Managing Documents on Your Macintosh

By Eric Leland, September 19, 2008
It's taken me two years to convert, but now I love my Macintosh. Many of the nonprofits I work with do too. However there is no getting around the fact that there is only a limited set of options for business software that runs on a Macintosh. While I would love to have all my nonprofit friends upgrade to the fancy new Mac laptops that will run Windows too, the cost and performance is still prohibitive.

I wanted to share one struggle of mine to find appropriate business software that runs on Macintosh systems. Recently I was challenged to look for a document management solution for a Mac based office. They have approximately 250,000 documents currently being imaged to PDF format. The main criteria are:

(1) $2000 budget
(2) 6 users
(3) Must handle about 8GB of PDF documents without crashing
(4) Can store some basic document descriptive information - such as Title, Author, Category.
(5) Should provide some kind of preview feature when browsing documents

Focusing on hosted solutions - I looked at freely available online systems such as Magnolia CMS (magnolia.info) and Alfresco (alfresco.com) - they could definitely do it, but I needed a brilliant and horribly underpaid software engineer to build it for me within budget. I looked as some online file storage solutions, such as Box.net, Xythos (xythos.com) and DocumenTree (documentree.com), but these focused on storing files in folders and provided very limited ability to store basic document descriptive information.

Eventually I turned to locally installed systems. FileMaker was out - the license costs + server software alone would break the budget. I found a raft of locally installed systems recommended by various companies who do document scanning, but all of these were PC only and most were quite expensive.

Do I just need to admit that my requirements are unrealistic, or are there more options I am missing?

So far I have found a few options that come close, but I am still looking for other leads. The best match so far is DEVONthink (devon-technologies.com). These are the same folks that built EasyFind - a very cool Macintosh OSX file search tool. DEVONthink can handle the larger amount of files, offers a preview function, and some basic document description data and a promise to do more on this point. I should be able to pick up licenses for about $900. Another possibility was Papers (mekentosj.com/papers/) - this is more for researchers who are gathering articles and other publications from online resources, but does has features that come close to what I am looking for.

Comments

I was researching this

by Ben Sheldon (not verified) - 2008-09-22 14:19

I was researching this problem just last week.

What we started with: shared network drive on Leopard Mac. Files organized into file-system folders, Spotlight for searching (Leopard allows Spotlight on networked drives), Quicklook for preview, Time Machine for backup.

After reading this article on TUAW (http://www.tuaw.com/2008/08/17/back-to-school-collecting-and-organizing-information/) I thought there might be something better.

I looked at Papers, Together, Yojimbo, Devonthink, Sente and SOHO notes.

For practical purposes, they all did basically the same thing. But...

Sente and Devonthink were the most powerful, but had horribly ugly and obtuse non-Cocoa interfaces (i.e. they don't *look* like Mac software... which makes me assume they don't *work* like Mac software).

Papers was really solid, but you couldn't import non-PDF things (i.e. if you had some notes you wanted to store with the PDF). Also, it's designed explicitly for journal articles (so the metadata may require backflips). It also isn't multi-user (though one could probably put its database file on a shared directory and point the software to it).

There are some other local solutions too: Yojimbo and Together. My issue with these mostly was around the metadata: I was trying to sort articles by their publication date, but the metadata was based on the file-creation date and couldn't be changed. Based on that frustration, I assume there would be other quibbles. Same issue as Papers as a single-user design.

The best solution I found was SOHO Notes / Organizer. It had a pretty interface, a good feature-set, and (relatively-) flexible metadata. Search was powerful and (a nitpick of my own), once you did a global search across all documents, you could easily scrub through the highlighted terms in an individual article (some programs, like Together, require a global search, followed by a separate command-shift-f and retype of the term to then find it in the document).

In regards to setting your initial variables: are they archiving something previous, or will this be a growing document storage system ("paperless office")? Do certain documents need to have limited access (financials or personnel files)? Is OCR taking place during the creation of the PDF, or will that also have to be included in the workflow?

...From all my research though, I'll be sticking with our current setup for the time being.

It's more on the order of

by Peter Campbell (not verified) - 2008-09-19 20:43

It's more on the order of Alfresco, but I'd throw in Knowledgetree, too, as a LAMP option. But I hold the bias that, if you're not willing to put in something that requires some planning and configuration, then your needs are probably well-met by doing what I do on my Macbook: set all Finder views to last modified sort; throw everything in a folder and use Spotlight and searches. I'm a big advocate of Document Management (I have an article on it here at Idealware), but it's somewhat overkill for individuals in these days of sharp desktop search.

Thanks Dale! Thats a great

by Eric Leland (not verified) - 2008-09-19 12:55

Thanks Dale! Thats a great lead. I like the feature where you can tag documents and search/browse by tag, wonder if I can change my document description fields (title, author, etc) somehow to use tags instead?

It has a rather daft name,

by Dale Edmonds (not verified) - 2008-09-19 12:35

It has a rather daft name, EagleFiler, but it's a cheap and effective way to handle a lot of files. It just adds a layer of meta on top of nested folders so if it goes kablooey, you've at worst lost some tags, not touched or damaged the filing structure or files. I think you can put it to access a network drive. The developer is quite friendly and I've been using it for four months now on about 10GB of mixed files. One plus is it handles importing files and a huge range of filetypes very well.