| Review of PaperPort Professional 11 |
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Nuance (www.nuance.com), but much has stayed the same, including PaperPort’s intuitive interface.This month, for the first time since the December 2004 issue, we will offer you a comprehensive lookat PaperPort, focusing primarily on our first impressions of PaperPort 11 Professional.It seems to me that I’ve been using PaperPort forever. Dave has been using it even longer than Ihave. PaperPort 8 came out around the time we began writing our first book in 2001 and we were both using it prior to that; five years later we are about to embark on a review of PaperPort 11. Much has changed over the ensuing years, including a corporate name change from ScanSoft to Before we get started, a few words about Nuance are in order. For those of you unfamiliar with the firm, they produce at least four products that are of interest to virtual office devotees: PaperPort, OmniPage, PDF Create, and Dragon Naturally Speaking. PaperPort just may be the easiest document management system on the market for novice users to master; OmniPage is widely considered the best mass market OCR product; Dragon is a highly regarded speech recognition product, and the Pro version of PDF Create can convert documents to and from the PDF file format. Generally speaking, we hold Nuance products in high regard and we’ve recommended all of them to readers over the past five years. I should also state, at the outset, that I’ve become slightly disenchanted with PaperPort, particularly since the release of version 9. There are a number of reasons for this. Competition is one. When we examined PaperPort for our first book, there was no product in its price range that offered anything approaching PaperPort’s functionality. This has changed. PaperPort Professional 11 now retails for $199.99; that is only a few dollars less than CEO’s Executive Assistant (EA has long supported ISIS drivers, PaperPort is about to). In addition, with the advent of desktop search tools from Google, Copernic and Yahoo, to name a few, some smaller advisors are content to forego document management software altogether. More importantly, the last two versions of PaperPort, upon initial release, were less than flawless. Almost all of the problems were attributable to two factors: issues with the PDF files format(s) and/or driver issues. Unfortunately, my tests on a limited number of hardware/software combinations could not uncover every bug, so a few readers were understandably upset when they purchased Paper- Port 9 or 10 only to find that their experience was less satisfactory than mine. June 2006—Volume IV, Issue 6 The Only Practice Management/Technology Newsletter for Financial Advisors © Copyright 2003-06, Sunset Financial Management, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PaperPort 11 Professional by Joel P. Bruckenstein I specifically brought up my reservations with PaperPort Product Manager Jeffrey Segarra. Jeff assured me that Nuance was well aware of the concerns I raised, and as a result they did much more extensive beta testing this time around. In fact, he says that they recruited some of their harshest users/critics to beta test the product so, hopefully, there will be far fewer post-release problems. Now that we’ve dispensed with the preliminaries, let’s take a look at PaperPort 11 Professional. Installation There are two small quirks in the installation process. When I installed PaperPort 10 (and some other programs), I installed PDF Create 2 along with it. As part of the PaperPort Professional 11 installation process, PDF Create 3 is installed along with PaperPort Professional 11. As it turns out, you can install PaperPort 11 without uninstalling PaperPort 10, but you cannot install PDF Create 3 without first uninstalling PDF Create 2, and then restarting the computer. If you try to run the installation routine before PDF Create 2 is uninstalled, the install fails; you get a warning instructing you to first uninstall PDF Create, and then try to install again. If you forget to restart the computer first and try running the PaperPort install after uninstalling PDF Create, you get another reminder. The other quirk involves the installation workflow. First you are supposed to install PaperPort 11, and then you register it online. Next, PDF Create 3 installs, and then you register it. Couldn’t Nuance figure out a way to let you install both programs first, and then allow you to register them simultaneously? I don’t view these quirks as deal breakers, but they are unnecessary annoyances. On a more positive note, PaperPort is considerate enough to ask you if you want it to install a Paper- Port icon on your desktop. The default choice is not to, so it will not intrude on your precious desktop real estate without an invitation. Very commendable. What’s New Nuance has greatly improved the experience for first time users. When PaperPort 11 Professional launches for the first time, a pop-up screen containing “how-to” guides appears. These are short, intuitive guides on the following subjects: scan documents, edit and enhance images, organize files, assemble documents, search for items, add notes, and handle forms. The guides are highly graphic, and they include important links. For example, if a guide tells you to go to the “scanner and camera” section of the Windows Control Panel, you can simply click on a link to be taken there. After the initial launch, you can choose to have the guide pop-up appear on subsequent launches or not. At any time, the guides can be accessed from the Help menu. Experienced PaperPort users will immediately notice better performance. According to Segarra, the number one user request was for more speed, and during my tests, PaperPort delivered. PaperPort claims that launch time has been cut in half, and in my environment, that was about right. When I launched PaperPort 10 on my test computer, it took just over 14 seconds. On the same computer equipped with PaperPort 11, the wait was roughly 7.5 seconds. When I opened one folder in Paper- Port 10, it took 4 seconds for the thumbnails for draw. In PaperPort 11, the wait was two seconds flat. Another folder that took over 6 seconds to open in PaperPort 10 took a shade over three seconds in PaperPort 11. That is a significant improvement! © Copyright 2003-06, Sunset Financial Management, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PaperPort 11 Professional ... 