Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe - Document Management the Easy Way

Considering the features included in Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe, the value for the money is just right.

Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe is a painless install. During the process you input the product key, accept the user license agreement, and follow the usual steps. The only relevant note to include here is the option to install support to Sharepoint 2001 and 2003 before the final step to begin the install process. [See image 1]

On the downside it requires you to reboot Windows.

The Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe user interface is as simple as it gets. You have a main screen where you have all of the shortcuts to the most common features and an explorer-type tree so you can browse your computer, external drives, and the network. [See image 2]

The base memory footprint, on my machine at least, doesn't go beyond 35mb and with normal use I see it sometimes double that, but that's still perfectly acceptable. It’s responsive in most tasks.

There are, however, some issues. The Favorites menu loads the favorites from Internet Explorer and takes a long time to do so. I have over 100 favorites in IE and it takes at least 5-8 seconds to load this submenu. During that time, the interface is unresponsive.

The Presto! Scan Buttons takes a long time to load as well, and the CPU climbs to 90 percent for a few seconds. In an ideal world this tool would be great to be loaded with the operating system, but the loading time and processor usage prevented me from doing this.

Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe includes a lot of features, but there is one that can make the difference: it can scan documents directly to certain formats. It seems a simple thing but if you have to do it 100 times a day, and have to do it in two or three steps, having the option to do it in one step with just a few clicks is a must-have.

The preview is also nice, letting you take a peak at the documents before you actually open them on the external application. The integration with Sharepoint is also very welcome.

After installing Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe, it loads a new option on the Scanner configuration under Control panel. You can select Presto! Scan Buttons as the app to launch when you press the scan button on the scanner. It’s a nice little detail. [See image 4]

Converting a document to PDF is as easy as pressing the Save PDF button on the toolbar. You can also merge more than one file into one single PDF.

All tasks that you can do with the popular PDF format you can also do using XPS. XPS (XML Paper Specification) as an alternative to PDF. It’s an open, cross-platform format based in XML.

There are many other features. For example, PageManager 7 can stack files to group them without changing them, and include search functions to locate files by content, name, or keywords. The network group allows you to share documents with other users, and includes an FTP client to upload and download files from an FTP server. It even plays audio and video files.