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The Paper LESS Office™: by Ross L. Kodner, Esq. ©1998 All Rights Reserved In the history of product branding the "generic-izing" of one’s trademarked name can be a double-edged sword. Whether jeans are referred to as "Levis"1, or one’s tissues are referred to as "Kleenex"2 or your children’s favorite fast food is referred to as "McNuggets"3 it is both flattery to the original and an intellectual property frustration for the General Counsel’s office. Visioneer Corporation is plagued by just such a situation. It’s genre-creating product, Paperport, has spawned an entire industry segment of low-cost, egg-carton-shaped personal document imagers. These diminutive scanning systems are quietly creating a revolution in the way law firms handle the mounds of paper that bury and obscure their work flow . . . and their profitability. At first companies like Logitech, UMAX, Microtek and even Hewlett-Packard introduced look-a-like scanners. While products like the Logitech PageScan and the HP 4s physically resembled the small tube-like profile of the original Visioneer Paperport scanners, they tended to fall behind in the area of software functionality. In the great scheme of things, small personal scanners are really a dime a dozen. While perhaps the particularly miniaturized Visioneer Paperport Strobe and Logitech PageScan USB push the smaller size of the form factor, these scanners are basically garden variety color or grayscale, up to 400 dpi, 24-bit scanners. What really helped the Visioneer Paperport originally define the genre was its oft-awarded and much lauded PaperPort software (more on this later). Lawyers nationwide have grabbed onto my own Paper LESS Office™ concept or partly stumbled on it themselves (see "The Paper LESS Office: Taming the Paper Beast "Law Office Computing, June/July 1996; "Ornithopters, Orgasmatrons and the Paperless Office" - The Circuit Court, Law Office Computing, August/September 1997; and "Paper LESS in Practice," Law Office Computing, October/November 1997), first put forth in these pages two years ago. In a nutshell, the idea is remarkably simple. The idea behind the Paper LESS Office™ approach is to acknowledge that for a law firm or legal department, becoming "paperless" in our work lifetimes is a pipe dream - a myth -- and instead takes a common sense and simple, but radically different angle (that WORKS based on the reactions of CLE audiences nationwide and field experience in real law firms) that if lawyers have to FIND and TOUCH paper files less often, they recover otherwise lost billables. Let’s not beat this point to death, but we are NOT reducing paper -- this is NOT paperless. It simply turns physical paper into "digital paper" which means:
Case-related documents have traditionally been split into two physical locations: externally received documents are in the firm's file cabinets; internally generated documents are on a firm's PC system - thus one cannot look at all documents (i.e. all correspondence, or all pleadings) at one time. One has to look at word processing documents onscreen (or terribly cumbersome and wasteful, having to print them and keep them in the client’s physical file) and then go and rifle through the paper file. Instead, all documents - externally received and internally generated--are mixed together, are turned into "digital paper" and then are located in ONE CONTIGUOUS electronic file stored wherever the firm ordinarily stores its electronic client documents on its network server or an individual workstation (i.e. in a fairly typical "client/matter" directory structure). Some documents (the internally generated ones) when "clicked on" will be retrieved into the lawyer's or staffer’s word processor for normal editing. Other documents (the externally received ones) when clicked on "pop up" in the image viewing software (i.e Visioneer’s PaperPort which we used originally in the development of this process). But the client file is in ONE place - all correspondence can be sorted, alphabetized, etc. but WITHOUT having to separately scurry around and track down the paper file (which may have gone home with a partner the night before and never made it back to the office, thereby barring work on the file!) That's the Paper LESS Office™ concept - all for as little as FREE per user (if they use free image viewer software like the PaperPort Viewer software that image-enables those working with people who use the Visioneer PaperPort Deluxe software - get it at www.visioneer.com/products), or $100-$200 per user if they decide to have their own little scanner. This is a FAR cry from high end, megabucks imaging systems that strive to reach the holy grail of the mythical "paperless" office - the province of large, well-heeled firms only and still fraught with serious frustration. This is as much an office workflow re-engineering concept as a specific technology topic--in fact, probably more so an example of the former. The specific hardware and software and just means to the overall organizational end. So while the Visioneer PaperPort software initially drove