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Current users are probably aware that when you open a large folder, you have to wait for all the thumbnails to open before you can navigate to a different folder. With PaperPort 11, this is no longer the case. You can move from one folder to another at any time, and the program responds. Folder capacity has also been increased, so that you can put literally thousands of documents in a folder without slowing the program to a crawl. The other really big upgrade for existing users is PDF-MRC high compression technology. What am I talking about? Glad you asked… this technology is a new improved PDF format that is supposed to improve compatibility with Adobe Reader, something that has been an intermittent problem in the past with PDF files generated in PaperPort. Another advantage of this file format is that it cuts down the size of a scanned color PDF file to 1/8th the previous size. This means that scanned color documents, which previously were too large to email to clients, will now be way below the typical size limitation of corporate email systems. The only downside to using the compression technology is that it slows down the scans. It appears to me that as you scan each page, the program analyzes it and then compresses it. Depending on the complexity of the document, the time required to scan and compress a page can be as long as 30 seconds. For some, this may be an acceptable trade-off, but those who do a lot of scanning will most likely only avail themselves of this format when they really have to (when emailing, for instance). Nuance has condensed the scanner setup experience. In PaperPort 10, they introduced a scanner setup wizard to combat many of the scanner related problems that plagued version 9. This proved to be a mixed blessing. The wizard did, in fact, eliminate many problems when used correctly, but the wizard took a few minutes to use, and it added an unnecessary level of complexity for some. In version 11, many users will never need to use the wizard. PaperPort 11 recognizes most popular scanners automatically, and configures them for use with little, if any, user interaction. If the program cannot automatically configure a scanner, or if a user wants granular control over the setup process, the wizard is still available to help. Speaking of scanning, PaperPort 11 Professional now sports Scan Profiles optimized for typical scanning tasks. Figure 1 below illustrates the desktop of my test computer. As you can see in the top left, I am conducting the test with a Xerox DocuMate 252 scanner configured to use the TWAIN driver. The scan profile box, indicated by the red arrow, allows users to select a profile based upon what they are scanning. In this case, I’ve selected the new Color PDF-MRC High Compression profile (discussed above) since I will be scanning a color document that I intend to email to a colleague. The gray box below the select profile box displays the default output characteristics for this profile. They state that this will be a PDF-MRC image. The image will automatically be assigned certain properties based on the folder (more on that later). It will be a 300 dpi scan; size A4 in the portrait mode. The SET process (also to be discussed later) will auto straighten the image after it is scanned. Of course, the settings within each of these profiles can be altered to suit your needs, and you can create your own unique profiles as needed. © Copyright 2003-06, Sunset Financial Management, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PaperPort 11 Professional ... Continued You may notice that the “Show Capture Assistant” box is checked in Figure 1. The new Capture Assistant, pictured in Figure 2, is very helpful when working with multi-page documents. Let’s say that you’ve scanned six pages, as I have in Figure 2 below. I now want to add a seventh page, but I want to insert it after the second page. I would drag and drop the “insert new page” placeholder after the second page, load the seventh page in the scanner, and scan it. The new page would appear between the current pages two and three. In Figure 2, many of the buttons below the scanned pages are grayed out. This is because I have not clicked to select a single page. If I did select page two, the buttons would light up and allow me to navigate to the previous page or the next page, rotate a page 90 degrees, move a page to the right, or to the left; or, delete a page. You could do all of these things in previous versions of PaperPort, but doing so was not as easy. The Capture Assistant is a much more elegant solution. The final scanning improvement we’ll be covering today is “button programmability.” Most scanners (and most multifunction devices) have one or more “scan” buttons, but they don’t necessarily do © Copyright 2003-06, Sunset Financial Management, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PaperPort 11 Professional ... Continued Figure 1 what you want them to. They may launch the scanner manufacturer’s proprietary software, or they may do something else. This version of PaperPort allows you to easily program a button on your scanner, or your multifunction device, to launch PaperPort and to automatically begin scanning using the scan profile of your choice. For example, if you have three buttons on you multifunction device, you can program the first one to launch PaperPort and scan the document using a Black and White Duplex document profile. If you wanted to scan a color document you could still do so… you would simply use the regular software controls instead of the one touch button control; or, you could program another button to do it. The “Scan Documents How to Guide” walks you through the process of programming a scan button. One aspect of PaperPort I’ve long struggled with is the assignment of document properties. In previ- © Copyright 2003-06, Sunset Financial Management, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PaperPort 