalog them digitally. I want a program that scans a sheet (or multiple sheets), turns them into PDF and catalogs them (title, category, and maybe even del.icio.us style tags). Acrobat will do the first two stages, but I want something that does the cataloging too. Any suggestions? OCR not needed whatsoever.
posted by wackybrit to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Mambo (CMS)
posted by AlexReynolds at 1:03 PM on January 9, 2005

Thanks, but I read all the FAQs and articles on their site and it doesn't seem appropriate at all. I need an application that runs on a PC, interfaces with a scanner (via TWAIN, I assume), and catalogs and lets me view PDFs on the screen. Mambo appears to be more of a Web based text content management system, rather than a paperless office system.
posted by wackybrit at 1:26 PM on January 9, 2005

Mambo add-ons add cataloging of more than just text, in particular, Docman adds document management. Mambo may do more that what you need, but it does what you want. You can run it within Cygwin, if you need to run it within Windows.
posted by AlexReynolds at 1:35 PM on January 9, 2005

Actually, Mambo doesn't control scanners. Nevermind.
posted by AlexReynolds at 1:43 PM on January 9, 2005

PaperPort
posted by Deepspace at 2:18 PM on January 9, 2005

AlexReynolds: I'll definitely bear Mambo in mind in future, perhaps if it requires sharing the documents over a network, which I think Mambo would be good at. Unfortunately, in this case, it's for someone who's not very computer savvy, so they just want some regular Windows software.

Deepspace: That looks really good, thanks! Those guys didn't seem to come up when I was doing searches for document management, though I saw plenty of the enterprise level guys :-)
posted by wackybrit at 2:26 PM on January 9, 2005

We use paperport at work for scanning and OCR, but its built as a complete document management solution so I think it would fit you well.
posted by madmanz123 at 8:09 PM on January 9, 2005

This could also be the job for a "Media Management System" like iView MediaPro.

I use it for my photos (since it allows you to add arbitrary amounts of tags and metadata), but it works equally well for PDFs.

You can even do long time archival to CD (and it'll keep track of which documents/media objects are on what CD).
posted by Laen at 8:57 PM on January 9, 2005

Check out Digital File Cabinet from Runningman Software. I used this product for awhile. and was happy with it. Windows only, I think.
posted by tayknight at 9:49 AM on January 10, 2005

I've also looked for something to do this, and I came across FileNotes, which appears to let you tag any file in your system with keywords for easy retrieval. Haven't tried it yet but looks very promising.
posted by Tubes at 11:10 AM on January 10, 2005