SOHO IMAGING MAKES YOUR HOME WORK EASIER

Whatever your budget, there's a package of imaging software or hardware/ software combo that's right for your burgeoning home business.

You finally did it. You left the nine-to-five grind to launch your own business. Working at home means no more early-morning commute.

That's the good part. The bad part: No more secretary to straighten your desk. Without an assistant, your filing system becomes a stack-as-you-go affair.

So get smart. Get organized. Get a home office imaging system.

No, it's not one of those high-priced lollipaloozas they use in big banks and insurance companies. What we're talking about here fits nicely within your technology budget. It also fits on your desktop.

Indeed, if you own a relatively new PC (486 or better), the biggest and priciest part of a home office imaging system is already ON your desk. Just add a scanner and some low-cost imaging software to create a package that will handle most of your paper management chores. Or spend a little more and get a system that rivals a high-priced lollipalooza.

Home office imaging provides four functions: scanning, indexing, search and retrieval, and printing.

1. Scanning. Run a page through your scanner. The resulting image (or a miniature version called a thumbnail) appears on your screen.

The next step is to store the image. Most home office imaging systems use filing metaphors like folder, drawer and cabinet to represent storage directories.

If your imaging software uses icons, drag the thumbnail to the correct icon or folder and drop it in. Or open the folder before you scan and have the image go there directly. The software compresses the image so it takes up less room on your storage device.

You can clean up a less than perfect image before you store it. If it's crooked, straighten (deskew) it. If it's upside down, rotate it. If edges look junky, crop them.

2. Indexing. After you've scanned a document, you need to tag it with an index.

A way to index images is to key data as you scan. You can also automate the process with OCR.

3. Search and retrieve. After you've scanned and stored your documents, you can search for them in many ways. Use some filing metaphors to rummage through various folders and drawers until you find what you're looking for -- the "hunt-and-click" approach. Enter the index you provided for the document you want. Do a full-text search by entering any OCRed word or phrase you think appears in the document.

Narrow your search by looking just in certain folders. Or do a Boolean search to logically join or exclude combinations of search words. All the documents that match your search criteria are displayed in a list.

Once the right image is displayed, go ahead and mark it up. Most personal imaging systems let you annotate in a variety of ways. Add electronic sticky notes. Type in text anywhere in the document. Scribble notes. Draw arrows, text boxes, circles or lines. Highlight selected areas with transparent overlays. Block out selected areas to protect confidentiality. Delete any or all of these whenever you want.

You can also make images easier to read. Zoom selected areas to make fine print more legible. Most imaging systems let you zoom a little or zoom a lot -- it's adjustable. Tired of scrolling? Use the common "Fit to Page" command, which reduces the image to the size of the viewer window. Or use "Fit to Sides," which makes documents easier to scroll through. Some systems let you "Scale to Gray," which smooths the edges of a black-and-white image to enhance clarity.

Want to combine pages to create a new document? Pop up the thumbnails and drag them on top of each other in the order you want. Rearrange documents in a folder. Sort them by last name or date. Move them from folder to folder. Throw them away. Do just about anything except make a paper airplane.

4. Printing. If you really want to make that airplane -- or you need a hard copy of any image for some other reason -- click on the print icon. Some home office imaging products will print the image with or without annotations, depending on what you want. Others automatically strip the annotations prior to printing, whether you want them or not. Some let you print a selected portion of an image. Others let you print several images on a single page.

There's More You Can Do...

Other functions supported by personal imaging software vary from product to product. Many of them offer some, if not all, of the following options:

1. Fax. Sending a fax is as easy as printing. With most systems, you just click on the print button and select "Fax" from the printer list box. Some have a separate fax button. Enter the name and number or select them from a directory you've created. Click "Send" and off it goes. If the imaging software supports Class 2 fax modems, you can transmit in the background while doing other work on your PC.

Handling an incoming fax is just as easy. Use the imaging software's Import command to send the fax to an in-basket. Clean it up and OCR it. Or file it as is. Put it in any folder you like. It's just another document.

2. Copier. Why pay several hundred dollars for a photocopier? Just scan your original and print as many copies as you want. Make double-sided copies. Do reductions and enlargements. Collate. Best part: Make your copies in the background and you can keep right on working.

3. Forms fill-in. No matter how sophisticated they get, most home office types still keep a typewriter around. Why? For forms. Unless you want to fill them in by hand, how else are you going to do it? With a package that does forms fill-in, it's easy.

Scan the form. Click on the image at the beginning of each blank that needs to be filled in. Then tab to each blank and enter the data from the keyboard. Some products even let you import your signature so you can sign on the dotted line. Print the form and mail it back. Or fax it right from the form screen. If you fill in lots of forms (rental contracts and so on), it's worth buying an imaging system just for this feature.

