PaperMaster Pro 7.0 - The Illusive Paperless World Creeps Closer

Besides e-tickets, one is hard-put to find an area where there is less paper used today than ten years ago. In years past, the term ‘paperless office’ was often bandied about. Here at the tail end of 2007,  it's readily apparent that reams of paper are still flying out of office supply stores.

PaperMaster Pro 7.0 is designed to reduce the amount of paper you use, but it does much more than that. One of the expanding pieces of software in the document management system (DMS) market, PaperMaster Pro 7.0 is used to track and store electronic documents as well as images of paper-based documents.

What's Hot: 
PaperMaster Pro 7.0 has a good feature set and a lot of functionality under the hood. Given that other document management systems can cost thousands of dollars, you get a lot of value from PaperMaster Pro 7.0.
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What's Not: 
Using PaperMaster Pro 7.0 is relatively easy, but not completely intuitive.

What's Hot: 
At $199, PaperMaster Pro 7.0 is quite reasonably priced compared to other packages with similar functionality.

What's Not: 
Low price means that your support options are limited.

What's Hot: 
The installation and setup of PaperMaster Pro 7.0 is easy using a standard Windows installation. You can simply run setup and accept the defaults for most installations.
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As part of installation, PaperMaster Pro 7.0 creates a directory called My Cabinets in your My Documents folder. This is where PaperMaster Pro 7.0 stores your cabinets. At the conclusion of the installation, PaperMaster Pro 7.0 performs an import of all your documents into the cabinet. I had about 4,000 documents imported, which took about 30 minutes to complete.
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PaperMaster Pro 7.0 works with scanners also, but only with TWAIN capable scanners. Most, but not all, scanner vendors have TWAIN drivers available. Configuring a scanner with PaperMaster Pro 7.0 is a relatively easy process.

PaperMaster Pro 7.0 can auto-file Microsoft Outlook attachments into your filing cabinet. This is not the default, and if desired, you have to (easily) configure PaperMaster Pro 7.0 to automatically place file attachments into the filing cabinet.

The other software options are rather intuitive, and it doesn't take much time to get the product working.

What's Hot: 

While designed to reduce the amount of paper you use, PaperMaster Pro 7.0 does much more than that. The product can be used as a mechanism to collect, organize, search, and maintain your electronic documents and faxes.

Using a computer and scanner, PaperMaster Pro 7.0 can digitize almost any hard copy document. It has a built-in OCR to convert the hard-copy documents into searchable, editable text.

The PaperMaster Pro 7.0 framework is built around the following three areas:

• Sending Document Collection.
• Document Organization.
• Document.

From a collection perspective, PaperMaster Pro 7.0 can scan both digital and hard-copy documents. It has the capability to convert files into its proprietary format and can also be used to digitize faxes.

From an organizational perspective, it uses a filing cabinet metaphor to use as a method for document handling. The file cabinet has a viewer to view the documents, and includes an index for full text searching of all items in the cabinet.

At lower levels, the cabinets have sub-drawers, folders and sub-folders that are used to sort and organize the myriad documents that will find their way into the cabinet.

Cabinets can be published, which creates a portable copy of the cabinet or drawer. Publishing a cabinet or drawer creates a portable cabinet that you can share with those that don’t have PaperMaster Pro 7.0. This is similar to the self-decrypting archive functionality supported by PGP.

When you publish, it places the files from the cabinet into a cabinet that is bundled with an installation binary for the PaperMaster Viewer. These files can be distributed via email, CD-ROM or the like.

The PaperMaster Viewer looks and works just like PaperMaster Pro 7.0, except that it can only be used to view existing PaperMaster Pro 7.0 files.

PaperMaster Pro 7.0 functionality includes the ability to email or fax documents directly from the PaperMaster Pro 7.0 cabinet. The document sending functionality enables the faxing of documents using the eFax product.
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What's Hot: 
PaperMaster Pro 7.0 performs relatively quickly at what it does. The most time consuming effort is the initial importing of files. If you have a large amount of documents, this can take a while, but will only require one import.

What's Hot: 
   

What's Not: 

PaperMaster Pro 7.0 lacks strong security controls. Ultimately, it's as secure as the physical security on which your cabinets are stored.

You can stamp a document with a default security level (confidential), or another customized security level, but the product has no functionality in which to support that security.

Given that one is putting all of their document eggs in the PaperMaster Pro 7.0 basket, a document management product such as this should have more security functionality.

What's Not: 

Although relatively easy to use, the PaperMaster Pro 7.0 help functionality was barely passable.

Most Windows programs will bring up a help menu when the F1 key is pressed, but PaperMaster Pro 7.0 doesn't support that basic functionality. Manually going into the PaperMaster Pro 7.0 help menu brought up a minimal set of basic information. When exported, then entire help output was a scant 13 pages.

I sent two technical support questions to j2 Global Communications Tech Support but never received a reply. They do not have any phone support phone number listed.
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Better help functionality; email auto support response; strong security controls

PaperMaster Pro 7.0 is an easy-to-use piece of software for going paperless.  My impression though is that the number of people who truly want to turn their reams of hard copies into digital files is limited.  The time required to scan, index, and organize large amounts of hard-copy documents can indeed be significant.

But for those who are indeed serious about going paperless, they will find gigabytes of easily searchable data at their fingertips after their migration to PaperMaster Pro 7.0 is complete. 

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