The Paperless Office Vexes and Indexes

The struggle to remove desk clutter continues with Computhink's The Paperless Office 2.5. The $199 stand-alone version of the company's document and image management package offers a single interface through which you can index and annotate documents--including scanned papers, e-mail, faxes, and digital images--and then file them in a searchable SQL database.

Clean Off Your Desk--Almost

Unfortunately, we found The Paperless Office complicated enough that ultimately the program may do little to help ease your paper burden, especially when compared with a less-expensive, easier-to-use, and lighter package such as ScanSoft's PaperPort Deluxe. The Paperless Office 2.5 is based on the original enterprise edition intended for large corporations, and its convoluted interface and design reflects that. In large offices, you might expect that multiple users would be assigned separate document management tasks: image capture, indexing, quality checking, and so forth. TPO mimics that process, setting each of those management functions into a separate module, or "Desk." But skipping between modules in a single-user setting turned the seemingly simple task of scanning and archiving documents into an unnecessarily cumbersome ordeal.

The interface wasn't particularly friendly, either. We found no wizards to help us get started, and no drag-and-drop functions to ease our passage through the program. Deep in the Quick-Start Guide, we learned that first-time operators must use the Administration Desk--from which you can configure the program--to set the number of index levels, or subfolders, in the database. If you decide later that you need more or fewer levels, that's too bad--you'll have to uninstall and reinstall the program in order to change those settings. Furthermore, in another odd twist, you must store files only at the last index level in your hierarchy, which can be inconvenient when you're filing a document.

TPO begins to show its better side in the Capture Desk, where you can acquire images from any TWAIN- or ISIS-compatible scanner; add "sticky note" annotations, text, and drawings; and perform touch-ups such as color and contrast adjustment. You can also attach OLE objects, including Web links, multimedia clips, and Microsoft Office files, to any document logged into TPO, without changing the original file. If an image is already on your hard drive, the Import button will add it to the database; however, if your document is in a nongraphic format--such as a Microsoft Word document or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet--you must first convert it into a graphic via the TPO print driver. Of course, that means you won't retain the ability to edit or change the file in its native format.

When you're satisfied with an image and any annotations, you can save it, which routes the document to the Index Desk. There, you can assign it keywords and tracking numbers, and archive it to the proper folder in your database. With practice, the process of acquiring, converting, annotating, editing, and saving documents starts to make sense, especially if you follow the Quick-Start Guide. But for novices, the many steps through multiple screens will prove challenging.

The Retrieval Desk was effective at pulling documents from TPO's database. However, the process was as convoluted as using the Index Desk. To locate a document, you can browse through your index hierarchy and pull up the contents of individual folders, or you can search for individual file characteristics, such as document number or keyword. That generates a "hit list" of matching documents, and selecting one will bring your file up in TPO's viewer. Searches support wild-card characters. For instance, searching for compu* would generate hits for computer and Computhink. But other than that, the search function is very literal, and there's no support for searching with fuzzy logic or Boolean operators. Fortunately, if you move a file within TPO's hierarchy, the program monitors the move, so all links are updated.