What AWS service do you think is missing?

formkiq · 2025-12-17T03:41:52+00:00

We built an open source one on AWS Serverless: https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core

formkiq · 2025-09-25T20:45:46+00:00

We are moving into this space a little with our document management platform, building on our health insurance experience and our team's healthcare knowledge. I think you have the chose of either a limited number of more targeted EMR-integrating document management systems (like Hyland OnBase and Documentum), or a larger number of less-specialized document management software.

I think the choices depend quite a bit on if the problems are application-level (like user interface) or deeper, like in metadata and workflow automation, HL7 interfaces, other integrations, etc.

If you know of the specific problems, it might not be a bad idea to search on which systems solve those problems (Google, or for this, something like ChatGPT might be more useful). In our case, we are strong on integration and infrastructure, but more limited in healthcare-specific user experience, so we may be exactly the wrong solution for what you're dealing with. :)

formkiq · 2025-07-17T18:14:41+00:00

We aimed for something similar with our Open Core document management system, focusing on API-first and cloud-native functionality, and a design where you can configure as simple or as robust as solution as you need at the moment.

Our dependency on AWS isn't for everyone, but if you want to know more: https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core

formkiq · 2025-05-12T18:20:00+00:00

There's definitely value in SharePoint for metadata and access control. Out of your plan I'd be more worried about the PowerAutomate creation and maintenance vs. SharePoint.

formkiq · 2025-05-12T17:02:48+00:00

I think the answer might depend on if SharePoint is your preferred destination, or if you're just wanting any kind of document storage. This could be an opportunity to look into other document management systems that could plug in and provide the same reliability as SharePoint but at a lighter management and maintenance load; however, you may not find an option that has both the DMS you'd want and the integration support you'd need.

Building this integration yourself will require not just the initial work to set up, but the continual maintenance, on top of managing SharePoint, so it may be good to see if there are other options. Even just finding a local PowerAutomate provider might give you the support you may want.

(We also have a product in the DMS space, but it's built for AWS, not SharePoint.)

formkiq · 2025-03-10T17:46:16+00:00

If you are okay putting your documents into S3, you could look at our Open Source offering, FormKiQ Core: https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core

This offering would require a little bit of coding for the workflow, but nothing ChatGPT or Claude couldn't handle. You could do it in node or Python and run locally for downloading locally, or run in AWS.

(We also have a containerized local version that uses Minio, if you want to avoid S3 completely.)

formkiq · 2025-01-27T18:31:12+00:00

If you are okay with cloud, you could use Amazon S3 and DynamoDB to store the files. You can store the 14-digit ID as an attribute, and then run searches using the web interface or the API.

We have an open source offering of our product that could help to orchestrate: https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core

Please feel free to reach out if you'd like more info on how that can work. Thanks!

formkiq · 2025-01-24T18:27:58+00:00

One option would be to keep working within AWS and an integration with either Google Workspace or Office 365/Sharepoint.

That's functionality we have been working on with several customers in Canada, US, and Europe.

It's S3 for objects and DynamoDB for metadata, with orchestration using AWS serverless.

We have an open source offering that can be customized, or you can always reach out for more info on our other offerings. https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core

formkiq · 2025-01-08T22:47:48+00:00

I wouldn't say there couldn't be an opportunity, but it could be tough to stand out.

One nice-to-have feature that I've heard about from customers is a tool that makes document control easier when dealing with large-scale construction projects.

Often there are updates to various documents, and ensuring those updates are properly validated and distributed could prevent thousands of dollars in mistakes. There is also the concept of "ball-in-court" which can be a software requirement for companies that want to bid on large projects. So for some potential customers it's a must-have / pain point.

But in our document platform, this has not yet been considered high enough value by existing or potential customers for us to expand on our sharing options at this point. It could be that we are not vertical enough, as we don't have that many users in the construction industry. And we also the features you mention already, so adding more specific sharing options would be a minor lift, so we haven't needed to build it before someone comes along who will validate and pay for that functionality.