this process, is it possible that new competitors could accomplish the same thing? It appears so. Recently, an acquaintance who is a small firm lawyer in the Midwest said to me, knowing my fondness for this particular area of technology, proudly said "and I paperported two bankers boxes of documents and took them with me on my laptop." I said, "Great! So you finally gave in, breaking free from the shackles of your technopeasantry and bought a Visioneer PaperPort! Congratulations Dave!" Dave said, "no it’s a Microtek Color PageWiz and it came with something called [Xerox] Pagis." Yep, at that moment, the trademarked brand-name "PaperPort" had become more than just a noun--it had been done the dubious honor in transformation to a verb: "to PaperPort" which could even be conjugated by us former French minors (i.e. je paperporte, tu paperporte, il/elle paperporte, nous paperportons, vous papertez, ils paperportent). Is this the ultimate compliment to pay to the product that pioneered the category or is it a sign that the market strength of the original Visioneer PaperPort has been diluted by competition? Let’s take a look at four products that enable one to "PaperPort" their images, including the original and namesake and see how they stack up. We will investigate our benchmark, Visioneer’s PaperPort Deluxe 5.2 , as well as competitors and PaperPort wannabes Pagis Pro 97 from Xerox (www.xerox.com/xis/pagis), Documagix’s Papermaster Live 3.0 and Zydeco Software’s Papervue. Xerox Pagis Pro 97 Xerox’s Pagis Pro 97 has received wide accolades as a personal document imaging product. Working with TWAIN and ISIS compatible scanners, it breaks out of the "electronic desktop analogue" mode and appears more as an extension to the Windows 95 Explorer. A floating toolbar appears on the Windows 95/NT desktop. From this toolbar one can click buttons to scan, copy, FAX, edit, search, update the full-text index and get help on using the program. A second floating toolbar offers links to common applications that one can drag and drop scanned images onto--such as WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, FAXing and not surprisingly from Xerox, a "copier" function. To scan a piece of paper, one uses a broad range of TWAIN compatible scanners4 When one scans into Pagis Pro, documents are stored in a standard Windows Explorer folder using a property .XIF file format. This is quite different than the "electronic desktop" approach of Paperport Deluxe and its clone, Papervue, or certainly even more different than the visual File Cabinet offered by the Papermaster Live 3.0 software. A floating toolbar offers links to functions like OCRing the text, FAXing it or printing it. As the company’s website describes it, "Pagis Pro 97 becomes part of your Windows 95 environment and is not just another standalone application." Like all the other products described here, Pagis Pro 97 is space-frugal using significant compression when scanning and storing images. We scanned a 3"x 5" color photograph at 100 dpi on a 24-bit PaperPort 6000 flatbed scanner--the resulting image took up 220K in file size. With prior generation imaging products, this could have easily taken up 2 meg in size. A text document (a pleading sample) that was four pages of double-spaced text took up 48K in size, only 4K more than the native WordPerfect 6/7/8 format document. As with the other products reviewed, the program offers a full-range of options to annotate scanned "digital paper" as well as edit and retouch images. The expected electronic highlighter marker, sticky notes, direct text annotation, line and box drawing around sections of scanned "digital paper" are all supported. Using the very capable TOPIC search engine from Verity, the system allows full-text of documents OCRed with the included Xerox Textbridge Pro text-recognition product (our favorite especially for superbly preserving the original format of scanned documents without cluttering documents with scads of extraneous codes or styles!). Background indexing is not apparent from the materials--it appears to be a foreground only function which is a bit time-consuming and requires manual intervention. If background text indexing is included, it is certainly not obvious as to how it would be done. The program has a broad range of image enhancement tools which can clean-up messy documents and improve one’s ability to OCR the results. The "Auto Image Enhancement" feature takes care of most of these adjustments automatically with quite remarkable results. The initial impression is that Pagis Pro is great for power users who are already comfortable and familiar with the Windows Explorer system for accessing, locating and managing files. For such a person, this product really image-enables Explorer and seems barely even like a separate program. This is not surprising from a company like Xerox with its long heritage of user interface research and its not-very-arguable position of developing the first graphical user interfaces upon which Apple got its Mac inspiration which of course begot Windows itself. Street pricing on Pagis Pro 97 is around $90-$95.
