I recently purchased a Fujitsu Scansnap S1300 (review coming in the next few weeks) after borrowing both a S1500M from work, and an S300 from a coworker. I hate having to deal with paper ((Heck, I hate people printing at work (it’s an ongoing debate in the building… it seems like I’m sometimes the only one saying we need to curtail printing) )). My hope, with this in hand and some knowledge gained from here, I can turn years of files in my filing cabinet, into years of digital documents in Dropbox that can be searched, easily found, and worst case, printed (if absolutely necessary). I’ve been shredding personal documents for years, so the thought of being able to scan something, then quickly shred it, just makes me all kinds of happy. My goal, then, is the “myth” of paperlessness ((Also, this is the first post in what will probably become an ongoing topic on my site (such that I’ve created a new category for it).)). (which I don’t consider as much a myth as some). While paperlessness may be a lofty goal, my hope is to become closer and closer as time goes on (now that most banks, utilities, etc offer paperless billing, much to the USPS’s dismay).
My big task, at this point, is to find software that will adequately meet my requirements, which aren’t that many.
- Tagging (not sure yet if this should be OpenMeta based or not)
- Searchable (not sure if I want this to be spotlight-able or not)
- Dropbox-able (either easily backed up, or must live on Dropbox)
That’s pretty much it. Some sites have a good starting point (like here). But basically, there are several options, of which, I haven’t touched any much.
I have no real views on any of these yet, other than some of them seem to have fallen by the wayside and have not been updated in a while, and that some companies (like Filemaker), are generally going to be pretty reliable (not going to suddenly go out of business). But then, they’re probably also going to be slow to respond to feature requests, bug reports, etc. So, over the next while, I’m going to take a look at each of these, and hopefully have something to report.
Stay tuned! Onward to paperlessness!
