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Comment by croo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Assuming that by Apache Oak you mean the Oak subproject of Apache Jackrabbit ( https://jackrabbit.apache.org/oak/ ), why would you consider it abandoned? Release 1.48.0 came out last week and it's been seeing steady activity throught the last years - https://github.com/apache/jackrabbit-oak/ .

I am a committer and PMC member in the project, so I may be biased.

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.

> 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.

Given the target market, I don't find Sharepoint that bad given the alternative offerings on the enterprise space.

All of them have different levels of pain.

Well.

Someone has never seen the advanced permissions tab...

There is not "eh, they're all kinda bad" left in your head after you try to understand that mess. And forget actually being able to validate your permissions, it's basically impossible without some actually licensed fake account that you can use for testing.

Also, in what world is "denying someone access to a folder" the same as making the folder invisible? What went through the head of the designer?

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...

For personal use I personally like the office suite. Bloat, but everything works without tinkering.

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

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.

ResourceSpace is fine, opensource and can be self-hosted.

https://www.resourcespace.com/

Don't think it's open source. Atleast no information on the site

https://www.resourcespace.com/svn

It's opensource.

https://www.resourcespace.com/knowledge-base/systemadmin/ins...

Feel like I'm traveling back to about 2009 visiting that site.

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.

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 :(

Would you be interested to re-activate this project? Are you available for (open source) contract work to that effect?

Of course!

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.

> For document-organizer almost any language would work fine, there's no need for super-optimized memory management

Depends on the scale, and the original comment in this thread mention "serious performance issues" as something they care about, so choosing a faster language is not that far fetched as an idea (algorithms trump but still...)

There's also Mayan EDMS [1]. I have no experience with it, but looks sensible from the outside.

[1] https://www.mayan-edms.com/

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.

Nextcloud is mature and I think pretty decent.

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.

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!

https://www.netdocuments.com ?

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

We're using it at $Work and search is an absolute nightmare. I can never find what I want with it.

SharePoint had better search than Nuxeo, for instance.

Have you checked M-Files? (https://www.m-files.com/). Not OSS, though.

Yes, me too. Currently getting docs approved via email back and forth and putting in sharepoint for access. There must be a better way.

Have you tried https://workdrive.zoho.com?

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.

I use Zoho CRM. it's actually pretty good in terms of customization reliability and features. I used to maintain a SugarCRM CE instance for several years after they stop supporting the community edition.I Could no longer afford to spend the time to maintain it so I replaced it with ZohoCRM.

You're right about their Mail solutions though they're not that great.

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

Document cloud is open source and you can host it yourself.

I moved to owncloud.

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