Cross-platform personal document management

[jeffq]

I'd pay good money (like $100s one-time, or $100/year) for an application that allows cross-platform collection, reading, and searching of general documents, especially receipts (probably in PDF form), emails, notes, and other miscellaneous, largely-text items. I'm a document pack-rat, yet my existing collections can easily fit on a 16GB SDHC, and all my Android devices have room to hold 32GB or more cards for this data; i.e., I can make them portable. What I'd like to do (more efficiently than currently) is to carry around records of anything I might want to recall at a moment's notice (e.g., receipts to prove purchase or identify dates, threaded discussions on a topic, warranties to determine what to do if something breaks, etc.). I'd also want to maintain the portable collection on multiple devices and base it on one of my desktop (Linux) systems.

While there are thousands of applications that do bits and pieces of this for individual platforms, I've been unable to find any that take on the mission of collecting everything in a single place (at least without severe limitations in capability or platform-based functionality). Not only would this make it easier to find things without having to remember where it came from or what form it's in, it would also allow all these other limited apps to delete old data (many require this even to operate without crashing) while the separate collection maintains everything.

Bonuses would include:
* A mechanism to allow other apps to push selected documents to the collection (or have the collector pull them from the apps);
* Incorporating ebooks, images, and possibly music and videos (mostly to fetch their text info);
* Including links to open offline or online copies of special source documents, depending on where they're located;
* Select and transmit a document to another device (probably needs to wait for some industry standards for mobile transfer);
* Ability to use a local server (WebDAV?) for the central collection, rather than the inevitable cloud-based service (especially since much of the data would be personal, and cloud security is still almost as much an afterthought as comprehensible software manuals).

My interest is personal doc management, not the tremendously complex enterprise doc management that involves so much overhead (like reviews, approvals, de-duplication, and stuff justifiable by hundreds/thousands of users per database). Trying to use those tools for personal documents is like driving a nail with a jackhammer. Surely there are thousands of people (millions within a a few years, I predict) who would find this portable document collection useful enough to pay for its upkeep and improvement.

My preference is on Linux and Android systems, although I might also find Windows compatibility useful at times. (I'd expect any serious cross-platform system to include MacOS and iOS as well, but I wouldn't need to wait for them.) I'd insist on Linux vs. WINE-based Windows software, as I've never found WINE adequate without far too much investment in configuration and bug toleration. (Also, Linux now is either the *basis* of or very similar to every other major commercial stationary AND mobile platform except Microsoft Windows, so it's about time we get off our a**es and make Linux the starting point of any robust, new software.)

Does anyone have anything like this, or know about or working on such a thing? Thanks for any suggestions or efforts.

 

[dlhavema]

The real kicker here is meta-data. if you can classify and attach keywords to each document, you can greatly simplify the storage and management of the system. Scanning the text of a receipt ( OCR ? ) would be very complicated and difficult, but upon import if you classify it as a receipt, and then enter a few key data points about it, you could then have a chance of recalling it at a later date. This would also be a much simpler system to build and extend. later when you need something you look at all receipts imported in a given time frame and maybe search on the store or the dollar amount. The image and data fields could be stored out on your/a server but, the data could also be stored locally on your device for fast searching, since the data is much smaller than the image, you don't take up nearly as much storage. when you find a document you want, the app fetches it from the server. you don't need a central server, but that's the easiest way to sync all your devices.

Does this sound like it has what you need?

 

[jeffq]

Since much of my data is receipts, meta-data is definitely important. The scanning system I'm currently using (ScanSnap S510 with a Windows-based ScanSnap Organizer based on ABBYY OCR) does an excellent job on documents that can be read, but perhaps a third of them get garbled because of cheap or poorly-maintained point-of-sale printers (especially in restaurants and large grocery chains). So far, I haven't found decent Linux-based scanning software. It might be possible to assemble a bunch of pieces, but that's Linux's greatest weakness -- everyone seems to treat the environment as do-it-yourself-or-you're-an-idiot, instead of considering the monetary value of assembled solutions that don't require mad Linux skillz. (BTW, I chose the ScanSnap because I knew it works under Linux.)

I'd prefer to keep the images with the searchable data, partly because of the OCR problem, but mostly because the images are less than 100 KB average, so a 64-GB SD card (which I have in my tablet) would hold over 600,000 records (about 40 times what I've collected in the past few years). I would, however, want to synchronize these across my tablet, desktop, and a backup server.

Anyway, I suspect my desired application suite would benefit from allowing addition of keywords/phrases on the fly, especially when scanning in the docs. Best would be the ability to recite key phrases, verbally punctuated somehow to allow multiple words in a key. But I'm not sure how many people would really want to do all that recitation.