OmniPage Professional 16 by Nuance Communications, Inc. offers features that would seem to supplant even a combination of Adobe Acrobat and an OCR program. My intention in this review is not only to examine whether the application lives up to its claims, but also to determine if OmniPage really does what would otherwise require multiple pieces of software.To get started, I spent quite a bit of time looking over the web pages for OmniPage Professional 16.
This product is so feature-rich that even a cursory explanation requires a sizable chunk of content. OmniPage uses "zones," which define what a chunk of a content is: text, image, form field, etc. This is how the software can interpret a document’s various regions, and run OCR on the text zones and allow for scanner enhancement technology (SET) on the image zones. But are the website's intimations that OmniPage is truly a magic bullet for paper-free business, workflow design, and content repurposing true?
OmniPage seems capable of taking care of everything you might want to do with a document; from a legal filing or a medical record, to a marketing piece, to any generic kind of form, whether paper-based or electronic. Besides creating PDF documents, there’s a broad range of file types you can save to, even disparate types like typical text-based formats, image formats, and even a simultaneous audio file of the content. There are toolbar add-ins for the obvious Microsoft Office programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and you can convert from paper or electronic format to PDF, or even edit PDF files directly and save or edit them in a number of different ways. There's also batch processing, custom workflows, and so on. OmniPage is truly a monstrously ambitious piece of software.
What's Hot:
The only way to assess a price-to-value ratio for this product would be to compare it to Adobe’s Acrobat Pro, since that’s the only other product that I can think of that comes close to the features in OmniPage Professional. The two products also have very close price levels; Nuance has OmniPage Pro 16 listed on their website for $499.00 and Adobe has Acrobat Pro listed for $449.00. But there are features in OmniPage for which you’d also need at the very least a good scanner utility and OCR program in addition to Acrobat, and even then the combination would still leave holes in comparative features.
If you need the features, then OmniPage is a good value, if you consider the power of the product I would have to say that OmniPage is not only a good deal, but something that an organization could make and or save tons of money with, and here’s why: with OmniPage, you can set up workflows and output options that anyone in an organization can capitalize on.
For instance, you could set up a printed “cover sheet” that initiates a workflow within the software. Virtually any computer user can be shown how to use it just once and be able to repeat it at will. To get the same capabilities out of another product (or set of products), the user will have to actually learn how to do something, and worse, that user would need to be a much more proficient computer user in general and most likely have to know the bigger concepts of what they’re doing even to figure out how to get the result they want.
More than most pieces of software, the level at which you use OmniPage has more to do with the price-to-value ratio than the price itself. If you use it for things like document conversion, workflows, and content repurposing, then it’s a total bargain, if you use it just as a “PDF printer,” it’s no deal at all and you should look at some of the lesser alternatives on Nuance’s website.
What's Not:
The price isn’t a problem if you use even a few of the unique features OmniPage Pro possesses.
