This posting by Mark Shead on Productivity501 is a bit older but worth reading when you’re planning to go paperless: “Components of a Paperless Office”. You may want to replace the ScanSnap S500M with the current models S300M and S1500M, though :-)

DEVONthink Pro Office comes with built-in support for both Image-Capture-compliant scanners as well as ones that use a TWAIN driver to communicate with your Mac. Some scanners however refuse to work with both approaches and work best with their own scan software. Don’t worry, you can make even make most of these scanners work with DEVONthink. (more)

Many of you are already using a Fujitsu ScanSnap together with DEVONthink Pro Office. But if you don’t and you’re living in the United States, we have something for you: Starting today you can buy DEVONthink Pro Office bundled with the ScanSnap S300M or S1500M in our online shop as the ‘Paperless Office Bundle’. Happy shopping!

Nils Raschke, a German high school biology teacher, writes a blog about all things teaching biology and more. Last week he published a nicely written piece about how he is trying to cope with the paper flood: … (more)

Hugo of Streamlined Mind asks his readers if a paperless life would make you happier:

First of all it’s a good idea to eliminate as much of the incoming paper as possible. Let’s take some time to make a list of all sources of paper sent to us. Bills, obligations and notices, promotional material, things like that. Do we really need them? Do we read all that stuff? […] Do you think you can have a paperless life? (more)

Today we released DEVONthink Pro Office 1.5.3 as well as updates for DEVONthink Pro, DEVONthink Personal, and DEVONnote. We’re re-introducing Image Capture based scanning including grayscale and document feeder support so you now have the choice: Image Capture or TWAIN?

When Mac OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’ came out, it broke our scanner support based on the system’s Image Capture framework. We had been in exchanges with the Developer Technical Support and their Image Capture team at that time to find out why our capture function worked on Mac OS X 10.4.x but not on 10.5. To no avail. After a frustrating six months we moved on and licensed ExactScan Capture which is now embedded into every copy of DEVONthink Pro Office. This works with all TWAIN scanners but breaks with some scanners that are only compatible to Image Capture, not TWAIN. (more)

Mark Shead asked a number of people how they would advise creating a filing system from scratch. Then the readers of Productivity501 voted for the best one. Of course, this also involved the use of DEVONthink when it comes to effectively organizing electronic documents or getting rid of paper. (more)

If you want to import a batch of scanned PDFs without converting them to searchable PDFs right away, e.g. because you want to run the time-consuming OCR process later, you can easily do so. Import the files, e.g. to a group “To OCR”. Later, make sure to check Preferences > OCR > Original Document > Move to Trash, select all the documents, and convert them in one batch using Data > Convert > To Searchable PDF. This replaces the selected scanned PDFs with searchable copies and deletes the original file in one batch.

No Tuesday Tip, but a Wednesday Announcement. We’re proud to tell you that we’ve agreed with the German capture software manufacturer ExactScan to work closer together. Their ExactScan software allows you to connect one of the fast Avision scanners to your Mac and feed scanned documents directly into DEVONthink Pro Office. Just as we already did with the Fujitsu ScanSnap. Avision makes low-end to high-end auto-feeder scanners with scan speeds of up to 100 pages (50 sheets) per minute. So if you’re into serious paper capture, check them out.