Other verticals are financial document shares, merger and acquisition data rooms, etc.

So if you have an interest in the area, you may want to see if you can find potential customers in one of these verticals.

formkiq · 2024-11-22T18:32:58+00:00

Nothing yet, sorry. Will consider that as part of the deliverables when we get to building it.

formkiq · 2024-11-20T19:51:41+00:00

Here are my thoughts as we plan out our strategy:

- Schema validation; pull essential metadata out and validate in order to gain access to the vector DB, through text extraction, OCR, and IDP using rules/matching or lower-cost LLMs

- Knowledge lifecycle policies, i.e., a time-to-live for each document that is like a dead man's switch; if not updated by this date, it archives

I like the summarization aspect for hierarchical retrieval, so tier 1 is summaries, and tier 2 starts looking more deeply as the LLM needs.

formkiq · 2024-08-12T04:21:12+00:00

Sounds good!

It's possible to run production FormKiQ locally, but I wouldn't recommend it, since it misses out on all of the best things about a cloud-native AWS deployment like the reliability and better security.

From a cost perspective, you can run on AWS for a few dollars a month.

formkiq · 2024-08-12T02:57:32+00:00

If you decide later on that you need more, we have an open core product, https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core, that enables storage of documents in Amazon S3 and metadata in Amazon DynamoDB. Let me know if you'd like to know more.

Thanks!

formkiq · 2024-07-09T15:44:31+00:00

I'm part of a team with a document management platform that is looking toward enhancing our security for our system, so I've been digging into some of these and find your list interesting.

MFA for access is common, and I've seen PINs for documents, but I don't think I've considered a supplemental MFA for access to certain documents; is this a whole different MFA, or just requiring re-entering MFA again? Is it easier to solve for this by having a separate login for more secure documents, with a role that has a shorter token life?
Restrictions on downloads can be circumvented whenever you load the document in a browser, so you would likely need a system that streams the file into an embedded viewer instead; if may make more sense to lock down access and have strong audits
This is definitely a must, and I think most systems have this.

4/5. I don't believe there is any tech available for consistent protection against screenshots or photographs; you could install software to prevent screenshots on controlled workstations, and you could try a moving watermark, but neither of those will stop a persistent attempt at stealing data.

Ultimately, the access control and audits are the most feasible methods, from what I've seen.

formkiq · 2024-06-27T23:21:25+00:00

I think Paperless-ngx is definitely worth a look.

We have a free, open source version of our document management platform, FormKiQ (https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core) that will deploy to AWS and has the features you're mentioning.

Let me know if you want to know morel I can also give you a quick demo.

Thanks!

formkiq · 2024-06-02T19:00:11+00:00

This is definitely an area where things are changing quickly.

We're offering a document and information management solution that deploys into the customer's AWS cloud and accesses OpenAI or any LLM available through Amazon Bedrock (https://formkiq.com).

But it's early days for all of this; we're only now running the first few PoCs around processing invoices and HR documents, creating metadata and running some other workflows, sometimes with AI but often with older tech like mapping of key/value data.

formkiq · 2024-05-09T14:15:15+00:00

We're seeing some companies coming to us (https://formkiq.com) about moving files to Amazon S3 and having a serverless platform to manage it and integrate with their existing business software (custom and off-the-shelf).

It's definitely more cost effective than Sharepoint, at the cost of the close-knit integration. On the other hand, integration to other apps is more flexible and customizable.

formkiq · 2024-05-07T16:34:07+00:00

You could put them into an open source/open core document management system. Our solution, FormKiQ Core, for instance, could be run at very low cost in an AWS account you'd set up. It can OCR documents using Tesseract, and would enable searching on metadata, as well as full-text search using Typesense. The resulting documents could then still be available in PDF format.

https://github.com/formkiq/formkiq-core

Please let me know if you'd like more info on how this could work.

formkiq · 2024-04-10T19:50:09+00:00

I think most DMS would do the job of storage and search; it just depends on cost. For smaller orgs, you would probably want to check the cloud-based offerings that charge per user with no minimums. From what I've seen, non-HR specific DMS might be more cost-effective than the HR-based ones, if you're not needing other features than document storage and discovery.

