This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘The rise of automated contracts'. We apologise for any errors.

Rory Bathgate

Hi, I’m Rory Bathgate. And you’re listening to the IT Pro Podcast, where this week we’re discussing digital contracting. As automation has been ramped up, companies have sought to improve manual tasks such as document handling using machine learning and AI. But when it comes to automation in the legal space, strategy is key. Contracts can be very complex and require human input, especially in stages such as negotiation — achieving the perfect blend of machine and employee oversight involves striking a careful balance. Rich Somerfield, CTO at Summize, to discuss the opportunities presented by automated workflows, and how companies can implement systems such as contract automation to improve efficiency and insight. Rich, thanks so much for being on the show.

Rich Somerfield

Thanks for having me.

Rory

So just to start off with, what are some of the current problems in the tech sector that Summize is seeking to address?

Rich

So Summize is a product that aims to make legal easy, so trying to understand what's in contracts, trying to help legal teams work with the rest of the business to understand what's in those contracts, and just overall processing those contracts. So we see our product is really like changing the game, in terms of how businesses work with the contracts and understand them. But yeah, overall, it's really just trying to make that whole process a lot smoother and a lot easier.

Rory

So in trying to speed up that process and trying to make that process smoother. What kind of qualities have you identified, that businesses are looking for, in IT contractors at the moment? And then vice versa, what kind of qualities are contractors looking for when they're forming contracts with businesses?

Rich

So I think it's quite interesting. So I've worked with contracts, never have actually been a contractor myself in the IT field, but I've worked quite closely with a number of different contractors, and for a range of different reasons as well. So some have been very specific projects with a very specific requirements and milestones, and others have been much more open-ended, kind of almost like as an ability to kind of increase your development team quite rapidly. But without kind of the fixed nature of a long term employee, so really kind of accelerated. I've worked on so many different projects. And those ones have seen both successes and challenges. But then really, in terms of the contractors themselves, it's critical to try and obviously find the right people, get them up to speed as quick as possible, and really deliver value. And like I say, I've seen successes and failures in that. And I think typically, it really revolves around a clear understanding, when you go into the process, about what the milestones are and what you want to achieve, whether that be a short term or a fixed event, make sure everyone understands on both sides what's expected, or whether it's a like I say, a longer term addition to a team to kind of accelerate other expertise or capacity. But then in those scenarios, given they are sometimes longer, longer ended, or, you know, kind of over a longer timeframe with with a less clear end date, I think again, it's really important that both sides understand what's happening and what's what's going on. What the end point is really.

Rory

So on a contractor side, being transparent, very clearly communicating what what a business can expect when they're entering a contract with you.

Rich

That's right, yeah, like I say, I've seen some of that have been very much more open ended, which is, you know, you've got a team, it needs more capacity for for many reasons, or it needs some expertise. And in some cases, they have been multi-year, in the end, they might have started out as kind of a couple of months that gets extended, keeps on getting extended, and then you kind of look around and it's they might as well, you know, have been a permanent employee for the time they've been with you. But, it's different. And obviously, it gives both sides at that thing, get their own benefits and cons as well. You know, from a contractor's perspective, they get the opportunity to work in an environment, a little bit of stability, but without the typical constraints of being a permanent. And then obviously from the business' side, you know, if things go really well, then you can look to different options moving forwards or if things don't go well the project closes down or whatever it would be, then obviously, you can, it's a little bit easier to kind of just agree an endpoint and kind of move on separately.

Rory

So when businesses implement solutions, such as Summize, they're really looking at, they could see benefits in the short term, but they're potentially looking at really great long term ROI.

