Proceeding to the Paperless Office, part II

Small Company, Big Document Challenge

In every job market, there is a need to bring together great employees and great employers. In Southwest Florida at the turn of the millennium, a tight labor market makes this even harder. C.J. Hueston, as a successful Barron Collier executive, was only too aware of how hard it could be to recruit just the right person for specialized job openings. Her new company, Corporate Dimensions, is designed to meet the need of organizations to hire both intelligently and efficiently in a very tight labor market.

To fulfill client expectations, Corporate Dimensions leverages technology. By implementing a sophisticated electronic document management solution, its small, but talented staff can find information within seconds. Hueston and her colleagues must be able to retrieve precise skill, job history and experience data from thousands of resumes. If the company relied on paper files and 3 x 5 cards, it could not respond quickly or appropriately. Even before her company was launched, Hueston began searching for an answer.

Hueston turned to Carol Conway at Computer Rescue Squad for a solution. CRS had recently begun to offer a variety of electronic document management solutions that combine astonishing paper reduction and rapid information retrieval. They were able to provide a turnkey solution that enabled rapid scanning and indexing of resumes and related documents into a database. Actual images of the resumes are retained so that when they are retrieved exact duplicates can be sent to a client.

The result: Both speed and precision. Corporate Dimensions can select candidates based on precise criteria from an ever-growing database of resumes. Instead of wading through dozens of file drawers in the hope of finding a match, Hueston and company can generate an appropriate list of candidates within seconds-and then can email or fax electronic versions of resumes to prospective employers.

How Does it Work: The Process of EDM

Although Electronic Document Management (EDM) solutions vary in cost and sophistication, the basic process is similar for each one. Here is how it works:

* Set up an information management structure to manage the stored documents. This is analogous to organizing paper file folders in a logical way. Because it's electronic, you can create folders within folders. You can also rearrange the electronic "folders" later.

* Establish the key words or other criteria -- for example, invoice number or date that will be used to find the documents once converted to images.

* Scan documents into the computer.

* Index the documents by key words or other criteria and place into the appropriate electronic folder.

* As an optional step, you may wish to use optical character recognition (OCR) to create text-based documents from the original images. In so doing, you enable full-text searching.

* Depending on your requirements, you may wish to store your EDM files on a CD-ROM or other removable storage media.

Alchemy: A Sophisticated EDM Solution

If you have a large number of mission critical documents of various types -- for example, text, graphics or CAD images -- and you need to store, index and retrieve them quickly, Alchemy may be for you.

Alchemy is a Windows compatible business application that builds document databases on low-cost PC storage and offers a number of retrieval and output options. Alchemy can be tightly integrated with new archival media such as CD-R and DVD. It is ideal for managing large volumes of images, MS Office files, PDFs, AutoCAD and other common PC files. The product includes the functions necessary for indexing, archival, query, retrieval, viewing, printing and routing via e-mail. Among its strengths:

* Alchemy includes a document database manager developed specifically to index and store object files and data together. Each database can easily scale to handle millions of files and records with no degradation of query and retrieval performance.

* Extremely fast queries and hit list display.

* Output options: advanced printing functions, send to fax, retrieve to hard disk, send to e-mail, export data to ASCII delimited file for database applications.

* A sister product, Alchemy Web Server, leverages this efficient and affordable database architecture to deliver files and data to a Web browser. Typical applications would be customer access to archived cancelled checks or a data vault service for a service bureau.

A corporate investment in Alchemy software and an industrial strength document scanner might nudge past $10,000. However, if your organization (and you know who you are) needs super fast access to lots of complex documents, you can count on a measurable payback in less than a year.

Pagekeeper Pro 3.0: A Simpler, Less Robust Solution

Although not nearly as robust powerful as Alchemy, PageKeeper Pro 3.0 is a surprisingly good document or management product. This new release of the venerable PageKeeper product is a significant improvement over the previous version. Since it won't ship until April, we examined the prerelease version.

PageKeeper enables users to organize and retrieve essentially all their computer documents, including both scanned paper and electronic files. It automates time-consuming tasks involved in setting up and maintaining a collection of documents. As a result, user interaction is minimized, and time is saved. One of the problems with document management software to date is that users had to work to hard to organize the organizer. To manage documents with PageKeeper Pro, users need only to identify (or "add") documents, they wish to use with the program.

Users see a thumbnail image of almost all document types linked to PageKeeper. The user organizes documents into virtual folders and subfolders -- they are virtual because the actual document remains where it started. PageKeeper simply creates an index for rapid search and viewing. Among the highlights:

* Smart Folders: PageKeeper includes a unique method for automatically filing documents based on user-defined criteria. The program includes Smart Folders, which allow users to specify filing parameters such as key words, file type and document size. As a result, new documents added to PageKeeper can be automatically filed to the appropriate folder without manual efforts.

* The Folder Watch feature automatically adds documents that have been saved or moved to certain directories. A user only need to identify directories and then PageKeeper "watches" these directories for new documents. New documents are added to PageKeeper without any user interaction.

* A highly flexible and speedy search engine enables users to find documents by setting numerous parameters. In our limited testing, it produced good, if not perfect results.

* PageKeeper Pro does a great job of pulling in and indexing pages off t