I try my best to keep up to date on the popular paperless office solutions on the market, particularly on those that are popular in the independent financial services industry. Every once in a while I run across reviews of solutions that are polar opposites of one another.

Here’s one recent example.

December’s Financial Advisor magazine features a write-up of PaperPort Professional v12.0, reviewed by Joel Bruckenstein. In the review he says:

…its ease of use, low cost and robust features make it an attractive option for smaller advisory firms with limited technology and training budgets.

and…

For the price, PaperPort provides a great deal of functionality.

Sounds fairly promising. For $199, advisers can get an entry-level document management and scanning solution that provides some of the basic functionality needed to implement a paperless office. What’s not to like?

Turn over to Amazon.com to buy the product, and right off the bat PaperPort Professional v12.0 is marked down 30% to $139.99. But wait a minute: Customer reviews of 2 out of 5 stars is troubling. So what gives?

Some of the highlights from Amazon.com reviews include these gems:

The OCR [Optical Character Recognition] is not improved since 11.2 … It still does not OCR accurately when it is a pdf document.

Over all, IMO, the “improvements” to PaperPort 12 aren’t. The pretty new face is nice, but that’s not enough of a reason to get the program.

However, potential purchasers of Paperport 11 or 12 need to know that there is a copy protection Docucom Watermark that may intermittently show up on your pdf files made with Paperport – making them unusable.

So the OCR engine is unimproved and buggy, version 12 seems improved only cosmetically, and there’s a Docucom watermark on scanned images? In my experience, accurate OCR and watermark-free images are essential in any document management solution worth its salt.

These drawbacks definitely seal the deal for me: I don’t recommend advisers look to PaperPort Professional v12.0 as a potential document management solution.

Make no mistake: I’m not bashing Joel’s review in Financial Advisor magazine. PaperPort does facilitate scanning, it offers a file manager, and it’s cheap compared to other solutions on the market.

But unfortunately, with the low price comes some significant shortcomings that I believe fail to meet most adviser’s expectations in a quality document management solution.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.