The Paperless Office Vexes and Indexes

Solid Foundation, but Room for Improvement

Interface issues and learning curve aside, TPO delivers a comprehensive filing solution suitable for small offices. The program is fast and stable, and it does an outstanding job linking your documents to related files on your system. An added bonus is the MiniViewer, a self-executable viewer that can be bundled with a collection of documents from the database (with annotations, but without any associated OLE files). You can export those files to any volume, including removable media such as Zip disks or CD-Recordables, and then launch the viewer to peruse the files--without having TPO on your system. We also liked TPO's flexibility in supporting multipage TIFF files, particularly its ability to split large files into smaller ones, and to join smaller documents into a larger whole.

However, we did encounter several bugs while we put this package through its paces on our test system, an 800-MHz Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. For example, we had difficulty importing and exporting fax and e-mail documents using the integrated import filters. We were able to work around the import bug by "printing" the document to TPO's printer driver and then using TPO's integrated TextBridge OCR engine on the resulting image file--but that was a time-consuming fix at best.

Other bloopers: The sticky notes are black, and we couldn't change their color, despite a 16-color palette intended to distinguish notes from different users. Also, TPO would scan only one page from our HP ScanJet 6250's automatic document feeder--a rare glitch, according to Computhink, that users should not encounter with most other popular low-end and midrange flatbeds. The software's implementation of Xerox's latest TextBridge OCR engine does a fair job of recognizing text, but forget about trying to preserve page-formatting features.

One improvement that should be ready by the time you read this review: Computhink has overhauled its initially dense and impenetrable online manual. We saw an early draft of the new Quick-Start Guide, and it appears vastly more organized and intelligible. But you'll probably need to take the company's advice to digest the whole manual before you use the software.

The Paperless Office 2.5 has some pleasant surprises hidden in dark corners, though, and those features alone make the program worthy of consideration for a small-office environment, especially in document-heavy vertical markets such as the legal and medical professions and construction. TPO is a strong application waiting for a chance to show its true colors, but you'll have to wait until version 3.0--which isn't expected for another year or so--for this program to fully deliver on its potential.