Virtual Machines I need to know

Just in case the basic problems are misunderstood:

1) I expect that the (or the first) scanner will be directly connected to the machine that controls it. We use Samba so whether Linux, Windows or whatever, it will be able to save to a directory that can be accessed by everyone on the LAN.

2) The second point is that users will want to browse the images much like flicking through a selected file of paper documents. They may want to see items in date-time order or by client ID and perhaps only within a subject range.

That means that someone has to look at a stream of pdf images newly scanned and index them by reference as we do now, to certain criteria. That is one software problem.

3) The second one is a browser that can deliver the images to the screen according to the users request.

For example I may want to look at the Tax File for client 1234ABC, possibly only for items within a range of dates or from a date forward. The solutions have to be suitable for ordinary users. This is going to take a lot of time to resolve methinks.