At the moment we have five colleagues in the office, four of them are using Macs, one of us a Windows PC. We use a Mac mini Server working as a file server. We are scanning each incomming document with a Snapscan an save it in the appropriate project folder on the file server.
In the future I want to install DTPO on the Mac mini Server and want to use the capabilities of Sncapscan/DTPO to scan and handle new incomming documents. Step by step I want to convince my colleagues to use DTPO on their Macs to work with the scanned documents. But in the transition period and as long as at least one colleague is not using a Mac it’s neccesary to save all the scanned files in the file system of the file server, but not in DTPO’s database.
Therefore: Is there a way to automatically save the scanned files in the file system when them are imported by Scansnap/DTPO?
When DEVONthink Pro Office converts scanner output images to searchable PDFs, the PDFs are saved within the database.
Some level of user action will be required to make those searchable PDFs show up on a shared server, external to the DEVONthink database.
One approach would be to create one or more folders on the shared server, the purpose of which would be to share those searchable PDFs. Then Index-capture those folders into the DEVONthink database. Corresponding groups will now exist in the DEVONthink database, and those will be marked as Indexed groups.
If you then move or replicate the searchable PDFs into an Indexed group, those PDFs will NOT be marked as Indexed items. However, if they are selected and Control-clicked (right clicked), a contextual menu option is Move to External Folder. Select that option and the non-Indexed PDFs will be moved to the external folder and Indexed back into the DEVONthink database. They will now be available to others with access to the server.
If PDFs are replicated to the Indexed group and moved to the external folder using that command, they will now be shown as duplicates in the DEVONthink database. That’s because the Finder doesn’t have a match for replicants and will treat them as “ordinary” files. I wouldn’t worry about that.
Depending on the frequency of new content to be converted to Indexed items, some level of automation may be useful. I’ll leave that to others for comment.