Zydeco’s PaperVue This is an unashamed virtual copy of the electronic desktop created by Visioneer in its PaperPort software. Can a copy compete with the original? PaperVue looks much like Visioneer’s PaperPort. The screen seen consists of a horizontal toolbar located near the top of the screen, a vertical window on the left that displays electronic folders into which one can organize their documents, a large pane on the right to show the thumbnails of scanned "digital paper" within the selected folder and a horizontal row of application links, PaperPort-style, at the bottom of the screen onto which one can drag am image’s thumbnail for processing. PaperPort users will see the similarity immediately. After launching the electronic desktop click the "Scan" button to acquire the image--it will then scan the paper and bring it as a thumbnail onto the electronic desktop whereafter one can drag the document into an electronic folder. After scanning a document, you can double-click the thumbnail of an image. An Image Editor then lets you annotate the "digital paper" with all the usual options: sticky notes, highlighting in multiple colors--just like using a traditional marker, drawing boxes around text, arrows pointing to and from text, you know, all the usual. Curiously, while the company’s website indicates that PaperVue recognizes 1000 applications which it can link to, on my own laptop--full of all sorts of applications, it only recognized a group of "standard" links and using the "refresh links" feature found no more. The standard links even included an application not on my hard drive so I presume it never actually looked or scouted out the actual applications before creating the links. The standards it included are Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, a generic "Bitmap" icon for image editing, a Printer icon for printing your output, a button to link to your default "Web Browser" and that odd one, a link to the Act contact manager which is not on the test system. There is a function that allows you to manually add links from among a predefined list or to define your own--but again, a far cry from the 1000 touted on the website. Curiously, major applications like Lotus Notes and Corel WordPerfect are not listed--they would seem to fall into the "create your own" link category done with the "Custom Link" button. The program has a full-text indexing system that can manually create a full-text index to allow full content searching but ONLY of OCRed documents--a big limitation compared to its brethren which can also search through the text on scanned images (to varying degrees). The manual aspect of this was time-consuming but works. It is unclear what text search system is used as it is not specifically identified. OCRing text is done via the included NeuroTalker module. Scanning a variety of documents produced mainstream results, meaning decent text recognition on cleaner documents, more flawed text recognitions on a "dirty" document (a skewed, grey-shaded copy of a copy of a FAX--my "OCR torture test" document) and adequate preservation of format when scanned into Microsoft Word 97 using the supplier "link." While it was not tested, the system comes with Spanish and French OCR dictionaries as well as its standard English one. This is a single-user product. The company produces an enterprise-oriented imager called Zydeco Corporate for networked use and uses either ODBC compliance for image database connections or high-powered data engines like Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, SQL Base, or databases on "big iron" like the IBM AS/400 and IBM mainframes. The program runs about $70 on "the street." For someone with a TWAIN-compatible scanner who has nothing more than OCR software, it is certainly a huge leap in the direction of the Paper LESS Office™. However, it has little more functionality than early version of the PaperPort software and is clearly a pretender for the purpose of "paperporting." The real question for this product compared to the benchmark Visioneer PaperPort Deluxe 5.2 which is about the same price is "why bother?"
