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 protocol or usable documentation).
This Hermes seems nice and being open source is a great thing but it's still in alpha, do not support custom file types and very Google oriented.
If anyone has a good mature alternative I'm all ears.
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.
If you use it in a way that you don't know it exists (e.g., Teams as the UI, open files directly into Office apps, collaborate with others in real time both in Teams and in the documents themselves, where Teams channels are SharePoint sites but you don't know that), then Sharepoint is pretty slick. Just, whatever you do, don't poke it. Let the Teams UI manage it. If things get wonky, recreate Teams and Channels, Microsoft iterates the defaults and integration wiring, but doesn't reach back and rewire existing things.
It's the only way I'm aware of to have a modern tech like office productivity suite that's genuinely compliant with security and compliance regulations applying to the most heavily regulated industries. Google's offering is not that. You can get there with mashups of other tools if you start with a compliant (but clunky) groupware live discussion offering and identity aware role based access to a versioned collaborative document store.
Most firms are not required to have this level of regulated compliance, so most firms don't have to put up with the downsides. If you do, it is the least worst.
To be honest, I just went for a small business subscription of Office 365 for personal use, which also gives you mail with a custom domain. SharePoint is decent enough when accessed from the mobile OneDrive App and offers out of the box indexing + OCR of images and pdfs. Also their document scanner is good enough to quickly get rid of all paper coming in...
Office365 would be nice if OneDrive were not crippled with a 1TB data ceiling before "additional storage" expenses, per user, render the use of Office365 too expensive for many a small business.
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.
I stood up a demo of Mayan a year ago and played around with it. It was very nice. The Customer ended up going with a commercial offering so I didn’t spend any more time with it. For a small environment where someone could fill the Mayan subject matter expert role I think it would work well.
Considering it’s only one person working on it, Mayan is pretty impressive.
However, support isn’t great. I’ve been stuck on a 7 year old version because the upgrade path past 2.8 is very murky and I’ve been unable to figure it out to date. Older versions of the docs have just vanished from the internet. There was a Tim when the lead had health issues and it halted development for several months (glad he recovered though, seems fine now, but it all depends on the one person)
It’s stuck running on an Ubuntu 16.04 VM that I can’t update and is heavily firewalled because of that.
If I were starting over I’d be using paperless-my instead.
Note this is for personal use, I scan everything and destroy the documents but it amounts to maybe 10–20 documents a week at most.
We are starting to move to M-Files (https://www.m-files.com/). I haven't used it yet, but it was evaluated quite carefully (by some people who usually do a good job).
We've relied for a long time on a home grown document management system, which is simple and excellent. Unfortunately it's built on Lotus Notes, which just isn't sustainable forever.
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.
I might be showing my age or bias, but that domain fires red-flags in my brain. Like freedownloadmanager.com kind of naming (ironically, FDM was a really good program back in the day).
Check out https://www.nuxeo.com I’m running their open source solution using docker on my nas. I’m truthfully not using it too much, but it’s an option
Happy to be be proven wrong as I haven't used this specific service, but the quality of Zoho mail-related offerings is so laughingly bad that I wouldn't touch any of their other products.
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
I would add 10) document review tools and management.
Authors in larger organizations are more editors than authors, and documents require submissions and detailed reviews by many different people. A management feature would be summarizing comments (RID - review item discrepancies, AI - action items, etc) and status of each comment; plus document deltas; plus document delta markup (change-bars in the margins of presentation versions like PDF).
Another feature would be support of document hierarchies, where changes to one doc invoke functions/procedures/status changes on subordinate docs.
Another feature would be tagging a set of matching documents as a "release" set.
The enterprise products support much of this. And the price is not small.
Indeed this laundry list is a great description of the services that are needed to manage documents. There's probably one more to add to the list (document generation, i.e. starting from a template like a generic NDA or an employment offer and generating a new document by inserting data like company name, expiration date, etc, into the template).
Since this thread talks a lot about how to provide these features on top of Google Drive and Google Docs, you can have a look at my company AODocs (www.aodocs.com) which provides a cloud-based Documentum/Alfresco/etc alternative, using Google Drive as the underlying file storage.
> 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.
This is a great recipe for billions expended on a system that should cost a few million at most.
> 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
Or have a cooperative of businesses write the necessary software.
In Germany we have vaguely similar thing going on with DATEV: Basically all tax advisors are members of the DATEV cooperative if they want to use their software suite, which for all intents and purposes is able to implement absolutely anything a tax advisor is required to do while at the same time implement all regulatory requirements such as confidentiality, archival rules, reporting, logging etc.
In my opinion there should be a similar thing going on for all industry to implement the regulations required by GoBD, GDPR and so on.