11 Professional ... Continued Figure 2 ous versions of PaperPort, you had to assign properties (keyword, author, subject, etc.) manually to each document. As a result, many users simply bypassed this task. Folder Notes, another new feature, are designed to partially overcome this limitation. Now, you can assign notes (subject or comments; author; keywords) to a folder. Whenever a document is scanned (or arrives in a folder through Desktop Delivery) in PDF or MAX format, the folder properties are automatically assigned to the document. So, for example, if you sent up a folder for a client, you could put the client’s name, or a code name as a folder property, and each document you scan into the folder would automatically record that property. While I did not see any mention of it in the documentation, Segarra told me that these notes should travel with the document, and he expects that VISTA, the next version of the Windows operating system due within a few months, will be able to read these notes. So, let’s say you assign properties to a number of documents and email them to a computer that does not have PaperPort 11, but that does run VISTA. The expectation is that you will be able to search for the note/keyword using the built-in VISTA search tool. Nuance tells me that OCR accuracy has been improved 40 percent over the previous version. I cannot easily quantify the improvement, but it is noticeable. The OCR improvement applies solely to text. This means that the new OCR engine is better at recognizing words, thereby making documents searchable. It can also identify a portion of text on a page, making it extractable. What the PaperPort OCR engine does not do is recognize and/or manipulate complex document layouts, such a pages containing a combination of graphs, charts, and text. If you want a program capable of dealing with those types of issues, you can purchase OmniPage Pro Professional (Nuance just released version 15). Since both of these programs are distributed by Nuance, they work virtually seamlessly together. When OmniPage Pro is installed on a computer running PaperPort 11 Professional, the OmniPage OCR engine is substituted for the one that ships with PaperPort, thereby increasing PaperPort’s OCR capabilities. Pairing PaperPort 11 Professional with OmniPage 15 Professional gives you a potent combination of document management and OCR capabilities. SET (scanner enhancement technology) tools are now available from right on the desktop. If you right-click a scanned image and select “SET tools,” you are presented with options such as autoenhance and auto straighten. A couple of the annotation tools caused a number of readers problems in the previous version. Apparently, this was due to some sort of compatibility problem between the annotation tools and the PDF formatting. It commonly occurred when users change the default annotation font. Nuance could not overcome this problem completely, but they did eliminate it by limiting users’ ability to change fonts in the annotation mode. Previously, the form type tool was a little clunky to use with PDF formats. You would make your edits in the MAX file format, save the file, and then, if you wanted a PDF file, you would convert the MAX file to a PDF file. These file gymnastics are no longer necessary; you can save directly to PDF. PaperPort Watson is a new optional application that you can install separately (before attempting to install it, make sure that any anti-spyware programs are temporarily disabled, or it will not function correctly, if at all). It is an intelligent search agent and virtual research assistant. When I installed it, it © Copyright 2003-06, Sunset Financial Management, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PaperPort 11 Professional ... Continued brought up a research pane on the right of my screen. When you view a Web page, PaperPort Watson analyzes that page and serves up links to other similar Web pages in the research pane. If you want to narrow a search, you simply highlight the text that you want Watson to concentrate on. It is a little bit overwhelming at first, but after you work with it for a while, you start to understand its appeal. PaperPort Watson can search the Web, desktop utilities such as Google, Yahoo, and X1 if installed, and the PaperPort index to incorporate news, email, blogs, shopping sites and more. A “professional edition” available for an additional fee adds the ability to configure additional information sources, access premium information services, and integrate with enterprise information systems such as MS SharePoint sites. Recommendation I could go on about features and improvements, but I think it is pretty clear that PaperPort 11 Professional is a major improvement feature-wise. It includes upgrades and fixes to existing features, while supplying some very useful new ones. After a greater than average number of complaints associated with versions 9 and 10, I’m a little bit hesitant to give 11 a glowing recommendation without testing it for an extended period of time, however, my initial round of tests suggest that PaperPort 11 Professional is so much better than the previous version that I’m going to recommend it (for most readers) anyway. If you are totally satisfied with your current version, I’d wait another month or two to see how things shake out; however, if you are currently experiencing slow performance, version 11 will surely help. If you need the batch keyword assignments through the use of Folder notes, I’d buy sooner rather than latter. If the improved scanning interface or PaperPort Watson is of use to you, buy now. I’d really like to believe that this version of PaperPort will be virtually bug free; my initial experience was highly satisfactory. If the bug problems are truly a thing of the past, new users and upgraders alike will have much to celebrate, because PaperPort 11 has been a joy to use. If you should encounter a bug or other problem, please let me know and I, in turn, will let Nuance know. Mr. Segarra assures me that he will read any and all complaints I submit, and that Nuance will do their best to address them. I’m really hoping that I do not have to contact him at all. |