In my office, paper comes in, is reviewed for value, gets scanned, and shredded or filed. I have setup a system that allows me to very efficiently scan documents to my “digital file cabinet”. Here is a quick guide on how I do it!
What you will need:
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- An unused computer attached to your network
- Google Desktop Search with network browsing enabled
- A document scanner
- A server based automatic OCR product
- A file compression product ( optional but recommended )
Now to put it all together. How I have my system setup is an inexpensive desktop computer with Windows XP installed. Once all the applications are installed you don’t even need a monitor attached to this computer. The computer is visible on the network and has one folder shared the “File Cabinet” folder in my case. This computer is my stand alone digital file cabinet. Attached to it is a document scanner with a 30 page feeder. I have the scanner configured to scan to an “input” directory on the machine.
The automatic OCR processing product is configured to pick up images as soon as they arrive in the input folder “hot folder”, OCR them using specific index level OCR settings, and create a PDF with a hidden search-able layer. The resulting PDF is put into another hot folder that the PDF compression tool is watching. As soon as a PDF arrives in this folder it is instantly compressed and the compressed PDF is moved to the “File Cabinet Folder”.
Because Google desktop search is enabled to index all files in the “File Cabinet” folder the PDFs very quickly become a part of the index. Configure your Google desktop search to enable network searches so that any machine on the network can open a browser, go to a URL located on the digital file cabinet machine and be located with a search.
Once it’s setup it’s simply a matter of putting paper in the scanner and pressing the scan button, and you’re done. It’s that easy, and extremely useful!
Chris Riley – Sr. Solutions Architect