Paperless Office Blog

Document Locator by ColumbiaSoft

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 22:28:00 +0000

Document Locator is an integrated paperless office system that uses the Windows file system.

This system looks like it is targeted to larger organizations.

The use of the Windows files system and using non - proprietary file structures is a big plus. It looks like this system uses PDF files extensively.

I could not find a reference to a price.

DOKMEE - Document Management Software

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 19:18:00 +0000

DOKMEE is given away free. You pay for support and maintenance. You download the system, and run it for up to 25 days. After that period, you decide whether you want to pay for support and maintenance. You can either pay for one year at a time or go month to month. Clearly, you are paying for something. The annual contract runs $39 per month per user. The mont-to-month contract runs $49 per month.

I have not seen many reviews of DOKMEE, but the ones that I have seen are favorable.

The price for support is certainly reasonable. One should remember that prices are subject to change. DOKMEE may always stay reasonably priced or the price could go thru the roof. That is the software publisher's option.

If you want to try out DOKMEE go to http://dokmee.net/Dokmee_download.html. If you try DOKMEE out, please return to this blog to post a comment.

eDrawer Paperless Office Solution

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 17:30:00 +0000

eDrawer, http://www.edrawer.com/ , is an integrated paperless office solution. The base price is around $1,500.

Any comments about this product would be appreciated. I can't tell what file format they use to store the documents in.

There customer base is substantial and diverse.

One of the testimonials indicated that the customer, an attorney, should have purchased more "file rooms". This raises the question whether the $1,500 covers enough storage for the typicall business.

eFileCabinet - Paperless Office System

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 18:53:00 +0000

Any comments about eFileCabinet's paperless office solution would be appreciated. This product is relatively heavily promoted on Google.

This system captures scanned and electronic documents. The documents are saved in a non-proprietary format. There is no comment on the Website what file format eFileCabinet uses. I strongly recommend the use of a non-proprietary system. You don't want to be held hostage to a proprietary system. I prefer Acrobat PDF.

At this time, the "starting" price is quoted at $1,700 http://www.efilecabinet.com/?q=node/23 . For an integrated system, this is reasonable. You might want to inquire whether eFileCabinet charges after the first year.

eFax Corporate - Paperless Office

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 17:25:00 +0000

An often overlooked component of a paperless office is the fax. Why would you want to print out a Word document and walk it over to a fax machine? With a paperless office you should be able to fax from your computer system or computer network.

Any exeriences with eFax Corporate (http://www.efaxcorporate.com)? I used to use Winfax, but my new computer only has a DSL connection.

With Winfax, I used to "print" to Winfax. Then the fax would be faxed through the modem. The setup and cover pages were easy to work with.

With eFax Corporate the steps look like:

Send an email with an attachment to eFax Corporate.
eFax Corporate would then transmit the fax to the recipient.

The cost of eFax Corporate depends on the level of activity. There is a setup fee and a monthly charge. At the present time, it looks like the cost of outbound faxes is $0.10 per page.

An alternative to eFax Corporate might be found at http://www.ntfaxfaq.com/

Acrobat Bookmarks

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 17:15:00 +0000

Acrobat bookmarks can save lots of time. Bookmarks let you return quickly to specific location in an Acrobat PDF file. Acrobat bookmarks can only be created using Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard. You will not be able to create bookmarks with the free Adobe Reader.

To create an Acrobat PDF bookmark:

Place the cursor on the text or image that you want bookmarked.
Press Ctrl - B (hold down the Ctrl key and press the "b" key). This will create a bookmark with a generic description.
Change the generic bookmark description to something that means something to you.
Save the Acrobat PDF file by pressing Ctrl - S.

Remember, this only works with Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard.

Document Retention

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:09:00 +0000

How are you handling document retention for your paperless office? We are using File Butler, http://www.denvertax.com/document-retention/. It is a program that we developed for in-house use.

With File Butler, when a file is created we also include the deletion date. When the deletion date arrives, File Butler moves the obsolete files to a quarantine folder.

This has saved lots of time and disk space.

When I talk to businesses about their paperless office, the document retention issue rarely comes up. This will eventually be a disaster if a business does not address document retention.

Dual Monitors

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 15:45:00 +0000

Using dual monitors is a great addition to the paperless office. I have been using dual monitors for about 1 year. According to stats I have heard, using dual monitors makes the user 20% to 25% more efficient. I can't verify the statistics, but dual monitors was a fast payback for me.

One of the problems with using dual monitors is moving a program (actually window) from one screen to the next. The window needs to be in a "normal" size before it can be moved to a different monitor. Since I usually work with maximized screens that means that I need to click on the button on the upper right corner of the screen to "normalize" it or "restore down".

