Electronic Document Management System

[Peter Riley]

Hi,

Has anyone successfully implemented an EDMS in Tap Forms?

I have sketched out a template as a database for my correspondence, user guides and all the other papers I scan as PDFs and store on my Drobo NAS in an attempt to go paperless. Apart from being intrigued as to how anyone else has approached it, I have the conundrum of whether to link to the PDF files in my TF form or import them into TF as attachments; the former means the db size is kept to a minimum but the docs are not visible in the iOS app, whereas the latter quickly builds into a huge database (are there any limits?)

Thanks

[Sam Moffatt]

I haven’t hit any limits so far with Tap Form’s documents. My largest database is 21GB and contains both videos and images in it. My second largest is 9.44GB which is also very image attachment heavy. The first I only keep on my Macs and CouchDB servers, the second is sync’d to a couple of iOS devices.

Advantage of having them all within Tap Forms is that they’re available on all of your devices and each device serves as a complete backup. That’s powerful on a few levels because it means that even if you have a hardware failure, you can easily push to another device quickly via the Peer to Peer or CouchDB/Cloudant sync options.

The disadvantage of having them all within Tap Forms is that they’re available on all of your devices and each device serves as a complete backup. As your document size expands that means you’re lugging around data that you don’t need most of the time and it’s going to occupy space on your iOS devices where it’s generally at a premium.

Something I’ve wanted for a while in this space is support for essentially AWS S3 compatible endpoints to store attachments. There are a lot of open source S3 compatible object stores that you can run within your own network in addition to third party providers (Amazon being the obvious one). This would provide a standard interface to upload attachments to a service outside of Tap Forms that could also be used to do on demand loads of those attachments where necessary. Adding in client side encryption would make the attachment safe in the remote storage provider and the decryption key could be stored within Tap Forms.

[Sam Moffatt]

I just realised this as I was posting today, I wrote a post a while back about how I use VueScan to scan and automatically upload records to Tap Forms via a CouchDB server. I’m doing this with my fuel receipts so I can track them over time (and now with the built in charts, visualise them!). I also use this to import shipping invoices when I receive packages (slightly newer use case to clean out a bunch of paper). In this case I’m importing these directly into Tap Forms and then enriching them with extra data.

[ASW]

Hi Sam,
I’m looking for a way of scan into Tap Forms by using an Epson Printer/Scanner. I will have a CouchDB-Server up and running on Synology pretty soon. VueScan is running on my Mac. Therefore I’d like to understand what else you have done to scan directly into Tap Forms. Unfortunately the link in your posting I’m referring to is not working.

Regards
Andreas

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