SnapScan Your Way to Effective Document Management
By now you have probably come to the realization that the Adobe Acrobat PDF file type is taking over the electronic document world. A very high percentage of documents that you want to download from the Internet now come to you in PDF form. The reason is, of course, that the PDF file is easy to share and easy to save. More importantly, 80% of Internet users have the free Adobe Acrobat software needed to read and use PDF documents. I convert all of my documents to PDF now. I can fax those documents from my computer desktop using the fax software that is built into Windows XP. I receive my faxes on my computer using the Greenfax.com program which sends me my faxes in PDF format as an email attachment. One big advantage of Greenfax is that I now get faxes anyplace I get email which is any place I can find a computer hooked to the Internet--which is virtually any place I am in the world! I recently got a fax in Spain which I read at a Starbucks in Madrid. Finally, I can send the PDF as an attachment to an e-mail message and so long as the person receiving it has Adobe Acrobat Reader on their desktop there is no problem. For example, if the fax I got in Madrid was important I could have copied the PDF and emailed it to somebody who was actually working. And if you are really moving around and rely on your PDA, Adobe makes Acrobat Reader for Pocket PC and Palm operating systems. Acrobat has really simplified my life!
I promised you a month ago that I would tell you how I convert all of my documents to PDF. First, I have the full Adobe Acrobat Professional software. I use version 6.x but there is now a version 7.0 which is much faster. Any document that is created on my desktop is easily saved as a PDF document by simply printing to the PDF printer that Adobe Acrobat installs on the desktop. The same is true with material downloaded from the Internet which is converted into a PDF document with the click of a little button in the top right corner of your screen. In short, any document that you have in almost any electronic format can be converted to PDF with a mouse click.
The problem is paper and of course lawyers get lots of it! One urban legend says that as a national average each of us uses a ton of paper every year. The technology for turning this paper into electronic form has become quite good and quite cheap. I use the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner which is available online for under $350.00. It is very fast and extremely easy to use. It installs through the USB port and comes with the Adobe Acrobat Professional software as a part of the package. It can be run completely from the desktop and scans pages at a rate of around twenty pages per minute. It is also a “duplex” scanner which means that it will copy both sides of a document with one scan. The software that comes with the scanner is smart enough to not copy blank pages so that the final product is a single PDF file that is complete. All of this runs from the included software that allows you to control the scanner completely from your desktop.
All document feeders jam from time to time and one of the great features of the SnapScan is how the software identifies a paper jam and the ease with which it can be cleared. In short, the scanner and its software are incredibly easy to use. Since Acrobat has a good OCR program built in to it you pretty much have your document needs covered.
The one drawback to the ScanSnap is thought to be the fact that it scans only to PDF and creates only PDF images. But once you have a PDF image it can be easily converted to a number of other formats that might be useful in a given situation. For example, if your trial support software requires TIFF images they are just a click away. Suppose you want to fax a paper document to a colleague. You can, of course, use a typical fax machine but it is much easier to use the ScanSnap to create a PDF image which you can then save in an appropriate file and fax directly from the desktop. The file you have saved can also be sent as an e-mail attachment. The ScanSnap has completely replaced my old scanner except for a couple of things. Because the ScanSnap is only a sheet fed scanner you cannot scan three dimensional objects. While you can scan photographs the quality is only marginal. The scanner accepts paper sizes ranging from eleven by fourteen down to business card size. The card scanning software is fantastic and scans business card information directly to Outlook. Those abilities cover an awful lot of ground in my office. The other day, however, I received a proposal on a construction project that was drawn on a piece of cardboard with a pencil. I could not run it through the ScanSnap but I could run it through my old flatbed scanner and email it to the appropriate people as a PDF attachment.
High quality flatbed scanners designed to copy photographs and such are now very cheap. You cannot totally replace the flatbeds with the ScanSnap so you may want to consider other, albeit more expensive, options. The ScanSnap has just come out in a version 2. The old version is still available and may be a bit cheaper. The only change in version 2 (5110EOX2) is software. Put “5110EOX2” into Google and look for deals under $350. At this writing Newegg has the version 2 scanner for $333 after a $50 rebate.
If you need a more high volume scanner that has a flatbed as well as sheet fed capability you have to go up considerably in price to maintain the quality of the ScanSnap, in particular its “duplex” capability. You can get a terrific high volume duplex scanner that has the flatbed option for around $2000 from Cannon or Xerox. If you don’t need to scan both sides of documents there are lots of options. I have used the Fujitsu 15C scanner which is under $1000. It is very good and has both sheet-fed and flatbed capabilities. It does not install through the USB port and requires the installation of an included PCI SCSI card in your computer. That said, it is a great scanner that is pretty easy to install.
Hewlett Packard has several scanners that are both sheet-fed and flatbed and they are in general very highly regarded. However, I have had such trouble with Hewlett Packard customer support that I cannot recommend HP products. (By the way, I have come to a similar conclusion about Dell but that is stuff for another column). The bottom line is if you stick with scanners from Fujitsu you will not go wrong.
You may be tempted by the all-in-one office machines that serve as a scanner, copier, fax and printer all in one machine. My answer is twofold. First, the Adobe Acrobat software can turn your existing computer into a machine that will do all of the things that the multipurpose machines do except for flatbed scanning. Since you will be printing and copying to your laser printer you will save a lot of money over the inkjet models, and laser models are very pricey. Because the addition of a very high quality flatbed scanner without a document feeder is so cheap I think the Adobe Acrobat software and an inexpensive flatbed scanner fulfills the need for a multipurpose machine. Moreover, the multipurpose machines are somewhat more complicated and I believe give you far less value for your dollar. I have had several of them and while they were very useful a few years ago I have found that I simply don’t need them now. Acrobat and my Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner make my day! Lots of small law offices use them and they have my highest recommendation.