Nuance's desktop document management tool also includes new compression tools that make smaller PDFs from color document scans.One would think there aren't many places that Nuance (formerly ScanSoft) could take PaperPort 11, which the company released May 16. It's a double-digit version number of a product whose raison d'etre is scanning paper documents into PDFs—in an age when offices are attempting to use less paper and make more documents digital.
But paper's still with us, and its presence actually is increasing. Sales of all-in-one office scanner-printer-copier machines are ballooning, said PaperPort senior product manager Jeff Segarra, with 15 million units selling in 2005, heading toward a projected peak of 20 million in 2008. That, he says, would double the 10-million-per-year peak of traditional scanners a few years ago.
Several trends are driving more paper into the office environment, from general growth in business to regulatory paperwork related to laws such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
More documents—whether they originated on paper or on a hard drive—equate to more need for a tool to help manage the growing morass of documents on most people's computers.
"When I ask people, 'If I e-mailed you a Microsoft Word document today, three months from now, would you be able to locate it?' most say, 'Yes, it'd be in my inbox or I'd file it somewhere I could find it,'" Segarra said. "But if I ask them if they could find, three months from now, a document I printed and put in the mail to them today, they say, 'Probably not.'"
Even if the workaday office drone could afford Adobe Acrobat to use for archival scanning, people in this demographic might not have the time to comprehend the application's layers of PDF settings and preferences for dealing with document scans. PaperPort 11 Pro ($199.99) seeks to automate the process for the garden-variety PC user.
PaperPort needs to make the scanning process as quick as possible and deliver the thinnest possible document files that can still be recognizable when printed, Segarra added.
To address those concerns, PaperPort 11 features a one-button "paper to PDF" feature that allows a user to slap a page down on the scanner bed, click a button and watch as PaperPort automatically plops a PDF on the desktop, or wherever the user prefers.
Also new to PaperPort 11 is MRC compression, which takes the different elements of a PDF file—black text, colored graphics, images—and compresses each one differently to maintain readability (according to beta testers) in the smallest possible file size. In 2,000 test files, the average PDF-MRC file turned out to be one-eighth the size of the typical office scanner's JPEG output.
"It segments the file out into its different components and applies a different level of compression on each of those," Segarra said. "It gets the file [size] down much smaller than JPEG alone can do."
PaperPort manages documents once they land on the hard drive, too. While some cubicle-dwellers might keep their documents perfectly organized in a sensible hierarchy of folders and directories, most of us keep things like e-mail attachments in the default folders where our e-mail app parks them, Word documents in their own little ghetto, and who knows what else in the Windows catch-basin called My Documents.
To help facilitate finding documents, Nuance licensed the Watson metasearch utility and built it into PaperPort. It can search the Web and the user's hard drive at the same time, building Web links into PDFs on the fly. The aspect of the tool that interested Nuance, Segarra said, was how it worked in concert with the Google, X1, MSN, and Yahoo desktop search utilities—and their catalogs.
"We call it an intelligent search engine," said Segarra. "You can type in keywords just like any other search engine, obviously. But it also does something more sophisticated. . . . It will automatically search the Web and desktop for documents related to the context of the article and segment [what it finds] under different tabs like news, blogs, shopping, and My Desktop."
Users complained about previous versions of PaperPort's speed; when the "My Documents" folder gets jammed with hundreds or even thousands of documents, it could take a long time for the program to redraw thumbnails for each file. For PaperPort 11, Nuance made the thumbnails feature user-controllable, so users can set the number of files in a folder above which the program ignores redrawing.
Acrobat and other sophisticated PDF-authoring tools offer network managers software and software development kits to dictate PDF settings and deploy them over a server, which helps make for consistent documents throughout the enterprise—not so big that they hog hard-drive space, yet not so small that they frustrate workers, customers and regulators. While Nuance hasn't yet joined that bandwagon, Segarra said that such network tools are in the works for the future.
Document Management 
