Techie Review: Nuance’s PaperPort Professional v14

PaperPort Anywhere—

As with what Nuance did with Omnipage, PaperPort has an option to put your documents in the ‘cloud’. I’m not a massive fan of ‘cloud’ access, but I do realize the benefit is can offer to some people. And for purposes of practicality, you shouldn’t store sensitive data in the ‘cloud’.

PaperPort offers the ability to upload your documents and images to offline storage such as GoogleDocs,  Nuance Cloud Drive, Box.net, Microsoft Skydrive and EverNote. And there’s options to sync the data to the off-site storage.

Making the data portable, there’s applications for Android and iPhone, to be able to pull and view your documents on your Smartphone or tablet PC.

Three PaperPort Anywhere subscription services are available:

The GUI—

The GUI for PaperPort has been updated, but the basis for the application is still there. And from the presentation is application isn’t focused the average home user. The interface is right in line with Nuance’s other software offerings; they’re keeping it in the family, but PaperPort doesn’t have the ‘snap’ for help like Omnipage.

There’s no doubt about it— This package has a focus to the above average and business class users. There’s nothing social about PaperPort; it’s all about business and getting things done.

And, the theme of the new PaperPort can be changed.

Something else about the new GUI had my interests peaked, and that was the ‘recently scanned’ and ‘recently viewed’. Sometimes images get scanned and somehow get lost… this option may help you. Same with viewing images; but you just can’t remember where the last one was…

The DekstopDelivery Manger—
For those people/businesses that really work with document imaging; you know how important it is to get data in to the system, but if you have a function to monitor and poll a folder, or shared folder on a regular basis and pull those documents in to the system for you— it’s that much nicer. Now you can…

Setup your folders, local or shared over a LAN and you can pull those images in to the system.

Another thing that was really nice to see— folder properties.

This not only works in DektopDelivery, but syncing images/documents to the web. This could be a God send for execs on the go, that need up to date information.

Still, you have the PaperPort indexer…

If you’ve had a previous version of PaperPort before, you know this is a service like application that monitors folders and indexes the data it finds and put that in to PaperPort for searching.

Microsoft Sharepoint Access—

As a person who knows how important this is in to a corporate environment; to have a better interface than what Microsoft offers by default on it’s SharePoint. PaperPort has incorporated a new interface option for SharePoint from inside the application.

As it turns out, I don’t have a way to test the interface to SharePoint. But the fact that PaperPort offers this option is good.

Folder Security—

In my last critical post of PaperPort, I mentioned security, and Nuance has responded by adding security options in the application. I have noticed that the latest version of PaperPort has made an effort to address security; it’s not proprietary; it’s Windows security.

The more I messed around, the more I found there’s nothing special about this.

If you have meddled with network shares or Microsoft credentials at some point; you can handle PaperPort document security. But it’s a valid approach… Seriously. Why reinvent the wheel? PaperPort stores all the data in folder format, very easy to understand, and it’s not cryptic.

The security settings can now be applied to Users, folders and shares.

While I believe Nuance could’ve done more to make the options a little more streamlined and friendly, they did extend themselves in to the realm of document security. This move may not launch them in to large corporations; it’s definitely get them in to the small business office.

Document Scanning—

PaperPort Continues to have the best interface for getting information/documents/images in to the system with the least amount of work, but with all due respect to the application, it’s not always about scanning a certain way, it’s about the batches of documents you scan, what kind of documents you scan.

PaperPort needs to push the envelope here and allow for scanning by types of batches and template recognition. Batches could allow the users to categorize and name documents much faster. Template recognition could offer user the ability to recognize documents/images by a point of reference, Something to help identify the documents being scanned.

But overall I found no issues with scanning documents…

Goodbye MAX files! —

PaperPort v14 is leaving MAX files in the past… MAX files generated with PaperPort v10 and above are read only and are able to be edited. [I heard the air leave the room people] Nuance says if you want to edit a MAX file, you have to convert it to PDF and then make your edits. This is where Nuance’s PDF power comes in to play.

Nuance’s latest offering for a PDF viewer is very powerful, and the enterprise version is loaded even more with bundles features. This is also something I noted when I did my review of Nuances PDF Enterprise v7; it was and it’s the perfect match for PaperPort in this regard.

And if you are worried about converting all those MAX files, Nuance provides an application [CVMAXPDF.EXE ] to convert all those nasty, old, legacy and cumbersome MAX files. I, for one, am glad to see the MAX files die a horrible death.

I, personally, took lots of my personal time about 2 years ago and converted all my MAX files to PDF— man, I wished I had that application back then.

Image Editing—

To make the transition from the MAX files to PDF and to really offer MORE to the document imaging freaks out there, the only answer was to turn PaperPort in to an image editing application as well. A lot of the feature sets and options you see in the Nuance PDF viewer, you’ll see in PaperPort.

Here’s some screenshots:

I did find something irritating about this release and the new image editing options.

I found I could copy/cut and paste parts of the images and put them back in the same image, but I found no way after the clip was placed, to go back and adjust it anymore. If the option is there, it’s elusive. Basically, if you have an image and you paste a clipping on top of it, once it’s deselected, you can move it anymore…

There’s an UNDO option, but that option removes the clipping from the image you’re working with; this could be very irritating.

Performance—

Once the images are loaded on the screen everything seems to be really fast, but I’m not able to say with any great certainty that any massive performance improvements have been made. I do know that PaperPort 14 officially supports accessing data from over a network connection and now when you access files on a network location, that file is locked.

Performance is going to be limited by the performance of the system and by the limitations and speed of the network you’re using. I did notice in the PaperPort settings/options you can set anything over X amount of results, switch to details view; this may be a way to combat the performance bug.

PaperPort biggest problem seems to be switching to folders and building a listing of thumbnails; if you aren’t using the thumbnails, things seem to go much faster.

In my testing, different from the last version, I had no issues with PaperPort grabbing information from a network location. And while I chose not to upgrade to this latest version of PaperPort, I believe this one is going to be worth updating to.

Two versions of PaperPort 14 are available: