SeedDMS is designed to be used by many users at the same time, doing different things. Keeping track of all the changes and requests, e.g. to interact in a workflow, is hard to achieve. That’s where notifications can help. The request to approve a document, informing users about added documents or folder, or when documents where changed are such notifications. Some of those notification can explicitly be requested by each user, other are always send by the system.

SeedDMS is for storing documents like any other document management system (DMS). Converting documents into other formats may seem like some extra requirement not really needed. But, to make real use of a DMS, converting documents is inevitably. The most obvious use is the creation of preview images. User expect those images for each document, because they make it much easier to scan quickly through a list of documents, identifying the one searching for.

Storing documents in a Document Management System like SeedDMS helps in organizing your scanned paper work, digital media, or any other electronic resources you would like to keep at a central place and possibly share with other people. When setting up such a system you will have to define some schema how to organize the documents. Since SeedDMS offers folders just like a regular file system, this is quite often the preffered way, taking into consideration, that users are well acquainted to such a hierachical folder structure.

SeedDMS comes with rather detailed instructions on how to install and update the software. It’s all described in the file doc/README.Install.md which is part of the quickstart archive. This article focuses on a very special but quite regular case, when SeedDMS is updated without changing the major and minor version number. Hence, all updates within the SeedDMS 5.1.x or 6.0.x series, e.g. from 6.0.22 to 6.0.28. SeedDMS’ folder structure on disk is designed to be secure and easily updateable.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a mechanism to expose meta data by a data provider. SeedDMS may act as such a data provider delivering meta data of those documents stored in SeedDMS. OAI-PMH is widely used by libraries, repositories and publishers to provide meta data e.g. for discovery systems like vufind. It does not prefer a particular meta data standard, but uses Dublin Core (dc) as its bare minimum.

Assume you have just received by email your booking confirmation for the next vacation and would like to keep a copy of it in your SeedDMS. Or you have found this wonderful recipe on how to make german schnitzel and would like to save a PDF of it in your SeedDMS. Well, you could save it to your local disk and then upload it into SeedDMS. But, how would it be if you just print it right into SeedDMS, no matter if you are using your mobile phone or your desktop PC.

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a widely used open directory services protocol, which allows computer systems to access user directory information over a network. LDAP provides a way to organize information (often user authentication information) in a hierarchical manner. It’s been around for decades and is implemented by OpenLDAP and Active Directory. SeedDMS has support for LDAP from it’s very beginning, but quite to often it is difficult to set up.

One of the fundamental differences between SeedDMS and a regular file system is its foremost purpose to store documents and all its versions for a long time and prohibiting any manipulation by unprivileged users. There is little focus on changing the content of the documents. Actually, the DMS itself doesn’t even support editing documents. Besides that, there are way too many different file formats to be supported, which is of course not achievable.

Whenever lots of data is managed like SeedDMS does it, there is sooner or later a need for running certain task, e.g. to do clean ups or update operations, or simply to check for data changes occurred over the past. One of the rather obvious operations in SeedDMS is checking for expired documents. But there are others, like informing users about reviews or approvals to be due or updating the full text index.

Unfortunately, there is no native Android App to access SeedDMS. If somebody has some spare time and thinks this has to be changed, then please contact me at info@seeddms.org. I’ll support wherever I can. Well, in the mean time there is another way, which covers at least the basic access on documents stored in SeedDMS. A brand new extension makes SeedDMS behave like a Paperless-ngx server by adding its REST API endpoints.