There is no limit to the kinds of documents you can import into Pincette. You work with folders and documents in the same way you do on your local drive. There are no constraints.

Depending on the type of document Pincette provides extra functionality such as meta-data exchange, text-extraction for full-text search, viewing of differences between versions, on-the-fly transformations, etc.

For most popular document formats meta-data exchange and text-extraction are provided out of the box. However, plugins can be made to support more exotic or private formats.

Placing documents online makes it more important than ever to prohibit access to non-authorized persons. Therefore credentials have to be provided to Pincette when accessing documents or folders, unless you have chosen to share them with the general public.

You can decide precisely with whom your documents are shared and in what way. A very important safety aspect of Pincette is that a new document is never shared with anybody, no matter where you have placed it the folder hierarchy. You can perfectly share a document without sharing its containing folder and vice versa. Sharing is always an explicit action.

You can't work with documents without pulling them out of the document manager. With Pincette this is done over an encrypted connection, which makes a document unreadable for those who would like to intercept it.

Pincette increases safety because of the way documents are opened. You just have to double-click on them. Downloading and uploading, in case of changes, is automatic. Documents are kept in a temporary space while the user works with them. This is why you never have to keep any copies on your computer. A stolen or lost laptop should not have to compromise sensitive documents.

Another safety aspect is the integrity of your documents. Imagine the connection is lost for some reason while a document is being uploaded. Pincette makes sure you will never have half-written documents on the server. Pincette will revert to the last correct situation in case of a problem of any kind.

Documents are rarely completely private, so there should be a way to share them with others in a controlled fashion. Pincette lets you share documents or folders with individual users and groups of users. Documents and folders can be shared for consultation only or you can allow others to modify them. It is also possible to share with the general public or with the entire group of authenticated or non-authenicated users separately.

Placing a document in a public folder does not imply it becomes public too. You always have to explicitely share the document. Doing it by accident becomes much harder this way.

Sharing between users is one thing, but that is not enough. It should also be possible to share documents between applications. Pincette enables this through URLs, which are standard web-addresses for resources. Every document is addressable through a legible URL, the path of which is entirely under your control. Because of this, Pincette documents can appear in calendar entries, e-mails, other documents, etc. A great deal of applications can cope with URLs.

Searching for a document can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Pincette provides powerful search tools to alleviate the problem. First, a full-text index is maintained for all versions of all documents. Second, meta-data is extracted from the documents and organized in a multi-dimensional hierarchy, which can be browsed through in any possible direction. This converges to the target document very quickly.

Yet more powerful is the combination of full-text search and meta-data. It lets you ask questions such as "Which are the PDF documents in this project containing these terms?". Proper organization of meta-data will greately increase the power of this tool.

A few peculiar aspects of search in Pincette are that:

• the returned results never contain any documents the user has no access to;
• a search in the past, when traveling back in time, yields only results that met the criteria at that time and
• starting a search from a folder only returns matching documents that are directly or indirectly contained by that folder.

Every action that results in a modification of something in Pincette is written in a log. This log will tell you who did what, when and with which document or folder. The log can be searched using criteria such as the username, a time frame or the actions. The log provides proof of what actually happened.

The changes in the contents of documents and folders are also traced. The trace is in the form of versions, which can be inspected individually. Since folder versions are maintained as well, it is possible to go back in time and have a look at the state the entire repository was in at a certain moment. This lets you recover accidentally deleted documents for example. Versioned folders keep your folders clean without losing the version history of old documents.