Documagix’s Papermaster Live 3.0 This is already a venerable product, into its third generation. From the beginning it was different conceptually and visually than its Visioneer competitor. Instead of the Visioneer-pioneered "electronic desktop" concept, it uses and equally visually obvious file cabinet analogue. On screen, one literally organizes documents into categorized electronic file drawers. Papermaster Live 3.0 can even appear as a link at the bottom of a PaperPort screen, offering an alternate "digital paper" storage system to the 6-level deep hierarchical nested folder system employed by the category leader. There are several very interesting things about Papermaster Live 3.0. One is the Hot Print function that allows you to save a web page in Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer to a Papermaster Live 3.0 file drawer. When you install the software it installs a "PM" button on the menu bar of your web browsers. A pull down menu makes it simple to save a web page with all its graphics, links, etc. intact. This is NOT however, a substitute for an offline web browser in that it saves just the web page you are currently viewing and not the entire site. Cool nevertheless. Another interesting feature is the ability to drag and drop files into the Papermaster Live 3.0 file cabinet directly from the Windows 95 Explorer. The drawers in the File Cabinet can be color coded and have descriptive names up to 255 characters in length. There is also a good-intentioned but practically useless AutoFile system that tries to anticipate what file drawer you would want to put your document in--for the life of me, I can’t imagine how it made it’s choice--they weren’t the ones I would have made. I gave up on this feature personally renaming it the "Drawer Randomizer." The program offers the expected annotation tools. OCRing seems to work reasonably well with the built-in "Read and Index" function. The "Read and Indexed" text is then searched with the programs AutoSearch function. Like PaperPort Deluxe it will also work to OCR the text on images like magazine ads and does a reasonable job--this, however, unlike PaperPort, is a foreground function that periodically takes some time to do. It is not apparent from the program help system that this could be done in the background in any way--this translates to wasted time and the need to remember to manually index periodically to ensure your searches are complete. Papermaster "file cabinets" can actually be placed on a shared network drive and shared by multiple users. The contents of a networked file cabinet can only be shared if the entire cabinet is set to "read only" status. If it is set as "read-write" the first person who gets to it has full access and it appears "grayed-out" to other users. Still, this is handy capability for leveraging the information. To work into the Paper LESS Office™ concept, images can be exported from any file drawer using the "Export Image" dialog box. Supported export formats include the widely used TIFF, PCX, BMP and JPG graphic file formats. Another capability worth noting is the ability to incorporate any data into a Papermaster file drawer by printing using the Windows 95 print driver setup during program installation. The document is supposed to be placed in the program’s "Inbox" for later filing into a specific file drawer. In practice, I could not get this feature to work--printed documents to this driver went off into byte heaven, nowhere to be seen again. A minor irritation is the way the program’s user interface is constructed. There is an element of awkwardness in that seemingly every major function from opening a file drawer to viewing the contents of a folder with a file drawer to the program’s "Inbox" opens a separate windows. Each needs to be minimized or closed when one wants to work with some other part of the program. One could argue that the ability to have multiple file drawers/windows open could be handy but after years of the simplicity of the PaperPort interface, I personally found it to be a bit cumbersome. Street pricing on Papermaster Live 3.0 is around $100.
Visioneer’s PaperPort Deluxe 5.2 The namesake product that pioneered the entire market segment, Visioneer’s PaperPort personal document imaging software has stood well the test of time. Compared to all the other products here, it still stands out as the elegant benchmark to beat. Not surprisingly, this venerable software has won award after award from heavyweight industry rags. The visual metaphor of PaperPort is its electronic desktop--with a horizontal toolbar across the top of the screen, a folder windowing showing the up-to-6-level-deep hierarchical nested color-coded folders on the left side of the screen. A large pane to the right of the folders is where one views the contents of the currently selected folder. Along the bottom is a row of "link" buttons used for receiving dragged and dropped thumbnails of scanned "digital paper." The program has a full complement of features including color image enhancements with a neat automatic AutoFix function to get the best results, especially of photographs. Tweaking the scanner for the type of source document is easy--one simply clicks on a "Settings" button on the toolbar and selects among pre-defined settings for Filing (for the fastest scans of any document type), OCRing (a bit higher resolution), storing Business Cards, Storing Color Photographs