ScanSnap vs DevonThink Pro Office

Can anyone please weigh in on the topic of DTPO scanning when you already use ScanSnap? ScanSnap is a great scanner and It has good scanning software with It. My scanning software has a way to save to DTPO already - unless I Have misunderstood and this demo of DTPO has inserted a pathway into the ScanSnap software? Even so, my Adobe Acrobat Pro and also my ScanSnap will already convert scanned text to readable and searchable text. IS there a reason to use DTPO for scanning?

One more wrinkle, I am still focused primarily on using DTP for indexing and working with and rediscovering all my (many) duplicate files. I Plan to use the AI feature a lot to hone in on projects and to stay focused. That means I am not really trying to scan directly into DTPO (at this point anyway).

I am not sure I really need DTPO as It gives me scanning, email importing (which I think It will let me do already, at least for archiving old email) and being a server.

I may fall in love with DTPO after I use DTO for a while but back to the question of this thread, is the DTPO scanning capability really worth It if I already use the ScanSnap scanner?

Thanks.

DEVONthink and ScanSnap work well together. If you search the forum, you’ll find nearly 1,500 threads on the topic, plus Help (or the Manual, same info), numerous bloggers, and so on. It’s helpful to read up and, if you already have ScanSnap you should get a Pro Office trial and see for yourself if your needs are met.

There is also more to DTPO than just the OCR feature. Office includes additional email archive/search/display capability.

Again, since I am not importing into DTPO, getting scans ready to index is where I Would go. I was wondering about using DTPO for that and if It were really any better than I already had? Probably in the “nice to have” but not really necessary at this time" category. I will continue to search threads, thanks.

Email: Wont DTP index any folder I tell It to already? And, does DTPO fix the dreaded “can’t open that found Outlook message because It’s not the main identity”, message?

Thanks all.

From what you write, it seems to me that DTP would be good enough for you. When I made the purchase, I went straight for DTPO just to have the full solution right away. With programs like DT, the financial cost is (in my view) negligible to the cost of time and effort that you have to put into organizing your information. So I was not concerned about the financial aspect (which is not to say that $100 is something to sneeze at). While I have OCR built in with DTPO, I personally prefer using Acrobat Pro to do the OCR. I have a smartgroup that indicates to me pdf documents in my DT databases that are not OCR’ed (everything that is “type is pdf” and “wordcount is less than 5”, and does not have a tag “noOCR” to explicitly exclude certain documents). Everything appearing in this smartgroup I will open in Acrobat, run OCR, check the result, and if I like it, just save the document. I find the file size of the Acrobat OCR’ed files much preferable; they are amazingly small and still high quality (while Acrobat is a slow and cumbersome behemoth on OS X, every now and then there is a feature that demonstrates that no one understands pdf as well as Adobe, OCR and the associated file compression is one of those).

Note that “email archiving” is not the same as just indexing your mailbox folders. So if you consider doing this, DTPO is the way to go.

Thanks. There is a lot going on for me - more than I need to get into here, but, Being able to have access to all my emails and hopefully associate them with projects would be a big deal for me. I think you have just convinced me to go with DTPO. Thanks.