Paperless office stuff

[ddrueding]

I'm helping a friend take his very small company paperless. How small? He does all the paperwork at night himself, and Quickbooks is the financial product of choice.

I'm thinking of setting him up with this scanner to supplement the flatbed (without ADF) that he already has. We'll also need a decent PDF app (cropping, rotating, etc) and some kind of filing system.

We could just use folders, but some of the paperwork would greatly benefit from a tagging system of some kind. Is there anything out there for the windows world yet?

 

[Mercutio]

I got a lot of mileage out of NitroPDF for a lot of simple stuff like adding signatures to electronic documents. Good, descriptive file names and some kind of network storage that supports Windows 7 libraries and integrated search could go a long, long way.

 

[ddrueding]

I haven't played with Windows 7 Libraries at all. Do you have a recommendation on where to start learning?

 

[Mercutio]

Library locations are indexed, so if you have stuff on them all the instant search crap in Win7 actually does something useful. You need 2008R2 or maybe WHS to make network shares available in libraries.

 

[Handruin]

In Windows 7, I tried adding a network location into a library and it said it couldn't because it was not indexed. However, there are ways to enable the indexing. Are you sure you need 2008R2 or possibly WHS?

Why did I get a message saying that a location can't be included because it's not indexed?

It means that the folder is stored on a network location that hasn't been indexed. A network folder can only be included in a library if the content of the folder has been added to the search index. If the folder is already indexed on the device where it's stored, you should be able to include it directly in the library.

If the network folder is not indexed, an easy way to index it is to make the folder available offline. This will create offline versions of the files in the folder and add these files to the search index on your computer. After you make a folder available offline, you can include it in a library.

When you make a network folder available offline, copies of all the files in that folder will be stored on your computer's hard disk. Take this into consideration if the network folder contains a large number of files.

 

[Mercutio]

No I am not, but making local copies of 12TB file shares doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea, either.

 

[Mercutio]

OK, the big thing is Homegroup and/or Windows Search support. That's what enables Network libraries without causing a huge pile of suck.

 

[Handruin]

I wasn't aware that ddrueding needed to index 12TB worth of content. My point was to show a possible option in case he doesn't have access to server2008R2 or if e doesn't want to pay for it. I have not tried the solution I posted, I just copied and pasted from the windows help file.

 

[ddrueding]

I will play with that. At the moment, this user has about 600GB of data on a generic NAS that is being duplicated via a script to another generic NAS in another building.

 

[Gilbo]

I've got nothing on the tagging system. If anyone knows of anything, I'd be extremely interested. Construction sites generate an obscene amount of paper and I've been trying to dig myself out for a while.

As for scanners, I use 2 Fujitsu Scansnap S1500's, one at work and one at home. They aren't TWAIN compliant though.

 

[ddrueding]

Funny you mention construction, I work for a medium-sized construction company (<500 employees), and my client is a small general contractor (crew of 5 if the job is big enough).

 

[Will Rickards]

I always see that neat receipt software advertised. But I think you have to use their scanners.

 

[Gilbo]

Dave,

While I do techsupport at my company because I'm good at it, and have a background in it, I'm actually a project manager for a developer. I can understand even guys who do small projects wanting to go paperless. Part of it is the simple fact you're working on different sites, in different locations, and you should have access to whatever you need, wherever you are.


Will,

I read some reviews on the Neat Receipt scanners and most people who had tried both preferred the Fujitsu Scansnaps, even though they don't have specialized receipt OCR software.

eg. BoingBoing.

The S1500 comes with a full version of Acrobat, which is nice for those who have to deal with PDFs. It's much better than Adobe Reader which is the worst piece of crapware ever.


One thing I've been super-interested in is zonal OCR at consumer price points, but I don't think anything exists at the moment. I'd love to be able to automate invoice & receipt data entry.