Document management for the small office

Point of View

Krystal DMS also lets you view documents. A viewer is integrated into the software for this purpose. Right-clicking on View Document in the tabular view displays the document in a separate window. Unfortunately, the formats supported by the viewer are not very useful: The Community Version only displays PDF documents and some image formats, such as PNG files. Simple text files or even ODF documents – or one of the Microsoft formats – are not displayed in the Community Edition or the cheaper versions of Krystal DMS.

If you attempt to view such a document, the DMS throws an error, requiring you to download the file in question. You need the Premium Edition of Krystal with the built-in viewer (Figure 3) to open files in ODF format (LibreOffice or OpenOffice).

Figure 3: The viewer supports very few formats in the free version of Krystal DMS.

Workflow

Krystal DMS offers impressive options that extend far beyond managing smaller document collections: It indexes documents and captures them automatically with a scanner. An OCR module is included; the program also supports foreign languages, and documents can be provided with expiration dates, which eliminates the need for removing them manually from your databases. However, these functions, as well as the calendar and to-do list, are only available in two versions: Premium and Enterprise.

That said, the Community Edition comes with essential features, such as keywording and appropriate search tools and lets you annotate individual documents. Users do this in the document viewer using the Bookmark Document, Edit Index, and Notes tabs. Additionally, the Community Edition implements a history for each document, which records the latest steps in a specific file.

LogicalDOC

LogicalDOC [7] is firmly established on the market as one of the most widely used DMSs. Several variants of the software exist as client-server applications: In addition to the open source Community Edition [8], there is the Cloud version, as well as the Enterprise and Business versions, which are installed locally. LogicalDOC requires a Java Runtime Environment, as well as a database back end; the recommendation for Linux is MySQL or PostgreSQL.

The manufacturer offers a 30-day trial version, with support available from the website. Neither the manufacturer nor its distribution partners publish either prices or terms and conditions for purchasing the packages. Subscription models including support, and updates are based on the number of users and are usually for one year, as is typical in the industry.

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