The Savvy Technologist

Homebrew document management system

I’ve been using Apple’s new OS 10.4 for over a month now and my initial impression was corrrect: the best new feature is Spotlight, Apple’s desktop search system. Since buying a Brother 7820N laser printer/copier/fax/scanner a couple weeks ago I’ve realized that if I can find decent OCR software I have the tools available to build my own document management system. Document management has been on my mind a bit lately since seeing a demonstration of a very large and powerful document management system at work a few months ago. If you get frustrated trying to locate files that are buried 10 folders deep in your Documents folder, desktop search may be the solution. It’s the “googlization” of your computer.

PC users have had desktop search ability for a while longer. Google and Yahoo! both have desktop search products for Windows users. Word on the street is that Yahoo!’s product, based on a piece of software called X1, is the better tool. These search products, Apple’s included, will search not just the name of files, but their contents too. Now I can search through MS Office documents, email messages, PDFs, chat logs, etc. and usually find what I’m looking for in seconds. This feels like a real improvement in computer usability and not just the standard feature creep.

There’s a missing link though. If I’m going to have a true document management system at home I need to be able to scan and OCR bills and other household documents so their contents can be indexed. And there’s the rub. The built-in scanning and OCR software that came with my printer is pretty bad and commercial OCR software is pretty expensive. If you’ve got Adobe’s Acrobat software I discovered a couple days ago that Acrobat has OCR built in and it seems to work very well. (Check out educational pricing for Acrobat. It’s a big discount.)

Time will tell, but I look forward to having my own little Google at home and much quicker access to the information I need.

Tags: google