Review of Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe

Home Office, business
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Introduction

Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe can help users to create a more collaborative, and consequently, a more productive environment, with the tools that we use every day.

With the technologies available today and cheap storage, you would think that the use of paper is becoming obsolete. The bad news is we’re still a few years away from that reality. The good news is that products like Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe will help us get there.

Price to Value (4 out of 5)

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

Installation & Setup (4 out of 5)

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.

User Interface (4 out of 5)

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]

Performance (3 out of 5)

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.

Product Features (4 out of 5)

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.

Images

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Suggested Features

  • Implement Zoom in and Zoom out using the keyboard or mouse wheel.
  • All options on the toolbar should have a corresponding option on the menu.
  • Please remove the favorites menu or change it in a way that does not take several seconds to load all of my Internet Explorer Favorites.
  • Presto! Scan Buttons needs performance improvements.

Conclusion

Using Presto! PageManager 7 Deluxe had some ups and some downs. On the one hand, I hardly had to turn to the provided help files to figure out how I could do something. The user interface is smooth and clean. On the other hand, there are a few tweaks that would improve some areas. I encountered stability issues on Windows Vista and some performance issues with the Presto! Scan Buttons that proved to be a problem at times. That’s the main reason for the three-star rating. If these tweaks were made it would be rated a ‘Good’ buy instead of an ‘Average’ one.

PaperMaster Pro 7.0, OfficeReady Professional 4.0