If I have two users and a central server, I envision scanning PDFs to the server and automatically OCRing them to PDF+text (I have finally figured out how to script this).
Then, two users could import or index different subsets of the documents as necessary. Asynchronously, they could share databases (not open by both at the same time).
The question is, if I want to set a watched folder on the server and have an unattended DTPO process OCR those and save them in-place, do I need to purchase a 3rd license, even though only a total of 2 humans use DTPO?
Hmm, this is a difficult question as we have to take our ABBYY license into consideration. Do you use the server-installed copy of DEVONthink as an OCR application, basically, or also for the actual data management?
That would be the proposed usage (OCR-only on server when desktop apps are not running). I am open to arranging it in different ways, but this seemed the most efficient for making sure all documents were OCRed (rather than relying on users to periodically search the directories and OCR manually).
The desktop installations would be used for all data management in the above scenario.
I suppose an alternative would be to ONLY use a server installation to achieve OCR and the web-sharing feature from within DTPO to provide some data management to users, but I am guessing that would give up much of the desktop functionality for the end-users.
My main immediate goal is have documents OCRed into PDF+text, but the organizational features that DTPO would probably eventually be compelling for everyone as well.
Please let me know your thoughts on doing this in a license-appropriate way that would be reasonably economical.
I can’t give an official answer (I am a user only) but perhaps you could purchase one DTPO license for the server and two simple DTP (no Office) for the others. If I understand correctly the server is doing the OCR-stuff. So you won’t need the OCR facilities for the desktops.
Have you considered accessing the main database on the server via web-interface of DTPO?
Just a thought. But maybe the headquarters have a better solution.
Johannes
Strictly sticking to our license agreement you are allowed to use one license on up to two machines as long as you don’t use the concurrently. But as your server runs DEVONthink Pro Office 24/7 for OCR this would not fall under this case. So I would say that Johannes’ suggestion would be the most economical one given that you want full power on the client side. Otherwise, of course, the web interface would suffice to access the data on the server.
Alternatively, you could buy two licenses of DEVONthink Pro Office and simply use the server as a hot folder. The two copies would access that folder, grab the files, run OCR on them, and save them locally. In this case no third copy of DEVONthink would run on the server.
Question: DEVONthink Pro Office is not truly multi-user capable so you cannot simply access the one database package on the server from two “clients”. You would need some AppleScripting to transfer the new files from the server database to the clients automatically.