[HN Gopher] Hermes: An open-source document management system
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Hermes: An open-source document management system
Author : shcheklein
Score : 164 points
Date : 2023-01-31 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hashicorp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hashicorp.com)
| tnolet wrote:
| Sounds like Mitchel got distracted. I get it, internal company
| wiki entropy is a hard problem.
| eatonphil wrote:
| > I don't work directly on most of those projects anymore. I
| was CEO for ~4 years, CTO for ~5 years, and then transitioned
| to being an individual contributor.
|
| I think it's his job now to get distracted. :) Though I see no
| reason from this post to think Hermes is one of Mitchell's
| projects.
|
| https://mitchellh.com/
| frostysocks wrote:
| The single, killer feature I'm looking for in a document
| management system (besides collaborative environment that we're
| used to from gdocs) is a way to stamp versions and have those be
| reviewed independently, with git like diffs across them.
|
| Think gerrit for docs.
| revskill wrote:
| Then a webui over git itself is better solution ?
| schmichael wrote:
| Google Docs actually has this and hides it behind terrible
| UI/UX. You can "Name this version" of a doc, and there's a
| separate page to view versions (from which you can name
| versions as well).
|
| The diffing isn't there, or at least not to the degree that
| code review tools offer.
|
| I'm not sure the feature has evolved in years either.
| Definitely feels like one of those things a Google engineer
| threw into production one day, and it's never been considered
| again.
| locustmostest wrote:
| Do you mean document control, or diff on text contents?
|
| For plain text, diff is do-able, but I don't know if comparing
| two PDFs can involve a detailed "diff" vs. a checksum, since
| the text could be the same but there's a change in layout, an
| image, etc.
| jve wrote:
| Word/docx with SharePoint/OneDrive has pretty nice comparison
| feature https://www.officetooltips.com/word_365/tips/compare_
| two_doc...
| znpy wrote:
| Os it just me or there's another document management system and
| authoring suite called Hermes?
|
| Maybe by Unisys? I've worked in the publishing industry and that
| name sounds familiar...
| revskill wrote:
| The hardest part is configuration among the mess of Google
| console UI. Ah wait, i need to earn a real certification in order
| to master the web ui !
| krater23 wrote:
| Maybee not the best name. Everyone here in Germany knows that
| Hermes is the name of the parcel shipping service thats notorious
| lose your goods. ;)
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| That's only because the scrooges don't have a stack of 5EUR
| bills at hand.
|
| Sacrificing one such bill with every delivery magically makes
| Hermes minions much more reliable.
|
| Same applies to all the others.
| pledg wrote:
| In the UK their reputation got so bad they renamed the company.
| solidr53 wrote:
| For me it's a JS engine for React Natve -
| https://hermesengine.dev/
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I don't know what it is about the name Hermes for software folk,
| it's apparently irresistible. I've heard the name used by three
| different companies for internal projects just in my own circle
| in the last year. This concludes my useless comment.
|
| This is just a joke, that you learn what Hermes means at one
| company and have to unlearn that when the next Hermes enters your
| life :p
| vajrabum wrote:
| Hermes was among other things, the messenger of the gods in the
| Greek pantheon. I'd guess they were thinking of that as the
| context for the name. Of course, he also the psychopomp, the
| god who guided dead souls to the underworld. That might also be
| appropriate for documents many of which are dead from day 1.
| odiroot wrote:
| Having lived in Germany, and now in the UK, this name gives me
| shivers. Nothing is scarier than getting an email from Hermes:
| we got your package!
| kderbyma wrote:
| Symbols and names have meanings which resonate with people when
| they value their origins.
| cstuder wrote:
| It's also the name of the official project management
| procedures of the Swiss Government. Follow it to the letter and
| nobody can blame you for sinking a project.
| ilc wrote:
| It is a name connected with speed, and few negative
| connotations.
|
| I used it for a trending system I worked on long ago.
