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Comment by kkoncevicius | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

Google was a search company. Now it is an advertising company.

You know their largest revenue stream.

This has been my experience as well. Google seems torn between multiple principles:

   1. Like Google Search, you shouldn't try to organize your files, you should just let search do all the heavy lifting.
   2. You should definitely organize things yourself, but search is a nice backup if you make a mistake -- anyone here create a document in Drive and have no idea what folder it *actually* ended up in?
   3. Search? That's another team.

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

---

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

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.

No thanks.

Full text search also provided by Algolia, so you’ll likely need an Algolia API key and account as well.

wat? ...what does Algolia do that Lucene can't?

Be zero management? And multi region?

Algolia is shockingly fast in any part of the world. That would probably not be true for your single region Lucene cluster.

Also mildly irrelevant to a document management system, but meh.

I just put up a paperless-ngx system at home in docker.

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.

I'm about to set it up myself (NixOS). I'm excited to scan and shred and forget.

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.

> Which begs the question, why?

Google Docs are the books. Hermes is the library.

I'm also baffled by that after skimming the page and watching the demo video… seems like a Google Docs wrapper of some sort.

It seems to have approval workflows for documents, which is sadly missing from google docs.

It seems to do approval workflows for documentation and that is feature I wish gsuite had.

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