or a Custom setting where the user can play around with the DPI and color depth settings to their heart’s content. Annotations include the usual multi-colored highlighters, sticky notes, arrows, lines, etc. A really slick drag-and-droppable FormTyper link at the bottom of the screen allows you to take a pre-printed form like a Worker’s Comp complaint so common in most states, automatically find and underline all the blanks and checkboxes and then allow you to type your text right onto the electronic form and print the resulting filled-in form. Very slick and very automatic. The program leads the pack in the simple feel of its interface. Much like a Web Browser, this program really requires little or no training for even novices to use. I always apply the "Dad" test--if my sixty something AOL-proficient (only) father can figure it out in 10 minutes or less, it passes the test. Especially if you are using a Visioneer scanner (although it supports TWAIN scanners under Windows 95 and some ISIS-compliant scanners under Windows NT 4.0) you simply insert the paper in the PaperPort scanner and the software pops up and receives the newly scanned "digital paper." With TWAIN scanners you need to load the software first and then slick the "Scan" button. Text searching is the most advanced of all the applications. Its SimpleSearch engine will index the scanned documents located in all the folders in the background--all you do is open the program and minimize it and at idle moments, it does its indexing. This is a great advantage over its competitors that require manual indexing, and worse, merely remembering to have to do it. Another area of strength is in its links to other applications. While PaperVue claims to have "1000" links, PaperPort links are really usable. When you install the software it searches the host hard drive for linkable applications. On the test system it found everything from Netscape to Eudora to Word, WordPerfect (two versions), Excel, WinFAX Pro and more. A "refresh links" feature lets you find applications installed after you install PaperPort. Presently the program comes with the Xerox Textbridge Lite OCR engine. This can and should be upgraded to the excellent $79 class-leading Textbridge Pro 98 product (www.xerox.com/scansoft/tbpro98win) although the built-in OCR is "ok." But it’s JUST OK--with the upgrade to the Pro version of the software, it borders on miraculous in terms of text recognition and format retention. According to Visioneer representative Chet Hong, the company will soon begin to bundle its new ProOCR 100 product with its PaperPort Deluxe software instead of the Textbridge product. The most important element of the PaperPort Deluxe 5.2 software is the easy export of documents and their ability to be organized with one’s document management system. On the test PC, a right click menu on the thumbnail of any scanned image listed an "Export" function. With the Worldox 96 document management system running minimized, an "Export" click activated the ODMA-compliant document manager and allowed us to organize the image file in the same client/matter structure as our internally generated word processing documents. Files exported in such a manner are stored in the program’s proprietary .MAX format. This allows one to later use the document manager to automatically launch an image of a document found in a client’s matter directory/folder by merely clicking on it--the PaperPort software is launched to view it. Networking Paperported images can be done in two ways. Using the Paper LESS Office™ process, one simply views the exported documents with the PaperPort software loaded on someone’s PC or with the free PaperPort viewer software. Alternatively one can use Visioneer’s PaperShare product to bring the PaperPort desktop to a network server. Users can drag locally stored images to the shared network desktop where anyone can access them. This programs ranges in cost from $100 for a 2-user version to $1000 for 50-user pack. The program really doesn’t need any training--it’s all pretty obvious. However, there is a "One Minute Guide to Scanning With PaperPort" that is effectively a mini-slideshow inside the program--helpful for the dwindling cadre of manual-obsessed among us. There’s also a feature called Explorer Pro Link that allows you to scan and drag an image’s thumbnail to the new bottom-of-screen link and then quickly save it as a BMP, JPG, MAX file or a GIF. Using this with the included ScanDirect function one can scan directly to an application without first storing the "digital paper" as a thumbnail on the PaperPort Desktop. The bottom line is simple. This is the product that created the category, lent its name to define the genre and is still the most flexible, easiest to use and best value. At PaperPort Deluxe’s price point and with broad TWAIN scanner support, why would one use anything else? If one is adopting my Paper LESS Office™ process approach, there is the logical product to use to turn your piles into "digital paper." Street pricing on the PaperPort Deluxe 5.2 software runs between $50 and $80 depending on whether or not a rebate is in effect.
For more information about the products indicated in this article please contact: Visioneer DocuMagix, a subsidiary of JetFax Inc. Xerox USA Zydeco, A Division of Information
Technology Systems, L.L.C. Microtek Lab, Inc. Logitech Inc. UMAX Technologies, Inc. Hewlett-Packard |