| capableweb wrote:
| Take any random Greek deity and search GitHub for it, you'll
| find tons of projects for each one, guaranteed. It's just a
| common source of naming for developers (how that relates to
| god-complex being common with developers, is left as an
| exercise to the reader).
| mattbee wrote:
| To me it's the University of Cambridge's email server (RIP
| 1993-2021). I see a few alums keep use their hermes ID as they
| a username outside of Cambridge (like mjg59).
| [deleted]
| meitros wrote:
| This reminds me a lot of the NY Times' Library project:
| https://github.com/nytimes/library. You use an editing
| environment that people are familiar with (google docs), and you
| build organizational and workflow stuff around it. Library
| rendered the document content itself with a link to edit
| (favoring the reader use case), whereas Hermes embeds the google
| docs UI.
|
| The lack of code blocks in google docs makes it tough for a
| centralized document repository for an engineering org. For
| companies using Quip it could work really well...except that I
| don't think quip lets you embed the editor like that.
|
| Everything that's been built so far for Hermes looks cool. My
| personal opinion is that it'll need more UX iteration for it to
| really take off.
| chedabob wrote:
| GDocs is rolling out code blocks now, albeit with a limited
| number of supported languages
|
| https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/12/format-displ...
| claytonjy wrote:
| Is it possible to write markdown in Google docs? This is what
| often pushed me back to Confluence for various docs, the markdown
| plugin works as expected, so I can write naturally or copy-paste
| from obsidian.
|
| Markdown is so ubiquitous as a dev that I strongly resist writing
| anything else these days.
| sphars wrote:
| Yes, Google added limited support for Markdown last year,
| though I'm not sure if it's rolled out to all accounts yet.
|
| Support documentation:
| https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en
|
| Wired article going in a little more depth:
| https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-use-markdown-google-docs/
| jmacd wrote:
| Google Docs supports Markdown just enough to frustrate the life
| out of you.
| evancordell wrote:
| I saw your comment, enabled Markdown in a Google Doc, tried
| to write a code block, became immediately frustrated.
|
| Looks like it only supports bold/italic, links, and headers.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| > Hermes uses Golang for the backend and Ember.js for the front
| end. It uses a PostgreSQL database for storage and Algolia to
| power its search capabilities. It also leverages several Google
| Workspace services for creating and modifying documents, sending
| email, etc.
|
| Great. 50 million incompatible parts combined with duct tape that
| is no better than Jira workflows with Google Docs, and less
| flexible. I can't wait to staff a team to maintain this garbage
| pile.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dewey wrote:
| What's wrong with that stack and how are they incompatible?
| capableweb wrote:
| > Hermes: An open-source document management system
|
| > leverages several Google Workspace services for creating and
| modifying documents
|
| Sooo, it's a UI over Google Workspace? Sounds a lot less
| interesting than I was lead to believe.
| croo wrote:
| I read through the project as I worked with several document
| storage solution before and still lookin for an ideal solution.
| Filenet is horribly overpriced from IBM, Alfresco looks nice but
| have serious performance issues (my experience is from 2020),
| SharePoint is only nice if everything is Microsoft... Apache Oak
| is an abandoned project with a lot of things that seems to be in
| it but didnt get finished (e.g. CMIS protocol or usable
| documentation).
|
| This Hermes seems nice and being open source is a great thing but
| it's still in alpha, do not support custom file types and very
| Google oriented.
|
| If anyone has a good mature alternative I'm all ears.
| wazoox wrote:
| ResourceSpace is fine, opensource and can be self-hosted.
|
| https://www.resourcespace.com/
| formkiqmike wrote:
| If you're not adverse to cloud file storage, FormKiQ Core (I'm
| a co-founder) is an open source document management system that
| runs on AWS and is designed to allow custom integrations.
|
| https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core
| bungle wrote:
| Have you checked M-Files? (https://www.m-files.com/). Not OSS,
| though.
