Free Paperless Document Management

If you have been looking for an affordable document management system, look no more. Google has provided the world with a free browser based document retrieval system called Google Desktop Search. With a couple of little-known tweaks, it can serve your whole office, and index scanned pdf files. Read the whole article for additional information.

Although the original version of Google Desktop Search (GDS) couldn't search beyond one computer (that is, search a network's shared drives), a recent enhancement provides the ability to search mapped network drives. With the assistance of a third-party plug-in, it can even OCR, index and search scanned Adobe .pdf files. In addition, again through the use of a plug-in, other computers in your office can be allowed to search your firm's central GDS machine.

To install these free plug-ins, first install the Google Desktop Search (GDS), which you can download from desktop.google.com. You may want to install it to your firm's file sharing server, although it could be installed on any Windows computer. Next, to let GDS OCR and index scanned .pdf files, install the plug-in "OmniPage Search Indexer". Finally, to allow others on your local area network (LAN) to access GDS through their web browser, install the DNKA plug-in. Additional third-party plug-ins are made available frequently, so even if the setup described above may not work exactly for your firm, browse through the many wonderful plug-ins to increase the functionality of GDS. Thanks Google!