One of our customers told us about a program called Ultramon that adds another button on a window next to the Minimize, Restore Down (normalize) and Maximize buttons. He loves the program. If you have experience with Ultramon, please post a comment to let us know what you think about it. Ultramon is available at <http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/>. The price is $40 for 1 machine, but the price drops for multiple machines.

Use your paperless office to get a tax write-off for saki!

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 22:08:00 +0000

It is my understanding (maybe incorrect) that you can write off purchase of saki after 5pm if you have a paperless office.

This give a new meaning to "its 5:00 somewhere"!

There is a catch to this. This is Japanese tax law. The deduction is only good in Japan.

Sorry.

Paperless Filing For Email

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 21:54:00 +0000

One of our customers asked for an easy way to file his clients' emails. Emails may be important documents. They should be filed in the paperless office system if they are important.

I recommended printing each email to the PDF Writer printer to create PDF files for each email. Those emails should be sent to the computer's folder or directory that is designated for the specific client.

Our customer really liked that suggestions.

I will go further by recommending a filename format for the email. The format should be " .pdf". Thus, an email from client ABC01 on 10/8/05 that I want to delete on 10-15-2012 would look like "ABC01 2005-10-08a del-10-15-2012.pdf". A second email that day from that client would be given a filename of "ABC01 2005-10-08b del-10-15-2012.pdf". The "del-10-15-2012" is to designate to filebutler when this file should be automatically deleted.

So you think I should put the subject of the email in the filename? You can if you want, but we use X1 search to find stuff on our computers. Why waste the time to put in a subject?

FineReader Version 8.0 or 7.0?

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:30:00 +0000

FineReader is our OCR software of choice. OCR software is critical for a paperless office. OCR software is the software that takes the "picture" that the scanner takes of documents and turns that picture into something that can be searched or indexed.

Recently, FineReader Version 8.0 was released. Question: Should you upgrade to version 8.0? We don't think the update is worth it. We scanned various documents today with FineReader Version 7.0 and Version 8.0. We did not notice any improvement in speed. About the only places where speed can be improved are in the "reading" phase and the phase where the PDF file is created. The "reading" phase is the process of recognizing words and letters in the scanned image. To be honest, the PDF creation phase is so short compared to the "reading" phase that an improvement in the PDF creation phase would not make much difference.

We did note that both FineReader versions will create PDF files that are Acrobat 3.x or 4.x version. The most current Acrobat version is now at version 7.

Security: ZoneAlarm or Symantec(Norton)

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 02:34:00 +0000

You can't have a paperless office for long, if you don't have security. Two popular security products are Norton Internet Security and ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite.

Recently, several computer publications have rated the ZoneAlarm product much higher than the Norton (Symantec) product. I don't have the means to do extensive security testing, but I rate the Symantec product higher.

When ZoneAlarm encounters a possible security breach, it asks the computer user for guidance. I sometimes don't know the correct response. Keep in mind that I probably have more computer know-how than the typical computer user. I have an engineering degree, a MBA, I have read extensively on computers and I have personally developed and sold over a dozen computer programs.

So what happens when a computer novice gets these ZoneAlarm pop up warnings? In many cases, if ZoneAlarm blocks a program, some other program doesn't work. The solution for the computer novice: don't block anything! That is a recipe for disaster.

Symantec frequently automatically configures security when a potential threat appears. In some instances, Norton Internet Security asks the user to choose the level of security. When that happens, Norton recommends what the user's response should be.

The real test of a security system is how well it protects the system. A user - friendly system, like Norton, does not guarantee security, but a confusing system, like ZoneAlarm, that lets inexperienced users guess about security options, in my opinion is a weak system.

Should The Boss Do The Scanning?

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 21:00:00 +0000

With a paperless office it is all too easy for the boss to do the scanning. Clearly, the boss should not spend hours scanning documents. Often the boss gets the documents, and it can be tempting to take the documents directly to the scanner. One purpose of a paperless office is to save time. The question is whose time is it saving?

We have a policy that if a document is 10 or more pages it goes to a clerical person to do the scanning. It does take time and effort do delegate. If there is one page to scan, it takes more time to delegate the job than to scan it.

To make delegation of the scanning easier we use a "Scan Cover Sheet." This functions somewhat like a fax cover sheet. You can see and download the one that we use from our Denver Tax Paperless Office Letter Webpage. See the link to the Free Introductory Newsletter.

