Two Keys to a Paperless Office

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If you are like a lot of business owners, you have heard about the "paperless office"--but for you it's more of a dream than a reality. You would like to free up the space currently occupied by your filing cabinets. You would love to get rid of that mess of pages on your desk.

Regrettably, for many years, taking an office paperless has been a difficult, expensive, and--at times--ineffective process. Pricey software, clunky scanners, and too-many-exceptions-to-the-paperless-rule meant that you could spend a lot of money creating an electronic filing system--only to find that you had to keep the physical files around anyway, because it was actually easier to file and locate documents the old way.

Fortunately, advances in both hardware and software have finally solved this problem. Today, an effective, affordable, paperless office is available to anyone who needs it. Two tools, in particular, make this possible--the Fujitsu ScanSnap s1500 and Google Desktop Enterprise.

Let's take a look at both, and how they can make your life a lot easier:

1. The Fujitsu ScanSnap s1500: For a number of years, Fujitsu has been making small, affordable, sheet fed personal scanners with one killer attribute--they work. This is a dream-come-true for anyone who remembers the days of banging your head against the wall just to perform a simple job, such as making a digital copy of a two-sided document. The Fujitsu ScanSnap s1500 does this brilliantly--by scanning both sides of the sheet at the same time. In addition, the software that comes with the scanner gives you a hassle-free way to save scanned documents as searchable.PDFs. This is essential for using the second key to your paperless office...

2. Google Desktop Enterprise: A lot of people use Google Desktop, but many are unfamiliar with the major benefit of its big brother. The Enterprise version is still free--but it lets you index files stored on a network drive. This means that you can save searchable PDFs to your company data store, and everyone in the office can search for them just like they were searching Google. Need to find the MasterCard statement for October 2007? How about the hand-out from that industry seminar you attended three months ago? If you can remember any indentifying information from anywhere in the document, Google Desktop Enterprise can pull up the document from the network drive.

This is the paperless Holy Grail that a lot of business owners have been searching for--a simple, effective way to store their documents electronically, and still be able to find them on a moment's notice. Technology has finally caught up with both our imaginations, and our business needs.

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