document tracking and inventory

Paperport is not the first document management program I have used, but it is the best. Version 9 has a great feature of scanning to PDF, which I set as the default save file type (otherwise, it scans to Paperport's proprietary MAX format). Paperport allows you to significantly decrease your paper count, as documents that you may have held on to can now be scanned and discarded. You can create any number of folders to categorize the scanned documents.

Paperport has been extremely reliable and has not given any problems in working with my Epson scanner. I've noticed that many of the negative reviews outline problems in doing more complex tasks such as batch conversion of files. As my workload is much simpler, I haven't used these advanced features and haven't run into any problems. And Paperport definitely beats any other document management software out on the market.

The scanning workflow in Paperport is a little awkward for multi-page documents, and you are indeed limited to having "My Paperport documents" be the default folder for storing your files. This hasn't been too much of a problem for me yet, as long as I remember to back up that folder along with everything else. Overall, Paperport has uncluttered my office area quite a bit since I started using it.

After reading all the negative review, I was going to pass on this version - that would have been a mistake. Installation on an XP Based Dell with HP7130 multi went quite smoothly. Loaded an update and rebooted - all were recognized and functioning quite smoothly. This was installed over Version 6.0 Paperport. While converting files from max to pdf was a bit of a problem - that was a one time (though fairly lengthy) procedure.
While it does create a default directory (which is differenet from the one I actually use) - in the options you can direct it to open up from where you left off. So I just directed it to my regular directory. The other one still is there but basically as an empty line.

Pros: PDF format is a big improvement of the max. Web capture to save my web pages in pdf files (either in color or B&W (save space).
Was considering buying a separate program to allow me to create pdf documents from MS Word. With this - you have a Paperport windows printer - that prints to a pdf format.
Only a couple of problems with system hanging up - vs. frequently on version 6.0.

Cons:
No serious ones so far - depending on my experience over the next 60-90 days the rating may go to either 3 or 5 stars.

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I first went the [Scansoft] Pagis route, putting thousands of business docs in their format, hoping to get better at using it and all the supposed features. I was dutifully getting each new version, adding the scarce patches, hoping that the next would fix some of it's many problems... but it never got much better.

I am coming to believe that after ScanSoft dumped all of the Pagis users to the wolves, they re-bagged it and called it PaperPort.

I say this because all the program problems are there, and the same poor customer support is back with it - problems are sometimes acknowledged but never really fixed. If all you do is store and search, it might be ok, but if you try to use other more advanced features, they often don't work.

Just enough is done to make it work, kind of, and that seems to be where it stands. If you look back at the horror stories of those who trusted Pagis, you might want to be careful that this situation, looking a lot like the one we Pagis users went through, doesn't turn out the same way.

I have a clean, modern system and a powerful machine, and it had problems with printing, scanning and keyword scans. Also, data was lost.

Deja Vue all over again... ;-(

With my last experience with Scansoft,I can't take that chance again, can you ??

Ed Judge