I am the Training Coordinator for a Police Department that employees 150 people (Officers and civilans). A major part of my job is documenting and recording all training that is attended annually. As a frame of refrenec when you add up all the mandatory training you come to about 1,400 items. Now mulitply that number by all the paperwork that is generated per event and you come out with a huge number.
My old workflow would be:
Manually short the documents and scan them to a network folder;
Go to the folder preview the files and rename them;
I would then drag and drop them into the individual Officer’s folder.
These are just a few of the major issues:
Occupy majority of my day;
Remember the Naming of format was always an issue;
The drag and drop was not the most effective way of file moving;
As fate would have it I came across a 2009 iMac that was abandoned in our Detective Bureau. A week later I dumped about 50 thousand documents into my “Work” database.
THIS IS THE ISSUE ,
Since I’m on the Mac the IT company that runs our network says I can’t be on the network. I’m afraid that the powers that be will make me revert back to a PC due the network issue.
I saw that I can share data bases through the server settings in preferences. What I want to do is:
Save the scanned files into a Dropbox folder that I will share with my coworkers;
I would like to use Hazel to rename the files based on contents;
Make a duplicate of the file;
Import the originals to DTO;
and leave leave the duplicates so they can be downloaded by a coworker using a PC.
I would ask for a legitimate reason for their assessment. Multi-platform environments are incredibly common nowadays. I used to work in a department with 30 Macs and 5 PCs, in a corporation where there were another 2000+ PCs on campus.
Based on what follows, I’m not sure what you’re intending to use the Web Sharing for? Could it be used to share your DEVONthink databases on the network to a bunch of people on PCs? Absolutely!
What I want to do is:
Why? Not saying it’s a bad idea, but just wondering the thought process behind it. (Keep reading and you’ll see why I’m saying that.)
Likely possible if the content is uniform.
Why duplicate the file?
Importing into DEVONthink already copies the file.
Leave them where?
If you scanned a file, you could rename it in more than one way. Hazel? Sure, it’s possible.
Import the file to a Shared DEVONthink database (shared in File > Database Properties), then turn the Web Sharing On.
Coworkers on their PCs could view the database in Microsoft Edge, Chrome, etc.
The files are also downloadable from the Web Sharing.
Over here, web sharing on the same local network between DEVONthink’s server and IE 11 on Windows 10 does not work. It’s not always easy to set this up. Especially on a law enforcement network which is usually highly secured and locked down. I work on Federal networks and users don’t get do decide to share their machines using non-standard machines and/or software.
Thank you for all the info, I was definitely overthinking matters and since my initial post I have becoming more comfortable with DTP. as recommended I was able to share some databases through the web sharing option in the preferences. This is going to be a game changer.
