I was feeling like I would literally drown in paperwork. Stacks and stacks of unfiled documents. Statements, legal documents, mortgage paperwork, car loans, instructions, you name it.
I had been looking casually for years for a solution to paper clutter. I always felt like just a shared drive was somehow insufficient. Sure you can store things in folders and name them properly, but that’s not enough — for me, anyway.
I wanted something that I could scan directly into (over the network — it has to live on a server, not on my desktop), something that I could replicate file cabinet functionality without storing the paper.
I finally got around to putting focus on it. I looked at PaperMerge. I like the layout and responsiveness of PaperMerge, but when I got to messing with the import and API upload functionality, neither one of them worked despite following the somewhat convoluted instructions to a T. Then I looked at their support page, and it really feels like it’s just one person doing the development, and that one person might be a little bit overwhelmed. There were comments about completely rewriting a portion of it, and I didn’t want any part of that. However, in PaperMerge’s own materials, a comparison is made between PM and two other products, one of which is Mayan EDMS.
I gave it a shot. I built an Ubuntu server VM, followed the detailed yet streamlined installation instructions, and it worked on the first try. I messed with the API, and it responded as expected. And then I found the import feature, and it was everything I wanted and more. I set up a Samba share on the server for the scanner (a Ricoh all-in-one) to drop files into, and started scanning. Documents started flowing into the EDMS. I created cabinets and assigned documents to cabinets. I renamed documents. Then I realized that all of those documents weren’t just being imported, they were also being OCR’d. With no additional effort on my part, I can now text search documents I scanned.
It’s not perfect. The interface gets a little bit clunky and less responsive once you have a page full of documents to display. I hope to dig in and find out of there’s a way to make that more snappy, maybe disable the previews, or reduce the number of documents per screen or something. I went to the website to see if there was a support forum — I guess I won’t be contacting THEM for support, holy crap. They want $699 per MONTH for support. It feels like a great product, but I’ll keep my eyes peeled for community support or just dig into the internals myself. Or maybe I’ll buy the book and see if I learn anything from that.
One thing I’m really curious about is whether it’s possible to have it automatically categorize/”cabinet” new documents for me during the OCR stage, based on keywords. That’d be amazing.
Oh, and it supports LDAP. That’s cool. I don’t think Papermerge does.