Digitize Your Small Business

By: Stacey Moore


There is a problem confronting business professionals in the office today. Valuable information that is written, printed, copied and faxed-driving much of your productivity-is kept in piles on your desk, stuffed in folders in your file cabinets or hidden away in locations around the office. Your paper-based information resources are not being managed in a way that can improve productivity. This inevitably results in increased operating costs, diminished productivity and, in some cases, lost opportunity.

The problem is not the paper-it is how to integrate this information into your electronic environment. How to actually do this is continuing to change into a highly mobile, connected digital workspace where all the information business professionals need is at their fingertips. However, until improved methods are brought forth that convert the paper on the desk, or in folders in the filing cabinet, into information that is instantly accessible, organizations will be forced to continue working in two separate worlds-paper and digital.

There is a plethora of document-imaging solutions available today that target these issues, but most are costly, complex and require special software and training to operate. However, technology has changed the face of scanning in recent years to where thousands of small and mid-sized businesses previously left out of the document-scanning revolution can now benefit from this technology. Currently, low-cost, sheet-fed scanners such as the Fujitsu ScanSnap are now available that eliminate these complexities, are fast and are small enough to place next to you on the desk.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap is roughly the size of a letter-size sheet of paper and offers a 50-page Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and optical resolution of 600 pixels per inch. The scanner focuses on scanning to PDF, with JPG as a second choice, and Adobe Acrobat 7.0 is included for instant PDF conversion. Simply place the paper in the ADF, hit the big green button and seconds later you have a full-duplexed PDF copy of your original document. It also comes with a ScanSnap-specific version of ABBYY Software's top-notch FineReader Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software (Readiris Pro v11 from I.R.I.S. for the Mac version), which will convert the words on the scanned pages to editable documents such as Microsoft Word.

The ScanSnap also functions as a business-card scanner, with the ability to run business cards through its ADF quickly, recognize the text and send the results to a variety of programs, including Microsoft Outlook and GoldMine. It doesn't discriminate when it comes to operating systems either. The ScanSnap S500 for PCs and the ScanSnap S500M for the Mac both come with automatic blank-page detection and deletion, automatic color detection and automatic deskew and image rotation.

Most offices store too much paper and that can affect productivity. Documents can become more valuable to your small business if you've had them digitized and archieved with a sheet-fed scanner.

For more information, visit http://us.fujitsu.com/fcpa.