| [deleted]
| MollyRealized wrote:
| https://www.netdocuments.com ?
| ab_testing wrote:
| Document cloud is open source and you can host it yourself.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Not mature, but if you fancy contributing I've started DMS.rs a
| couple of years ago: https://github.com/DMSrs/dmsrs
|
| It's written in Rust but I never managed to continue the
| project sadly :(
| deepsun wrote:
| I can't help but notice the fact that language choice is put
| first. For document-organizer almost any language would work
| fine, there's no need for super-optimized memory management.
| Much more important would be language+ecosystem security and
| speed of safe development, IMHO.
| jll29 wrote:
| Would you be interested to re-activate this project? Are you
| available for (open source) contract work to that effect?
| macrolime wrote:
| Nextcloud is mature and I think pretty decent.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| Check out https://www.nuxeo.com I'm running their open source
| solution using docker on my nas. I'm truthfully not using it
| too much, but it's an option
| mnkypete wrote:
| To be honest, I just went for a small business subscription of
| Office 365 for personal use, which also gives you mail with a
| custom domain. SharePoint is decent enough when accessed from
| the mobile OneDrive App and offers out of the box indexing +
| OCR of images and pdfs. Also their document scanner is good
| enough to quickly get rid of all paper coming in...
| satya71 wrote:
| There's also Mayan EDMS [1]. I have no experience with it, but
| looks sensible from the outside.
|
| [1] https://www.mayan-edms.com/
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I stood up a demo of Mayan a year ago and played around with
| it. It was very nice. The Customer ended up going with a
| commercial offering so I didn't spend any more time with it.
| For a small environment where someone could fill the Mayan
| subject matter expert role I think it would work well.
| el_don_almighty wrote:
| Hermes: Futurama?
| tomaszsobota wrote:
| I think this tool would be perfect if it allowed managing a self-
| hosted markdown filebase. Hopefully one day :fingerscrossed:
| pedrocr wrote:
| That seems something in the ballpark of my favorite wiki
| software:
|
| https://github.com/gollum/gollum
|
| Edit and view pages as a normal markdown wiki. But the backend
| is just a git repository of markdown files so you can also just
| use your text editor and git pull/push. Usable by any novice
| but with the ideal power user interface.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| Maybe a slow day for me, but from the homepage and video it isn't
| clear - does it do anything that cannot be achieved with plain
| Google Docs?
| tremon wrote:
| Run it on your own servers?
| mrzool wrote:
| I'm also baffled by that after skimming the page and watching
| the demo video... seems like a Google Docs wrapper of some
| sort.
| imran-iq wrote:
| It seems like it manages some metadata around google docs, but
| google docs is doing all the heavy lifting
| (creating/editing/sharing documents). Which begs the question,
| why?
|
| By titling itself as a document management system I would
| assume it would be something like paperless-ngx[0] or mayan
| edms[1]. The latter of which has a built in workflow system[2].
|
| But by being tied to google docs you can't really self host the
| important parts
|
| ---
|
| 0: https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
|
| 1: https://gitlab.com/mayan-edms/mayan-edms
|
| 2: https://docs.mayan-edms.com/chapters/workflows.html
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Utterly misleading to call this self hosted document
| management then, and defeats the purpose. Here's a front end
| to Google docs you can host, but you still need access to the
| internet, Google docs, and Google sees all your docs anyways.
|
| No thanks.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Full text search also provided by Algolia, so you'll likely
| need an Algolia API key and account as well.
| [deleted]
| phphphphp wrote:
| The hardest part of documents within a business is not
| producing documents but rather creating a useful library.
| Google Docs is a place where great documents go to die.
|
| Notion's success (for example) is more about it making it
| possible to create a useable library of documents than it is
| about being an editor with neat widgets.
|
| I don't know if Hermes is going to be particularly successful
| given it's competing with things like Notion, but in principle,
| a library for Google Docs is a great and valuable project for
| teams using Google Docs.
| [deleted]
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