Review: Nuance ScanSoft PaperPort 11 Professional utility software

A program of three pieces, but does PaperPort manage to integrate them into a single application?

Nuance is the new name for ScanSoft, although bizarrely the latest version of PaperPort, has both names in its title.

Nuance ScanSoft PaperPort 11 Professional is the latest version of the best selling document management system in the world.

Installation is a little messy, with the various components of the product popping up dialogs which are sometime hidden by the main set-up menu. Some parts, like PDF Create 3, demand authentication, too, while others don’t.

Our first thoughts were that of an un-integrated product. It also refused to recognise our USB-connected multi-function printer, although it worked well with our Firewire-based scanner.

The control centre is divided into three main panels, with selected documents in the main window. An operations panel sits on the left, showing things like scanning profiles, while underneath there are icons for other software on your computer that is supported by PaperPort.

Everything happens automatically with these icons. Once you’ve scanned in your documents, which may be single pages or ‘stacks’, you simply drag the document’s icon onto an application icon.

Drag it to the Word icon and it’s automatically turned into text through an upgraded Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine; drag it to the Adobe Reader icon and Nuance’s own PDF Create application turns it into a PDF file. It’s all handled transparently.

PDF Create 3 is the latest version of Nuance’s PDF creation tool and supports PDF-MRC (a new type of file compression), which Nuance claims creates files up to eight times smaller than from other PDF tools.

The third part of the suite, along with PaperPort itself and PDF Create 3, is Watson. This is an automated search agent, which presents context-sensitive results in a separate window, from search engines, news sites and blogs.

It’s reasonably intelligent and as you browse the Web, it collects likely information. It doesn’t fit that logically with the rest of PaperPort 11, however, and in the end you’re left feeling the product is a little bitty.

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