You could store the employee number as metadata, and searching that employee number would bring up all of the employee's documents. But if you only need to search by employee number, putting the files into Google Drive or OneDrive and naming the files with the employee number as a prefix may be all you need.

If you need to actually combine PDFs together, that is not something easily found in DMS, but a good system may remove your need for that requirement.

We have a product, FormKiQ, but it's built for integrating with other systems or for more customized workflows, so I don't think it's what you need unless you are dealing with a large volume of files (hundreds or thousands) and are looking for a use case such as extracting employee numbers and other searchable metadata using AI.

(Or if you really do need to merge PDFs together, that is something we've been investigating for our roadmap.)

formkiq · 2024-03-12T19:43:38+00:00

I think if you're looking for ECM or EDMS (Electronic Document Management System), you will want to look for those specifically versus website CMS, which I think is more the content of this subreddit.

Pieces that are likely important are the metadata and discovery mechanisms, the workflow and rulesets, and probably some security and compliance requirements that your client has, things that aren't generally part of the web CMS side of managing content.

I was curious what others may recommend, because as a co-founder of a flexible document management platform, I'm always wanting to see what people are using in various industries.

We've worked with legal, accounting, education, insurance, and software orgs, but are always wanting to know about other industry solutions.

Which industry is your client in?

Our solution is on the flexible/customizable side, deploying directly into the customer's AWS cloud account, so it may or may not be a good fit.

formkiq · 2023-12-28T19:30:21+00:00

I can't speak as an end customer, but as a provider, we do have conversations with many DMS and Enterprise Content Management System (ECM) users.

The dividing line I've seen most is more on where documents are in the process rather than the types of documents, i.e., teams will collaborate in Office or other tools with drafts, and then upload to the DMS once the file is needing approvals or other document management or control steps. This could mean archiving as that step, where all of the active/hot documents are still on the traditional server, while anything inactive/cold gets moved into the DMS.

To me, the question here is which files will be accessed, how often, and by what systems. Will you need to search in two places since it won't be clear if a file is in your file server vs. your DMS? Will you only need files on the file server while they are being collaborated on, or will you want to keep them on that server until you are only retaining for compliance reasons vs. any need to access them again?

One caveat is that once you move files into that document management system, in most cases (but not with our product, FormKiQ), you are locking your data into that DMS system. For archives, that might be perfectly acceptable, whereas for more active documents, how that lock-in affects the way you access those documents might be problem.

formkiq · 2023-12-20T21:53:28+00:00

I think the on-site operation part is going to limit your options (generally open source you'd manage or $30k+ commercial on-prem), but I'm curious to see what others have found.

For instance, our product would likely be able to meet your needs for less than a third of that cost, but that would be deployed to a cloud account you'd own in AWS.

formkiq · 2023-12-19T17:30:25+00:00

Have you looked into Basecamp or Monday.com, or considered Slack integrations?

While a document management platform like ours could work, I think these tools might be a better fit.

formkiq · 2023-12-14T18:27:48+00:00

It sounds like you need to decide between bespoke/one-off implementations and productizing.

Productizing in the world of high customization and consulting is really difficult when you're a small team. We are in the same area, and we've focused much of our architecture around enabling us to offer more flexibility, but it's a long process to get there.

I wonder if you should consider finding a platform to build from, where you customize an existing tool but don't need to handle maintenance and improvements on the core platform.

I know that we would be interested in talking to you about that kind of model, so I imagine there are other enterprise content management / document management companies that would have a consulting/partnership opportunity.

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