Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. Prometheus collects and stores its metrics as time series data. That data is collected from services (like SeedDMS) by polling a web page which delivers the information to monitor. In case of SeedDMS this information consists of the number of users, document, folder, etc.

The SeedDMS prometheus extension implements such a web page as an additional http end point which is not part of the regular REST API. It can be accessed at https://your-domain/metrics.

In my last post about Paperless NGX a new application called Paperless AI was introduced as a very promissing approach to utilize a local LLM to enhance the meta data of documents in SeedDMS and to be able to chat about the documents.

Unfortunetly, the development of Paperless AI has stopped, but a new project called Zettelrobbe continues the work. Zettelrobbe has removed some features like the RAG based AI chat and rather focuses on finding appropriate meta data. The software can easily handle large document archives without using lots of resources. The dashboard remains snappy even during document processing

It’s been a while since SeedDMS adds Paperless NGX support, which makes SeedDMS behave like a Paperless NGX server, allowing apps which have been developed for Paperless NGX to be equally used with SeedDMS.

All you need to turn your SeedDMS into a Paperless NGX compatible server is an extension named paperless. This extension implements almost all of the Paperless NGX API undistinguishable from a Paperless NGX server. This of course does not replace a Paperless NGX server, the document processing is not affected, but all Paperless NGX clients can be used.

SeedDMS 6.0.36 and 5.1.43 have some major changes, which may require to tweak your existing installation. Those changes affect the way SeedDMS is installed on disc and should be taken into account when updating your installation. It does not have any impact on the documents stored in SeedDMS. There is also a new console tool, which eases some administrative operations, like installing and updating extensions. This will be officially supported and can be enhanced by extensions.

SeedDMS is a great Document Management System, but quickly exchanging documents is somewhat cumbersome. It requires any involved party to have an account, be able to upload files, and setup permission, so any receiver can access and download the files. This can be complicated, error-prone and possbily does not comply with security rules - not to mention technical restrictions, e.g. when you run SeedDMS behind a firewall. There are other applications which are much better suited, but there is also an equivalent solution for SeedDMS.

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. Hence, there must be some conversion to turn a document into an image format known by the browser (e.g. png). User also expect to be able to search for phrases in the content of a document. Hence, there must be some conversion to extract the text from a document and feed it into an index. User may also want to print documents without much hassle. Hence, there must be some conversion to pdf, which most printers nowadays can process.

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. Not seldomly such a structure is sufficient enough to quickly find certain documents, even within several thousands of documents. Anyway, one of the key features of all DMS is searching for documents to quickly get what your are looking for. SeedDMS supports two kinds of searching

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 parts to be replaced during an update are located in two directories in the base directory named pear and seeddms-5.1.x or seeddms-6.0.x. All other directories remain unchanged. This is achieved by soft links within the directory www and it enforced to run SeedDMS on a platform supporting soft links. If this in not the case, this article may still be useful to understand the update process but you will have to dereference the links yourself.

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.