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Asian Technology
ScanSoft Has Cornered the Market
In Scanning and Paper Management
By JEREMY WAGSTAFF
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SOMETHING WEIRD has happened in the document scanning/paper management world.
As of this month, if you want to buy document scanning/paper management software, you'll probably end up buying it from the same source: ScanSoft. Want Pagis Pro Scanning Suite? Go to ScanSoft. Like the look of its arch rival PageKeeper Pro? ScanSoft owns it. What about PaperPort, which just happens to do pretty much the same thing? Rush on down to www.scansoft.com. You get the picture?
OK, so the business is consolidating. And fast: In 12 months ScanSoft has emerged from the relative obscurity of Xerox when it was bought by scanner manufacturer Visioneer. Now a unit of Visioneer, ScanSoft then snapped up much of the remaining opposition with its purchase of photograph manipulator MetaCreations in June, followed by this month's completion of a $140 million purchase of Caere. That leaves ScanSoft with pretty much the market cornered.
What exactly is document scanning/management? Well, in brief, it's about that long-predicted nonevent, the paperless office. Don't laugh. It still could happen, despite the fact that today people use more paper than ever, according to Wayne Crandall, senior vice president at ScanSoft.
I, for one, have to fess up: I'm a scanning nut. I figure if you can't scan it, it's not worth hanging onto. Business cards, bank statements, letters from Mom; you name it, I've scanned it into my hard drive.
So now my entire life is no longer hard copy. Last year I threw out a four-drawer filing cabinet. And no regrets: Now I can find my Visa card statement from 1992 faster than my bank can. That layoff letter from the BBC? Got it to hand, virtually. A letter Aunt Margie sent me in 1992? It's there on my hard disk. Wherever I go. And retrievable in seconds.
It's a simple enough process. Buy a scanner -- more or less any one will do. Run it over whatever you want to store. Give it a name. Save it. Want to convert a letter to text you can edit? Fire up the Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, program. It's there in Microsoft Word ready for you to edit. Want to touch up a photo? The software is there to handle it. Then you can store it, fax it, copy it, alter it -- and throw out the original. That's it.
It's not that this stuff is particularly new. OCR software was boasting high success rates in the early 1990s. But only now is that claim halfway true. Other changes make scanning and document storage something worth considering. Hard drive sizes are growing and prices shrinking: And these scanned files do suck up room. Scanners are cheaper, too: They're about $100 these days, if not less. And they come bundled with basic scanning software. Processors are faster, meaning the entire scanning and OCR process isn't too tedious. And finding stuff you need later is, in theory, easy.
If you want to take the plunge now, where should you start? Well, scanners are all pretty much the same. You have a choice between flat-bed (they look like a photocopy top, without all the paper trays), and sheet-fed ones, which vary in design: An old favorite of mine is Logitech's PageScan Color Pro, which takes about 10 sheets in a feeder and can be removed from its base to scan books and other bound documents you're queasy about ripping to bits.
It's the software that's key. For all this to work, you've got to have software that helps you scan things quickly, and helps you slot things away somewhere safe, allowing you to get them back quickly and easily. Which brings us back to ScanSoft. With the purchase of Caere, ScanSoft now owns three of the four main players in the field: Pagis Pro, PageKeeper Pro and PaperPort. Lurking in the background is one of the first document-management products, PaperMaster, owned by Documagix before it too was bought out, this time by eFax.com.
So how do they shape up? I tried out version 3.0 of PageKeeper, which was launched when Caere was still an independent company. I had trouble installing the program, which wasn't a good sign. And it comes bundled with a software version of Post-It Notes, which loaded itself without asking me. But once it was running, everything worked well. As with most of these products, the software is built around an Explorer-style interface, with drives and folders listed on the left, the contents of your files --pictures, documents, clippings -- on the right. Scan in whatever you need, and you can see a thumbnail on your screen. PageKeeper works hard to automate as much of this as it can, while adding two important features: Scanned files are left in their original format -- meaning other programs can read them -- and also will work as the main repository of other files on your hard drive, scanned or not. The result: a one-stop shop for keeping and finding stuff.
That said, there are shortcomings. I put mom's letter into the default directory offered, and I had trouble finding it again. Not something she'd be happy to hear about. Another gripe: The software doesn't feel particularly professional, despite its name. It's as if Caere isn't really visualizing that users will be serious about storing stuff.
Pagis Pro has a better feel to it. Bundled with high-grade Textbridge OCR software and programs that help you to fill out scanned forms (a real timesaver), copy documents and alter photographs, Pagis Pro takes compatibility with Explorer a stage further by adding easy-to-spot folders in your hard drive's hierarchical structure. It's both more intuitive and more functional: You now can view any file on your hard drive from Pagis Pro's souped-up Explorer interface. Want to OCR a document? Just drag it onto the OCR icon at the bottom of the screen.
Like PageKeeper, you can let the software keep a track of your hard disk, indexing new stuff as it's added to ensure you can find documents quickly. This is a good feature but uses up memory and slows things down.
Paperport, meanwhile, now on version 6.5, hasn't improved much since I first tried it as the bundled software with a Visioneer scanner in 1996. (I ended up chucking both.) Documents are stored as piles that manage to appear unsightly and hard to read at the same time. And there's not much you can alter in the interface to suit your preferences.
But for disappointments, eFax.com's PaperMaster takes the cake. It's a once-great product that has failed to move with the times. Eschewing the Explorer style interface for a filing cabinet metaphor (pull-out drawers and folders, gray metal-looking cabinet), PaperMaster 98 does have its pluses. It does a good job of letting you view documents: Thumbnails appear in the top of the window with the selected page below (an improvement on the other products reviewed here). Scan a document and it'll try to work out what folder it fits best in. But the filing cabinet thing looks cheesy these days, and with no room for the user to control folder and file names, things can and do go missing. I have no idea what eFax intends to do with the program since my e-mailed requests for information went unanswered. EFax doesn't even refer to the product on its homepage but has acknowledged in security filings difficulties in absorbing Documagix into its primary business, namely Internet faxing.
This raises one of several warning flags if you're considering a shift to the paperless-ish office: Don't get stuck with a product that saves scanned documents in its own file format. If the company goes bust, or disappears into the ether like PaperMaster, you're stuck. (Following this advice, PageKeeper wins, with Pagis Pro a near second. And ScanSoft's Mr. Crandall confirms the company intends to keep supporting all products.)
Another word to the wise: Back up your computer regularly. Losing a hard-disk worth of filing cabinets could be a problem. Especially if Aunt Margie finds out you trashed the hard copies of her letters. |
