Document Management Software Question

Posted by dan7000
Sep 2, 2011 at 12:48 AM

We do a lot of scanning large volumes of paper in my work. We almost always just send the documents to an outside firm that specializes in document imaging. As an example, I recently was confronted with 50 boxes of documents delivered to me, I looked through them and sorted out about 15 boxes I wanted scanned and sent them out to a company that had it done within a couple of days. They will scan it and then load it into whatever kind of software you prefer, with or without OCR, and many companies will have good suggestions on the software.

For smaller jobs, I agree with another poster that the hardware is really key. We have a Xerox Multifunction laser printer/scanner that does a great job of scanning from its autofeeder documents up to around 100 pages or so. At home I have a Canon multifunction ink jet machine that claims to do the same thing but can’t seem to get past 3 or 4 pages without jamming. If you have a high volume you don’t want it jamming on you ever.

One big difference between doing it yourself and outsourcing is what they call “unitization.” If you scan 100 pages into the Xerox, you get out a single 100-page PDF. If that’s supposed to be 10 documents, you then have to manually go through and split up the PDF into 10 separate files. The outsourcing companies usually handle unitizing, so you get one file (or one database record) per document.

Finally, for a medium-sized job, since you like Evernote, I would consider one of the scanning services offered in Evernote’s “Trunk.” There are a couple of services advertised there that you mail your documents to, and they scan them and put them into Evernote for you. You might get a better price from them than from one of the big imaging companies, but it would make sense to shop around.