The problem with versioning & management systems for docs is that you need the process to drive the adoption. Getting people to version, approve, and fully manage a document database is the hard part. Many companies do not even adequately document - they just send information in a Slack/Teams message and nothing is written down for later (this is why startups like Glean exist: https://www.glean.com/). There are massive companies that exist without this organization layer and just whip up Notion/365/Office docs with the expectation the documentation will get lost and become irrelevant very soon (even if a search feature existed).
The point I'm (badly) trying to make it is that my intuition tells me very few companies will actually pick up and adopt software like this. If they do, there might be many nuances in their process and they might find the versioning easier to do with simple duplicate Notion/Office/GDocs parent templates.
This is painfully accurate. I setup Alfresco for our company, and I used the versioning tools etc. while doing documentation.
A few years after I moved out of documentation I went back to Alfresco to download a document, only to find none of the tools still in use. jessica_edit_v2_final.pdf type documents all over my beautiful server!
Nobody uses versioning to work on document. It is too annoying and merge barely works if at all anyway. Trying to convince people to put work in progress document in a DMS is a lost battle. Sharepoint via Teams might happen but that's stricly for the shared folders and cooperative edition functionality.
A DMS is very good for storing reference documents however.
The only company I worked for where DMS was really successful, there was someone in charge of managing it full time. The only documents which could go in had to have been reviewed and signed by the relevant persons. Documents were considered as not existing unless they were in the DMS and producing said documents was a significant part of our objectives as they were contractually mandated by our customers.
This had the nice side effect of making retrieving documents very easy.
This is typically what happens unless the users of the software really need it. For example the concept of folders is really outdated, but good luck getting people to use a good tagging system to replace it.
Law firms are heavy users of a DMS, especially versioning. Insurance companies use it too, but probably not versioning. So there are customers, but quite specific.
Most people have only interacted with file management systems, which are far more basic in their functionality.
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 things like Notion, but in principle, a library for Google Docs is a great and valuable project for teams using Google Docs.
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.
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 important parts
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.
As a somewhat heavy user of google drive, a better UI and organization system would be worth a boatload. Google docs makes it very easy to create decent docs. Good luck finding them a year later, though.
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.
Google Docs actually has this and hides it behind terrible UI/UX. You can "Name this version" of a doc, and there's a separate page to view versions (from which you can name versions as well).
The diffing isn't there, or at least not to the degree that code review tools offer.
I'm not sure the feature has evolved in years either. Definitely feels like one of those things a Google engineer threw into production one day, and it's never been considered again.
Do you mean document control, or diff on text contents?
For plain text, diff is do-able, but I don't know if comparing two PDFs can involve a detailed "diff" vs. a checksum, since the text could be the same but there's a change in layout, an image, etc.
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.
This reminds me a lot of the NY Times' Library project: https://github.com/nytimes/library. You use an editing environment that people are familiar with (google docs), and you build organizational and workflow stuff around it. Library rendered the document content itself with a link to edit (favoring the reader use case), whereas Hermes embeds the google docs UI.
The lack of code blocks in google docs makes it tough for a centralized document repository for an engineering org. For companies using Quip it could work really well...except that I don't think quip lets you embed the editor like that.
Everything that's been built so far for Hermes looks cool. My personal opinion is that it'll need more UX iteration for it to really take off.
Although they are in general quite bad, in my local area they are surprisingly good - for one reason - that specific delivery driver has significant local knowledge.
Getting the right staff in the right place sometimes makes a big difference.
I would pay him, but I never seen him. When he finds the house at all he puts the parcel at the baby buggy of my neighbor or directly in the paper collection bin.
Edit and view pages as a normal markdown wiki. But the backend is just a git repository of markdown files so you can also just use your text editor and git pull/push. Usable by any novice but with the ideal power user interface.
Readit News
This Hermes seems nice and being open source is a great thing but it's still in alpha, do not support custom file types and very Google oriented.
If anyone has a good mature alternative I'm all ears.
I am a committer and PMC member in the project, so I may be biased.
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.
Respectfully, I’d never describe Sharepoint as nice.
It’s been hell since the first time I encountered it 15 years ago.
It's the only way I'm aware of to have a modern tech like office productivity suite that's genuinely compliant with security and compliance regulations applying to the most heavily regulated industries. Google's offering is not that. You can get there with mashups of other tools if you start with a compliant (but clunky) groupware live discussion offering and identity aware role based access to a versioned collaborative document store.
Most firms are not required to have this level of regulated compliance, so most firms don't have to put up with the downsides. If you do, it is the least worst.
All of them have different levels of pain.
My use case with CMS is business related. I'm looking for a solution that can
handle millions of documents and folders,
versioning files,
handle metadata to the saved files(types),
be able to search between documents fast,
has a standard protocol or at least a nice API(nice==documented),
able to handle java transactions (xa) and
has a UI for manual testing
Self hosted option
https://www.resourcespace.com/
Tired looking design, forced 'Book a demo' (why? Just give me the damn product) nonsense, still using SVN for their opensource version, etc.
