News on Paperless NGX

It’s been a while since SeedDMS adds Paperless NGX support, which makes SeedDMS behave like a Paperless NGX server, allowing apps which have been developed for Paperless NGX to be equally used with SeedDMS.

All you need to turn your SeedDMS into a Paperless NGX compatible server is an extension named paperless. This extension implements almost all of the Paperless NGX API undistinguishable from a Paperless NGX server. This of course does not replace a Paperless NGX server, the document processing is not affected, but all Paperless NGX clients can be used.

There are two new Android apps and a desktop application using Paperless NGX (or SeedDMS) as a backend.

• Paperless NGX Uploader
• PaperNext
• Paperless-AI

The probably most exiting app is Paperless AI, but let’s have a look at the other applications first.

Paperless NGX Uploader

Paperless NGX Uploader is a simple but very useful tool. Once configured on your mobile phone it allows to share a document with a Paperless NGX server. So it basically uploads a document and adds some tags. Probably the fastest way to get a document into SeedDMS.

PaperNext

If you have used paperless-mobile already, you have an idea of what PaperNext is. The two apps are very similar, but while the development of paperless-mobile has almost stalled, PaperNext is still actively development.

Paperless-AI

Paperless-AI calls themselves as …

… an AI-powered extension for Paperless-ngx that brings automatic document classification, smart tagging, and semantic search using OpenAI-compatible APIs and Ollama.

It basically allows you to talk about the documents. This is what is often called a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) application. It digests your documents and enables a semantic search allowing questions like “What was the amount of the last electricity bill?”

There are two main feature groups of Paperless-AI

• Automated Document Processing
• a RAG-Based AI Chat

Paperless-AI is best installed as docker container. Once started it can be accessed through a web gui. When it asked during configuration for a Paperless NGX server then just enter the URL to the REST API of you SeedDMS (https://your-server/restapi/index.php/).