Eric Mack On-Line

The other night, I used the 14" wide-screen on my Tablet PC display a PDF file on the left while I created a MindManager map on the right. What a delight! No paper! As I've said before, I don't believe in the paperless office; however, I DO believe in the less-paper office. It looks like the will be a vital part of this strategy. I want to see how far I can take this.  (Do I sound like I'm getting closer to becoming YABHTU?)

Now that I have the Tablet PC, the next step is to deal with getting paper into it so that I can store, organize, retrieve, and markup these digital documents.

My current document imaging setup:

I'm presently using a hybrid of Adobe Acrobat 7.0 (for document preparation), ScanSoft PaperPort 10 (for file-based document management) and Cobra Image router for document image capture and automatic filing in Notes. On the hardware side, I use an HP DS9100C for high-volume work, an OpticBook 3600 for books, and a mobile scanner.  I have everything working with the Tablet PC - except for the mobile scanner

Visioneer + Tablet PC = Strike out

After a frustrating experience trying to get my new Visioneer scanner (Strobe XP 100) to work with my Tablet PC, I did what any sensible person would do ... I called tech support. My support tech rep informed me, "Visioneer does not support the Tablet PC with any of their products at this time; the market's just too small."  Despite this disclaimer, I he tried to help me anyway before concluding that this scanner and the related driver simply would not work with Windows XP Tablet Edition. There was some discussion as to whether or not Visioneer would take back the product since, according to them, the problem is that I am using a Tablet PC.  I finally got an RMA and the scanner will soon be on its way back.

Too bad. Visioneer makes a really nice scanner and its small size make it an ideal companion to the Tablet PC. I would have gladly recommended it to my clients as a standard part of their mobility toolkit. Instead, I will look for an alternative.

My current plan is to purchase the Plustek OpticSlim M12 (Rob Bushway has a photo and a link to a review, here. James posted his thoughts here.) The book scanner that I recently purchased is also from the same manufacturer. The drivers installed without a problem on my Tablet PC and the application worked flawlessly. I hope that my experience with the M12 will be equally positive. If so, I'll recommend it to everyone. (That's what blogs are all about, aren't they?)

If you are a Tablet PC user and you are successfully using a very small mobile scanner with your tablet, I'd like to hear about your experience.