docspell/website/site/content/docs/intro/_index.md

+++
title = "Introduction"
weight = 0
description = "Gives a short introduction to the goals of docspell and an overview of the components involved."
insert_anchor_links = "right"
[extra]
mktoc = true
+++

# Introduction

Docspell aims to be a simple yet effective document organizer that
makes stowing documents away very quick and finding them later
reliable (and also fast). It is a bit opinionated and more targeted
for home use and small/medium organizations.

In contrast to many DMS, the main focus is not so much to provide all
kinds of features to manually create organizational structures, like
folder hierarchies, where you place the documents yourself. The
approach is to leave it as a big pile of documents, but extract and
attach metadata from each document. These are mainly properties that
emerge from the document itself. The reason is that this is possible
to automate. This makes it very simple to *add* documents, because
there is no time spent to think about where to put it. And it is
possible to apply different structures on top later, like show first
all documents of a specific correspondent, then all with tag
'invoice', etc. If these properties are attached to all documents, it
is really easy to find a document. It even can be combined with
fulltext search for the, hopefully rare, desperate cases.

Of course, it is also possible to add custom properties and arbitrary
tags.

Docspell analyzes the text to find metadata automatically. It can
learn from existing data and can apply
[NLP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing)
techniques to support this. This metadata must be maintained manually
in the application. Docspell looks for candidates for:

- Correspondents
- Concerned person or things
- A date and due date
- Tags

For tags, it sets all that it thinks do apply. For the others, it will
propose a few candidates and sets the most likely one to your item.

This might be wrong, so it is recommended to curate the results.
However, very often the correct one is either set or within the
proposals where you fix it by a single click.

Besides these properties, there are more metadata you can use to
organize your files, for example custom fields, folders and notes.

Docspell is also for programmers. Everything is available via a REST
or HTTP api and can be easily used within your own scripts and tools,
for example using `curl`. There are also features for "advanced use"
and many configuration options.


# Components

Docspell consists of multiple components that run in separate
processes:

- REST server
- JOEX, short for *job executor*
- Fulltext Search Index (optional, currently Apache SOLR)

The REST server provides the Api and the web application. The web
application is a
[SPA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application) written
in [Elm](https://elm-lang.org) and is a client to the REST api. All
features are available via a http/rest api.

The *joex* is the component that does the “heavy work”, executing
long-running tasks, like processing files or importing your mails
periodically. While the joex component also exposes a small REST api
for controlling it, the main user interface is all inside the rest
server api.

The rest server and the job executor can be started multiple times in
order to scale out. It must be ensured, that all connect to the same
database. And it is also recommended (though not strictly required),
that all components can reach each other.

The fulltext search index is another separate component, where
currently only [SOLR](https://solr.apache.org) is supported.
Fulltext search is optional, so the SOLR component is not required if
docspell is run without fulltext search support.


# Terms

In order to better understand the following pages, some terms are
explained.

## Item

An *item* is roughly your document, only that an item may span
multiple files, which are called *attachments*. An item has *meta
data* associated:

- a *correspondent*: the other side of the communication. It can be
  an organization or a person.
- a *concerning person* or *equipment*: a person or thing that
  this item is about. Maybe it is an insurance contract about your
  car.
- *tag*: an item can be tagged with one or more tags (or labels). A
  tag can have a *category*. This is intended for grouping tags, for
  example a category `doctype` could be used to group tags like
  `bill`, `contract`, `receipt` etc. Usually an item is not tagged
  with more than one tag of a category.
- a *folder*: a folder is similiar to a tag, but an item can only be
  in exactly one folder (or none). Furthermore folders allow to
  associate users, so that items are only visible to the users who are
  members of a folder.
- an *item date*: this is the date of the document – if this is not
  set, the created date of the item is used.
- a *due date*: an optional date indicating that something has to be
  done (e.g. paying a bill, submitting it) about this item until this
  date
- a *direction*: one of "incoming" or "outgoing"
- a *name*: some item name, defaults to the file name of the
  attachments
- some *notes*: arbitrary descriptive text. You can use markdown
  here, which is properly formatted in the web application.

## Collective

The users of the application are part of a *collective*. A
*collective* is a group of users that share access to the same
items. The account name is therefore comprised of a *collective name*
and a *user name*.

All users of a collective are equal; they have same permissions to
access all items. The items don't belong to a user, but to the
collective.

That means, to identify yourself when signing in, you have to give the
collective name and your user name. By default it is separated by a
slash `/`, for example `smith/john`. If your user name is the same as
the collective name, you can omit one; so `smith/smith` can be
abbreviated to just `smith`.

