May 14, 2007

Docupen: When Mobile Scanning is a Must

Planon's line of DocuPen is one of those business gadgets that you didn't know you needed - until you have it.

While there's a huge market for desktop scanners (and larger) inside corporate and home walls, what about the needs of the roving sales person or executive who handle documents - not generated on his computer?

What does the support technician do, whose bag is bulging with documents? Is there a better way?

You could look into setting up a document management system, but this can be expensive and prohibitive. One solution you can do right now is to use a portable scanner from Planon, about as thick as a large children's pencil and as long as a ruler.

There's no need to be tethered to a computer to scan documents and the DocuPen RC-800, one of the newest products from Planon, has a built in memory chip so you can store hundreds of pages in the scanner itself. It can scan a full page document, in as little as 4 seconds and store the images in the pen itself.

I was impressed with the accessories available for the DocuPen RC-800 including a Universal Mobile Charger - which can charge the scanner up to 55 times.

One of Docupen's selling points is that unlike the competing scanner from WizCom, which scans line by line (hand movement is like highlighting) Docupen scans the entire width of a page. The included software (from ScanSoft) can do optical character recognition and manage your scanned images as well.

If you travel a lot, it's important to have as many useful tools in your bag that will make you most productive. You'll find there's two kinds of tools in your bag - tools you need on a constant basis and tools you buy (like insurance) just in case you need it.

Although you might not think you need a personal scanner, having one in your bag (or that of a colleague's) could be useful.

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