4. Import and export. Bring files created with other Windows applications into your imaging system and store them in folders with images. Or send image files already in folders out to other applications for editing.

Scoping the SOHO Products

Most home office imaging products fall into three categories:

1. Software that costs less than $200.

2. Software that costs more than $200.

3. Combined hardware-and-software products.

Here are examples of products in each category:

lSoftware under $200: At $50 list, E-Quip from Alacrity (Hackettstown, NJ 908-813-2400) is one of the lowest-priced imaging products on the market. But don't let the price fool you -- E-Quip offers almost as many features as other products that cost much more than $50.

Enter up to 128 characters to index an image. Search on any character string in the index. Resize and rotate images. Annotate with sticky notes, straight and freehand lines, rectangles or transparent highlight overlays.

E-Quip also includes a form fill-in component and a copier function that enlarges and reduces. Fax features include background send-and-receive, broadcast mode and an address book that holds 10 databases of 500 names each. OCR is available with E-Quip+, which lists at $70.

Another recently introduced $50 product for personal imaging is MyDesk from Iota Industries (Norwalk, CT 203-849-1400). MyDesk automatically converts scanned documents into TIFF-compatible images that are immediately searchable -- without a separate OCR process. To search, enter any word. MyDesk retrieves all images that have that word in them and displays them with the keyword highlighted. Other features include zooming and multipage document support.

Decision Management (Laguna Hills, CA 714-855-6885) offers two versions of their low-priced imaging product. Questys Lite is a scaled-down version of the company's enterprise imaging product. The Lite version offers basic scan, index and retrieve functions. Download Lite from Decision Management's Web site (www.dmc-inc.com) for $25 or purchase the packaged version for $50. If you want OCR, the prices are $75 and $100, respectively.

Questys Lite is also available as Thought For Word, which runs directly from Microsoft Word. With Thought, there's no need to learn a new user interface. Just call up the button menu from Word and start scanning. Click the OCR button to create a text file from the image. Click the Import button to dump the file into Word. Edit the document, then click the Index button to put every word into a searchable index database. Price? $100 for the downloaded version (with OCR), $125 for the packaged version (with OCR).

PaperMaster 2.0 from DocuMagix (San Jose, CA 408-434-1138) offers one of the most intuitive user interfaces in the personal imaging marketplace. This $100 product lets you work with multiple folders in multiple drawers in multiple cabinets. Once you've stored a document with this product, you can do just about anything with it. Drag it from folder to folder. Copy it to another folder. Annotate it with text and color-codable sticky notes. Rearrange the pages. Add pages. Delete pages. Delete the entire document. Everything's drag-and-drop or point-and-click.

If you scan a lot of similar documents (bank statements, invoices, purchase orders), PaperMaster helps you decide where to store them. The AutoFile function recognizes similar image formats (after several have been scanned and stored) and prompts you where to put documents of the same type. Just click OK and it's filed. To edit the text of any document, just click on Show Text. PaperMaster will OCR the image and paste the text into a word processor.

Recollect from Mindworks (Sunnyvale, CA 408-730-2100) offers the most search features in this product category. Full-text, Boolean and fuzzy searching are all supported. Fuzzy searching will locate documents even if they don't exactly match the keyword you've entered. Very helpful when searching for hard-to-spell proper names or technical jargon. Spell it as close as you can. Recollect will put up grayscale thumbnails of all the documents containing words that are approximate matches.

Another Recollect feature: Portable Document Indexing. This lets you to copy images to a removable media storage device (Zip drive, for example) without reindexing. Images stored on different storage devices (Zip, SyQuest and magneto-optical, for example) can be searched using the same index database. You can also hyperlink related documents. Recollect costs $150.

Scan & Type from GDI (Novato, CA 415-382-6600) includes several features that enhance the product's form fill-in function. You can move the cursor anywhere on the form and enter text in any font and justification. Variable horizontal and vertical spacing lets you put your text in the exact position you want. There's a check-mark icon to make quick work of government and registration forms. Annotation tools include sticky notes, drawing pen and highlighter.

With Scan & Type's Multiple Document Interface, you can work simultaneously with several multipage documents. Compare documents. Refer to one document while editing another. Quickly jump from document to document to find the information you need. List price: $200.

If managing incoming faxes is more important to you than managing scanned images, then BitWare 4.0 from Cheyenne Software ($200) may be what you need. BitWare lets you annotate faxes with text and graphics and file them into folders using drag and drop. Or OCR the text and throw it into a word processor for editing. Stored faxes can be automatically deleted from folders based on the schedule you specify -- after 30 days, for example. You can also set up a fax-on-demand system that lets you automatically send information to anyone who calls and requests it. A great marketing tool.