As a card carrying paperless zealot and enthusiastic Twitter user, I am fond of following conversations on the subjects of paperless offices, document management and the like. There is one vein of tweet that never fails bring a smile to my face:

There is seemingly a perception amongst the uninitiated that the paperless home or office is a thing unto itself, that will, without cause or warning, bring itself into being and install itself right where you need it. I do not have the heart to shatter such beautiful fantasies.

To the enlightened, the paperless office is not a thing to be bought or installed, but a state to be achieved through diligence and practice. To be manageable and sustainable, the process must be simple. It must present the fewest obstacles, and the most benefits. Like many paperless practitioners, I use a four-stage system.

From Paper to PDF
Our process must of course begin with the paper and its conversion into an electronic format. Of the many document formats available today, none is more ubiquitous than the PDF and because of this, it makes the ideal format for long term document archival. It is easily read on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, Google Docs and Zoho etc, and offers good file size and fidelity.

In the spirit of simplicity, the ScanSnaps tick all the boxes. Not only do they quickly scan (around 18ppm) both sides of the documents at the same time, they automatically remove blank pages and convert the paper to fully searchable PDF document. The S300 in particular takes up so little room and will even draw power from the USB port, minimizing cables!

Working with PDFs
Without proper thought, your unsightly piles of paperwork will disappear only to be replaced with unsightly collections of PDFs. How efficiently you are able to work with your PDFs will determine how successful your paperless strategy it.

Home Document Manager is a desktop application for Windows, and is designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind. It maintains its own separate, high performance index of all your documents, meaning that your entire document collection can be searched in a fraction of a second.

You can customize your internal folder structures to reflect the way you work, and the way you like to organize your documents. How your files are organized in Home Document Manager is down to the individual. Everyone’s needs are different, and everyone’s way of working is different, but once they’re imported and organized, finding them is a snap. The list of documents for each folder (or search) contains a snippet (a small preview) as well as other document metadata (e.g. date).

Unlike when organizing files in Windows Explorer, Home Document Manager allows you to change metadata, such as the document’s date, so that it better reflects “when” the document arrived or was sent, rather than when you scanned it.

Previewing your documents is also a piece of cake. Home Document Manager gives you the option of previewing your documents using either its built in quick-PDF-preview technology, or with whichever PDF reader you have installed on your system (e.g. Adobe or Foxit). The built in PDF preview provides full access to searching within the current document.

For more on configuring Home Document Manager with your ScanSnap, go here.

From Scanner to Shredder
Unless the document you have just scanned needs to be kept (driving license, birth certificate etc), it should now be making its way to the shredder. This is probably the most satisfying part of any paperless process, the wonderful noise of paper clutter being cut in to tiny strips.

For a typical small/home office, there’s no need to go overboard with a shredder. I use a Fellowes Powershred p-48c. It’s cheap (less than $70), has a good capacity, can handle 6 to 8 pages at a time and cross shreds. I think it’s important to get a cross shredder, this type of shredder will cut the paper in to tiny (3.9m x 50mm) strips instead of the long strips that older scanners used to do. Most cross cut shredders will also destroy credit cards, which is a nice extra.

Backup. Backup. Backup.
If you don’t already back up your computer then consider this; every single hard drive ever manufactured will fail, it’s only a matter of time.  As with anything precious, if the only copy in existence is the one on your computer, it isn’t safe.

How you backup is another matter of personal preference.

• You can backup to another hard drive. Getting an external USB hard drive offers a quick, cheap, convenient way to backup up important documents.  Whilst quick and convenient, it still leaves you vulnerable to fire, theft, flood etc.
• An increasingly popular option is the online backup. Companies like Jungle Disk and Mozy etc, are making it less and less painful to back up essential files online.

My personal choice: I make weekly backups of my entire system to a second hard drive using Acronis True Image, and perform daily incremental backups of important files (documents, family photos, etc.) using Jungle Disk. I’m protected from flood, fire, theft, and hard drive failures. I sleep soundly.

I hope this goes some way to showing that being paperless is nothing more than the adoption of a process. The tools you choose are key, but using a ScanSnap with Home Document Manager would be a great place to start.

Tim Haughton
Home Document Manager