If you own a scanner, chances are you are using Nuance’s Windows-based PaperPort software, the tool that has been bundled with scanners for more than 20 years. Today the company introduced version 14 of the venerable utility, a new iOS app and a cloud-based scanning solution called PaperPort Anywhere.
What is interesting is how Nuance has taken a piece of desktop PC software that has been around so long and incorporated these more modern innovations, to make a powerful way to leverage how we work between cloud and desktop programs and enable users to more closely tie in cloud storage with their desktop files.
Anywhere has three different accounts: free, $10 or $25 a month that vary by the amount of cloud-based storage (one, 10 or 50 GB), and per-document file size limits (500 MB, one or two GB). By way of reference, a ten-page document will be 5 MB when scanned and compressed. You can store any digital file, just like Dropbox or SkyDrive, as well as take scans and move them to this repository. The display of files in your cloud drive can show you thumbnails of each document, as you can see in the screen shot below:
But more importantly than just transportation, you can also search for keywords or text within the document easily too. The PaperPort software will synch the same folder structure that you have on your desktop, which is better than some of the cloud services that just limit you to a single synch folder. When you synch folders, their names are bolded on your desktop software to remind you.
In addition to a link to the Anywhere cloud service, the newest version 14 of the Windows software (there wasn’t any 13 for superstitious reasons) includes the Nuance Cloud connector, which allows you to connect to over 20 different cloud-based services, including Amazon’s S3, Google Docs, Microsoft Live SkyDrive, Box.net and Evernote, among others. You can treat these services just like local desktop folders, such as drag and drop files from your desktop to the cloud, something missing from some of the clients for these cloud services. You can also scan a document and send it to these services too. There is also support for Windows 7 jump lists to improve navigation, and access to the Windows Context menu to be able to easily compress multiple documents. “Our users don’t have to leave our desktop to do tasks that they previously had to do on the Windows desktop itself,” says Jeff Segarra, director of imaging product management of Nuance.
Nuance will also introduce downloadable mobile applications for iPhone, iPad and Android devices that allow users to access and send documents from PaperPort Anywhere. Again, this is similar to what the mobile clients on Box.net and others offer, for example.
PaperPort v14 is available now in two versions for $99 for the basic version and $199 for the professional version, which includes PDF creation and some other tools. Upgrades will cost $99 for the Professional version if you are an existing Nuance customer, and available until the end of September.