Omnipage, Acrobat Capture, Visioneer Strobe 450

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 23:57:00 +0000

One of our Denver Tax Paperless Office Letter subscribers inquired whether he should dump Omnipage Pro version 14 for Acrobat Capture. Omnipage and Acrobat Capture are competing OCR software programs. OCR software takes an image and makes it searchable. He liked Omnipage, but thought he should move to more Adobe products. I recommended that he stay with Omnipage. Omnipage is highly rated. Why learn another program that does the same thing. Several years back I heard that Acrobat Capture wasn't that good. I am not sure that is still the case, but, again, why change?

This subscriber also said that he had good luck with the Visioneer Strobe 450 scanner.

Paperless Office Alternative To Notepad

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 17:18:00 +0000

I have not come up with a good alternative to using a legal pad when in a meeting.

Afterwards, I will scan the notes into my paperless office system. My OCR software, FineReader, does not recognize characters out of my handwriting. I will create a non-searchable PDF file. When I do that, sometimes I include some keywords in the PDF file's property screen. That way, even though the text is not searchable, the keywords are.

What are the alternatives? Type the information into a notebook computer during the meeting. Sorry, I don't type fast enough.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Paperless Office: Faxes

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 15:11:00 +0000

A contact told me yesterday that the way he handles incoming faxes for his paperless office is to:

1. Receive the fax (paper) from a traditional fax machine.
2. Scan it to a PDF file.

I suggested that he instead:

1. Receive the fax via Winfax on his computer or use an online fax service.
2. Print the fax to a PDF file.

The second approach reduces time because scanning can be time consuming. This also increases the quality of the PDF image because each time a document is scanned at 300 dpi the quality of the image is somewhat reduced.

Laserfiche For A Paperless Office

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 19:12:00 +0000

I just got off the phone with a customer of ours that purchased "How To Setup A Paperless Office" ($89). He has a 4 person CPA firm.

He got a $33,000 quote to have Laserfiche setup their paperless office. After it was apparent that $33,000 was too high, they removed some features and dropped the price to $10,000.

Laserfiche does some powerful stuff. They might be able to hide social security numbers on documents. For a 4 person firm, $10,000 might be too powerful!

I think they also use TIFF files instead of PDF files. Laserfiche's argument is that TIFF files are not proprietary. There are enough software programs that can read and create PDF files that I don't have a problem with using PDF files.

Paperless Office Reduced Our Rent

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 18:04:00 +0000

A month ago we moved from a 1,500 sq. ft. office to a 1,100 sq. ft. office. This move resulted in about $500 per month savings. One of the primary reasons why we could move to a smaller space was going paperless.

The differences in our document management system from the time we moved to the larger space to the time when we moved to the smaller office were as follows:

Since 1997 our copies of sales invoices were stored in a computer file. When we needed to furnish a copy of an invoice, it would be recreated using report writer software.

All but about 100 pages of our CPA firm's client files are stored as PDF files.

Old tax records for Denver Tax Software are stored as PDF files, with the exceptions of a small amount of odd shaped vendor invoices.

All bookkeeping records for Denver Tax Software and the CPA firm since 2002 have been paperless.

Most of the tax return files for Denver Tax Software, before going paperless, were scanned before the move.

I still believe that the primary reason to go paperless is to make documents easier to share and search. However, lower rent sure is nice!

GoFileRoom ??

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 04:19:00 +0000

GoFileRoom <http://www.immediatech.com/> is an interesting twist on running a paperless office. GoFileRoom an outsourced paperless office solution. With GoFileRoom a business stores its documents on a server on the Web.

There are some strong advantages to considering a paperless office like GoFileRoom. GoFileRoom professionals manage updates, backups and other IT functions. You can easily access your GoFileRoom paperless office from any place that has an Internet connection.

There are some serious downsides. We sometimes lose our DSL connection. Losing our DSL using GoFileRoom would mean that our paperless office documents are not available until DSL comes back online. What if GoFileRoom gets too expensive? How difficult is it to move the paperless office on GoFileRoom from GoFileRoom to one of your computers? Does GoFileRoom keep the files in an industry standard PDF format or is some format that only works with GoFileRoom?

GoFileRoom was recently purchased by the Thompson Group.

Setting Up Paperless Files For Clients

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 00:15:00 +0000

It is easy and makes good sense to model the paperless office after a good traditional office. For an accounting firm, that would mean a permanent file folder for each client and a file folder for each year. This system is workable, but I now think there is a better way.

Why? 1. You want to be able to burn a CD with client information for the client. 2. Desktop and network search programs are now reasonably priced and powerful.

If you set up a client file system the way I described, above, it would be time - consuming to create client information CDs. Some of the files, the client should not have access to. These files might contain research, correspondence, workpapers, etc. The files that the client should have, and would want, would contain tax returns, certain financial reports and copies of tax documents.

Solution: 1. Have two permanent files, one for the office only, and the other available for the client. 2. Have a folder for Tax Return Documents. 3. Have a folder for Tax Returns.