It might be a great package but most people will never know with the lack of demo and red flags all over the place.
It's written in Rust but I never managed to continue the project sadly :(
[1] https://www.mayan-edms.com/
However, support isn’t great. I’ve been stuck on a 7 year old version because the upgrade path past 2.8 is very murky and I’ve been unable to figure it out to date. Older versions of the docs have just vanished from the internet. There was a Tim when the lead had health issues and it halted development for several months (glad he recovered though, seems fine now, but it all depends on the one person)
It’s stuck running on an Ubuntu 16.04 VM that I can’t update and is heavily firewalled because of that.
If I were starting over I’d be using paperless-my instead.
Note this is for personal use, I scan everything and destroy the documents but it amounts to maybe 10–20 documents a week at most.
We've relied for a long time on a home grown document management system, which is simple and excellent. Unfortunately it's built on Lotus Notes, which just isn't sustainable forever.
Deleted Comment
https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core
SharePoint had better search than Nuxeo, for instance.
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
Authors in larger organizations are more editors than authors, and documents require submissions and detailed reviews by many different people. A management feature would be summarizing comments (RID - review item discrepancies, AI - action items, etc) and status of each comment; plus document deltas; plus document delta markup (change-bars in the margins of presentation versions like PDF).
Another feature would be support of document hierarchies, where changes to one doc invoke functions/procedures/status changes on subordinate docs.
Another feature would be tagging a set of matching documents as a "release" set.
The enterprise products support much of this. And the price is not small.
This is a great recipe for billions expended on a system that should cost a few million at most.
Or have a cooperative of businesses write the necessary software.
In Germany we have vaguely similar thing going on with DATEV: Basically all tax advisors are members of the DATEV cooperative if they want to use their software suite, which for all intents and purposes is able to implement absolutely anything a tax advisor is required to do while at the same time implement all regulatory requirements such as confidentiality, archival rules, reporting, logging etc.
In my opinion there should be a similar thing going on for all industry to implement the regulations required by GoBD, GDPR and so on.
The point I'm (badly) trying to make it is that my intuition tells me very few companies will actually pick up and adopt software like this. If they do, there might be many nuances in their process and they might find the versioning easier to do with simple duplicate Notion/Office/GDocs parent templates.
https://www.glean.com/pricing is the worst ‘pricing’ page I’ve ever seen XD
A few years after I moved out of documentation I went back to Alfresco to download a document, only to find none of the tools still in use. jessica_edit_v2_final.pdf type documents all over my beautiful server!
A DMS is very good for storing reference documents however.
The only company I worked for where DMS was really successful, there was someone in charge of managing it full time. The only documents which could go in had to have been reviewed and signed by the relevant persons. Documents were considered as not existing unless they were in the DMS and producing said documents was a significant part of our objectives as they were contractually mandated by our customers.
This had the nice side effect of making retrieving documents very easy.
Law firms are heavy users of a DMS, especially versioning. Insurance companies use it too, but probably not versioning. So there are customers, but quite specific.
Most people have only interacted with file management systems, which are far more basic in their functionality.
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 things like Notion, but in principle, a library for Google Docs is a great and valuable project for teams using Google Docs.
It’s shockingly bad given that Google literally is a SEARCH company.
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 important parts
---
0: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
1: https://gitlab.com/mayan-edms/mayan-edms
2: https://docs.mayan-edms.com/chapters/workflows.html
No thanks.
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.
Google Docs are the books. Hermes is the library.
Deleted Comment
Think gerrit for docs.
The diffing isn't there, or at least not to the degree that code review tools offer.
I'm not sure the feature has evolved in years either. Definitely feels like one of those things a Google engineer threw into production one day, and it's never been considered again.
https://www.craft.do
For plain text, diff is do-able, but I don't know if comparing two PDFs can involve a detailed "diff" vs. a checksum, since the text could be the same but there's a change in layout, an image, etc.
The lack of code blocks in google docs makes it tough for a centralized document repository for an engineering org. For companies using Quip it could work really well...except that I don't think quip lets you embed the editor like that.
Everything that's been built so far for Hermes looks cool. My personal opinion is that it'll need more UX iteration for it to really take off.
https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/12/format-displ...
Getting the right staff in the right place sometimes makes a big difference.
Sacrificing one such bill with every delivery magically makes Hermes minions much more reliable.
Same applies to all the others.
https://github.com/gollum/gollum
Edit and view pages as a normal markdown wiki. But the backend is just a git repository of markdown files so you can also just use your text editor and git pull/push. Usable by any novice but with the ideal power user interface.
Super handy for devs who both dev and wiki doc.
Or like Obsidian for business people.
Or Notion but can (optionally) work offline.
https://www.craft.do/solutions/businesses
https://www.craft.do/solutions/remoteteams
https://www.craft.do/solutions/individuals