By default, all users can see all items of their collective. A
*folder* can be used to implement other visibilities: Every user can
create a folder and associate members. It is possible to put items in
these folders and docspell shows only items that are either in no
specific folder or in a folder where the current user is owner or
member.

# Rationale

In 2019, I started to think about creating a dms-like tool that is now
Docspell. It started at the end of that year with the initial version,
including the very basic idea around which I want to create some kind
of document management system.

The following anecdote summarizes why I thought yet another dms-like
tool might be useful.

I tried some DMS at that time, to see whether they could help me with
the ever growing pile of documents. It's not just postal mail, now it
gets mixed with invoices via e-mail, bank statements I need to
download at some "portal" etc. It's all getting a huge mess. When
looking for a specific document, it's hard to find.

I found all the enterprisy DMS are way above of what I need. They are
rather difficult to setup and very hard to explain to non-technical
people. They offer a lot of features and there is quite some time
required to extract what's needed. I then discovered tools, that seem
to better suite my needs. Their design were simple and very close to
what I was looking for, making it a good fit for single user. There
were only a few things to nag:

1. Often it was not possible to track multiple files as one "unit".
   For example: reports with accompanying pictures that I would like
   to treat as a single unit. It also more naturally fits to the
   common e-mail.
2. Missing good multi-user support; and/or a simple enough interface
   so that non-technical users can also make sense of it.
3. Missing some features important to me, like "send this by mail", a
   full REST api, and some more
4. still a lot of "manually" organizing documents

These are not big complaints, they are solvable somehow. I want to
focus on the last point: most systems didn't offer help with
organizing the documents. I didn't find any, that included basic
machine learning features. On most systems it was possible to organize
documents into a custom folder structure. But it was all manually. You
would need to move incoming documents into some subfolder. Some
systems offered rules that get applied to documents in order to put
them into the right place. Many offered tags, too, which relieves some
of weight of this text. But they were also all manual. So the idea
came to let the computer do a little more to help organize documents.

Let's start with the rules approach: A rule may look like this:

> when the document contains a text 'invoice' and 'repair company x',
> then put it in subfolder B".

This rule can be applied to all the new documents to get automatically
placed into this subfolder. I think there are some drawbacks to this
approach:

- rules may change over time. Then you either must re-apply them all
  to all documents or leave older ones where they are. If re-applying
  them, some documents may not be in places as before which can easily
  confuse coworkers.
- these rules may interfere with each other, then it might get more
  difficult to know where a document is
- rules can become complex, be comprised of regular expressions, which
  are really only suited to technical people and need to be
  maintained.

I decided to try out a different approach: a "search-only" one¹.
Instead of using a manual created folder structure, I simply search
every time using this rule. In essence such a rule is a search query.
But searching with rules like the one above is not very efficient. One
would need to do fulltext searches, even extracting dates "on the fly"
etc. It wouldn't be very reliable either. That's why documents have
properties (called metadata). In my case most of them have a
correspondent, a date and so on. If these properties were defined on
documents, the queries become quite efficient. The idea is now, not to
use rules for moving documents to some place, but for attaching
properties, information, to each document. This solves a few issues:
they can't get easily out of sync, and they can't interfere. Then
docspell can help with finding some of these properties automatically.
For example: it can propose properties by looking at the text. It can
also take existing documents into account when suggesting tags. In
docspell, it is not possible to define custom rules, instead it tries
to find these rules for you by looking at the text and your previous
documents.

That said, there is still a manual process involved, but I found it
much lighter. Once in a while, looking at new documents and confirming
or fixing the metadata is necessary. This doesn't involve deciding for
a place, though. What properties you are interested to track can be
configured; should you only need a correspondent and a date,
everything else can be hidden.

So in docspell, all documents are just in one big pile… but every
document has metadata attached that can be used to quickly find what
you need. There is no folder structure, but it is possible to later
apply certain hierarchical structures. It would be possible to create
a "folder structure", like the one mentioned above: click on
correspondent `repair company x`; then on tag `invoice`, then
`concerning=car` and `year=2019`. A UI could be created to present
exactly this hierarchy. Since I can't know your preferred structure
(not even my own…!), the docspell ui allows every combination,
regardless any hierarchies. You can first select a correspondent, then
a tag or the other way around. Usually it's not necessary to go very
deep.

That's all about it! I thought why not try this approach and at the
same time learn about some technologies around. In the last year,
docspell evolved to a quite usable tool, imho. This was only possible,
because very nice people gave valueable feedback and ideas!


¹This is inspired by tools like
[mu](https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/) and GMail.