Introducing Hermes, An Open Source Document Management System

[Hashicorp]

At HashiCorp, we’re proud of our strong writing culture. Not only do we think that writing things down helps improve our ideas and process, we also believe a culture of writing is a necessity for a fast growing, global, remote-oriented organization.

As the company has grown, we've created new ways for teams to create and share documents — amongst themselves and across the entire organization. To cope with the scaling challenges we built Hermes, a document management system designed to help HashiCorp employees author, review, approve, discover, and deprecate documents. Today, we are pleased to open source Hermes to the rest of the world.

Currently, Hermes supports Google Workplace. Once users login to Hermes, they can create document drafts using Google Docs.

Users can share these drafts with collaborators and once ready, send the document for approval to other team members. Approvers get notified using email and they can approve using Hermes. There’s also a full-text search capability to search for published documents.

A document owner can deprecate a document by using Hermes to mark it obsolete. This short video showcases Hermes’s features:

Hermes was created by HashiCorp’s Labs team in the Office of the CTO, which was founded to build internal tools and projects to help our teams be more productive. The Labs team started Hermes as an internal project with the goal of open-sourcing it. We launched Hermes internally at HashiCorp in June 2022 and more than 20% of HashiCorp employees are already using the application.

»Hermes’ Technology and Design

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 Workplace services for creating and modifying documents, sending email, etc.

Importantly, we are launching alongside Helios, HashiCorp’s new open source product design system. Hermes uses Helios for its UI components, which allows it to match the look and feel of the HashiCorp product line, from internal tools to our commercial products like the HashiCorp Cloud Platform. Read more about Helios in this blog post: Introducing Helios, HashiCorp’s New Product Design System.

»What’s Next for Hermes

At HashiCorp, we have been using Hermes internally for more than six months. We aim to add more features as the project and use cases grow, in areas such as:

• Related resources: These are documents, wireframes, videos, and other links that are related to the content of a document being read by a user. Related documents may enable a reader to better understand the context of the document they’re looking at.
• Document recommendations: Users may see recommended documents tailored to the document they “like” in the Hermes dashboard.
• Advanced sharing and approval workflow: Document writers may share documents with their immediate team before sending the document out for approval and sharing it with the rest of the organization.

»Get Started with Hermes

For more information, please visit the Hermes GitHub repository and give the application a try and give us your feedback.

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