One of the main reasons so many offices are still “pushing paper” instead of using an electronic document management system is because they think going “paperless” will be too difficult. What many don’t realize is that all they need is a decent document scanner and some OCR scanning software.
Larger organizations will often outsource their document scanning and digital storage needs as a way to get started, since these companies will eliminate the need to spend weeks in the office at the scanner. However, once the initial work is done, many offices choose to do the scanning themselves.
A relatively inexpensive scanner will help you keep up with the influx of paper documents into your office, including letters, faxes, invoices and news articles. Using OCR scanning software in conjunction with the scanned images allows you to convert the PDFs into an editable, search able text format.
Some companies choose to use the software that comes bundled with the scanner, which works well for controlling image quality, but does nothing to make the images search able. You will need a powerful OCR scanning software package with an intuitive user-interface. The best software will recognize different languages and fonts, read the text from screen-shots, and even extract text from a scanned document containing tables and pictures with ease.
After your documents are all converted into digital formats, you will want to decide on an easy way to store and archive them on a secure server, or store them on an external hard drive. An easy way to index your search able scanned images is by using Google Desktop or the built-in search index tool on Windows Vista.
Once you get the hang of it, you will wonder how you ever managed your documents any other way.