Scanning Old Files

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:44:00 +0000

One of the road blocks to starting a paperless office is the thought of scanning all of your old files and documents. That could represent years of old back files. Remember, a paperless office is another name for a content management system or document management system.

While starting your paperless office by scanning your old files is an option, it might not be your best option. There is usually nothing that forces you to have an exclusively paperless office. For example, you could keep the traditional paper files through 2004 and go paperless starting in 2005. You could also have a "phased" paperless office.

A phased paperless office might convert one function at a time to paperless. For example, sales orders might be the first set of documents to "go paperless". After that, you might convert Accounts Receivables to paperless.

Most of the old paper documents will be destroyed when the document retention period has run. Let's say that after 10 years, old documents are destroyed. Why would you want to spend hours or days scanning 9 year old documents that will be destroyed in 1 year?

There are some "permanent file" documents that will not be scheduled for destruction. Those old documents should be scanned into your paperless office.

If document storage is becoming too expensive to deal with, you might be able to find a service that will scan documents for a reasonable fee. Labeling documents by filename can be very time consuming. As long as the documents are searchable it doesn't make too much difference what filename you use.

Smart Disk by Bason Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 22:45:00 +0000

I recently purchased a 60GB "Smart Disk" sold by Bason Computer. These are so small that they are ideal for taking backups from the office to an off - site storage. This is an essential procedure for a paperless office. The cost was around $110. That is not much more expensive than some tapes used in tape backup systems.

The bad news is that on one Windows 2000 Pro machine, the system would not recognize it.

On the other machine, the backup stopped because the disk was formatted as FAT32. FAT32 did not allow for a large enough file size. The solution would have been to convert the drive to NTFS. The drive would not format using NTFS.

Create Acrobat PDF Files Quicker

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 18:05:00 +0000

From both casual observations and timings I found a way to create PDF files quicker. This holds true for both Acrobat 6.0 and Acrobat 7.0.

Try to create as many PDF files from one source program at a time. Example, I have just downloaded 2 emails that I want to archive as PDF files. When I "print" the second email to a PDF file, that second PDF file takes much less time to create than the first PDF file. The emails are close to the same size. This holds true for MS Word, MS Excel and other source programs that I have worked with.

Strategy to take advantage of this situation: If possible, create as many PDF files you need from one source program at a time.

The specific running times are available in The Denver Tax Paperless Office Letter.

Acrobat 7 vs Acrobat 6

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 01:20:00 +0000

I have suggested that PDF files should be the primary file format for a paperless office. In most cases PDF files look like the orginals and the can be searchable. Even though there are numerous programs that can create PDF files, I still recommend using Acrobat for the paperless office.

Adobe recently came out with Acrobat 7. How much better is it than Acrobat 6? I have a detailed discussion about this in the most recent issue of the Denver Tax Paperless Office Letter (See the link on the right side of this blog.). Computer magazines have been impressed with Acrobat 7.0's speed. Some of this is an illusion and in many cases Acrobat 7 is faster than Acrobat 6. This is critical to the efficiency of a paperless office.

The illusion is the fact that Acrobat 7 starts quite a bit faster than Acrobat 6. This gives you a great first impression. In practice, you are going to start Acrobat soon after starting your computer, and you will keep it running until it is time to turn the computer off. For some, that would be once a day. For others, it might be as long as once a week.

The place where Acrobat 7 is faster than Acrobat 6 is in turning small source files into PDF files. I also noticed that for some large source files, Acrobat 6 is significantly faster than Acrobat 7! However, for most paperless offices you will be turning small source documents, like a letter in MS Word or a spread sheet, into a PDF file.

I recommend upgrading to Acrobat 7 for the reasons mentioned above.

Stay tuned! In a future blog I will give you a hint on how to make Acrobat 6 and Acrobat 7 work quicker.

Speech Recognition Software

noreply@blogger.com (Dave K) — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 18:04:00 +0000

I haven't discussed speech recognition software as part of a paperless office strategy. If speech recognition software works well, the office could be "keyboardless" as well as "paperless".

When visiting my dentist, the assistant was using speech recognition software. It was clearly a great time savings. Dropping the dental instruments to document an issue would take up plenty of time or would take a second person.

PC Magazine 6/7/05, pg. 52, discusses Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 8. It indicates a 95% recognition rate. That stikes me as pretty good. ViaVoice version 10 recognizes about 70% according to the same article.

I get frequent calls about paperless office issues. These calls are usually about scanners, software and PDF files. I have never been asked about speech recognition software. Speech recognition software sounds like a great concept if it can work.

Any comments on speech recognition software would be appreciated.