Content area
Full text
Computhink's The Paperless Office is a complex and powerful document management solution, but it has a few quirks.
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...