Ten Things to Ask When You Buy A Home Office Imaging Product
1. Does it do what you want?
When you're buying software for your home office, it's tempting to go cheap. There's ample opportunity to save money. Prices for personal imaging products start at $50 -- or even less. For example, TDF's (Bethesda, MD 301-951-1133) Personal Image Edition gives you many features of a full-fledged document image storage and retrieval system -- for free. (Download it from www.tdfcorp.com.)
But you may not want to use the lowest-priced product you can find. First, decide what your current and projected needs are. Then compare products feature-for-feature. Even if you don't need certain features right away, they may come in handy down the road as you become more skilled in using the system. It's better to buy a system you can grow into than one you'll quickly outgrow.
2.Is it easy to use?
A small imaging system should be simple and easy to use. You should be able to load the software and start scanning. And you should be able to get at your images quickly, without learning a whole new bag of software tricks. Everything should be done using point-and-click and familiar metaphors like files, folders and cabinets. If it's not, the vendor hasn't put much effort into the user interface. Shop for a more intuitive program.
3.Will it run on your PC?
Imaging takes more computing power than most PC applications. Most companies say that you can run their products on a 386. If you're not in a hurry, go ahead. But you'll get much better performance with a 486 or better. And count on needing more RAM than the minimum requirement stated by the vendor, especially if you plan to do a lot of searching and retrieving or OCR. If you want to store your images on your hard drive, remember that image files are hefty -- up to about 70 KB compressed. If you're still using a 250-meg hard drive, things will get pretty crowded pretty quickly. You'll need to upgrade your hard drive or invest in a removable-media storage device.
4.Is it expandable?
Say your business booms. Your home office won't cut it anymore. You move to a bigger office. You add staff. You install a network. Your document scanning volume increases ten-fold. Will your imaging system be able to keep up? Some products let you scale from a single-user home office setup to a full-blown enterprise-wide imaging system -- without abandoning what you've invested in along the way. If expansion is your goal, you'll be way ahead if you pay a little more now for an imaging system that can grow right along with your business down the road.
5.What scanner interface does it support?
TWAIN and ISIS are the most common interfaces. Go with products that support both. That'll give you the most flexibility if you ever want to upgrade your scanner. While you're asking about the interface, ask about maximum scanner throughput. What seems fast enough today may seem unacceptably slow if your business expands and you need to push a higher volume of documents through. Again: Go with more power than you need right now, if you can afford it. Grow into the scanner rather than out of it. You'll save over the long run.
6.Does it let you fax and copy in the background?
Some systems let you use your PC for other tasks while documents are being faxed or copied. If you plan to use your system for either of those two functions, you'll want this feature. Your fax board will have to be of the Class 2 variety to work in the background. If you haven't bought a fax board yet, put this item at the top of your priority list.
7.What type of file and compression formats does it support?
The more, the better. Support for many file and compression formats gives you the flexibility to export and import documents to and from other programs. Most personal imaging products support some, if not all, of the variations of TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). Depending on your applications, you'll want others. For example, if you want to save images from the World Wide Web, you'll need GIF and JPEG support. Also, ask about file conversion. If someone sends you an image in a format your system doesn't support, can you convert it? Can you convert your formats so you can send images out to other systems that use different formats?
8.Does it handle multiple document types?
In addition to scanned images and incoming fax documents, some personal imaging systems let you store documents created in other Windows applications as well. But each system does this a little differently. Some save images of the files -- you have to OCR them for editing. Others store the apps in native file formats, but you need to launch the originating apps to view and edit them. A few let you call view and edit the text file in the image viewer.
9. Does it include OCR?
This lets you do full-text searching. Drop the text file into a word processor and edit it. Systems that include OCR cost more than systems that don't. But it's well worth the extra money, so go ahead and spring for it if you need this feature.
10. Does it provide flexible searching?
If you store several hundred documents in your imaging system, you'll want to be able to search for them in several ways. Keywords work well -- if you can remember them. Full-text searching is good when there's a limited number of documents containing the word you use for a search word. It's less efficient when it brings back, say, 50 documents that meet your search criteria. The system should let you narrow your search to certain folders and do Boolean searches. Often, you can find things just as fast by flipping through your folders. The software should make it easy for you to do that.