Rich

For sure, I mean, in the IT sector hiring is quite challenging. There's been a massive increase into the supply side of things. Since I started 20 odd years ago, the supply has increased, but the demand has increased and exceeded that supply as well. So everyone's looking for the right people, and looking for the right skill set. And I think that really, everyone's quite different, which is quite interesting, the diversity that we're seeing start to expand. Traditionally, it might have been someone who went into IT in high school, and stayed in it and beyond. I think what we've seen over the last 10 years or so, is people actually transitioning from other careers and sectors. And I think what we've found is that diversity is actually incredibly useful, incredibly beneficial people perhaps being in the services sector, for example, and bringing that to the IT team. I think, yeah, that that kind of diversity has been incredible, really, overall.

Rory

Yeah, there's been a lot of discussions around roles such as CIOs, for example, really benefiting from people with maybe an HR background or humanities background. Do you see that contracts are kind of following in that suit? And there are there are greater discussions around maybe more flexible roles and pairing up companies maybe that traditionally, you wouldn't have paired up before?

Rich

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting idea. I really like that that thought process really like you say, you're looking at those combinations of different experiences, lead to kind of unexpected results, and unexpected and beneficial results. So if you've got people from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different kind of previous careers, those combinations actually really generate a much better end result is what we've experienced. And I've seen from the different roles I've done, as well, I always kind of look to like innovation, there's some people look at innovation has being like magic, but really, it's just connecting the dots between different things that have never been connected before. So if you've got someone that's perhaps worked in, like you say, HR, or the service industry or anything like that, that then comes into an IT role, then they've got experiences, they can connect in to new experiences, or new understanding of IT. And it's those connections that if you've been in the pure IT role on your career, you're unlikely to see. But the connecting the dots is actually quite simple, if you've experienced it. We've got a strong ethos at surmise round DEI, so a dedicated DEI person, and really trying to make sure that we're doing the right things. Because it is easy to kind of stick to what you know, and recruit from people that you know, but you're really trying to make sure that you're looking outside of that. And bringing those different, different experiences in is incredibly beneficial, whether that be you know like I say, all the different backgrounds, or contractors, what it would be like you think of typical contract has probably done quite a few different contracts, seen a few different things experience have experienced quite a lot. They've they've got a wealth of experiences they can bring into a team as well. So like keeping those combinations there is incredibly valuable.

Rory

So taking into account a range of data points for any hiring process, any contract process that really evaluates people are more than just the traditional metrics.

Rich

Absolutely right. Yeah.

Rory

Fantastic. So, on the sort of more technical side of the solution itself, Summize is looking at using AI powered automation, and improving workflows to automate contracts, automate hiring. How would you go about combining AI powered automation and human workers to achieve a balance. Presumably, there must be situations in the creation of some contracts where things have to be, for example, escalated to a to a manager for oversight.

Rich

Absolutely right. So, we typically try to think a little bit more about augmented intelligence than pure artificial intelligence. I think artificial intelligence, is obviously a very broad, a broad area with many different areas of applicability, but really thinking more about augmented, that ties in quite nicely with the legal, with it being very much an advisory service. So you've got people who have trained seeing different things, understands the current business strategy and the appetite for risk, all that kind of stuff. And then really kind of tying that together with the direction that you're assessing contracts that coming in, or that you're drafting new contracts, we really see that as kind of a, very much a human powered activity, really, at the moment at least. But then bringing that in with where are the areas where computers can help make that process more efficient, more effective, perhaps more predictable in the areas that make sense? So coming into legal I, prior to joining Summize, I was had not been in the legal sector at all. And from a programmers perspective, you kind of look at the look at contracts, and you think "well obviously they're going to be consistent language, you know, everything's going to be like a, almost like a coding language that turns into a contract". And the reality is extremely, a long distance away from that. Contracts are very much bespoke. Everyone's kind of got slightly different favourite clauses and different words and approaches to tackling them. So I think what's interesting is how can you blend that variety with something that potentially is more predictable? There's been some initiatives in the industry for things like one NDA and one DPA, which is trying to kind of narrow down the ranges in contracts that perhaps don't need that ultimate flexibility in the drafting side of things. But, but in other cases, you know, you've got your most important supplier, and negotiating the contracts with them, you're highly unlikely just to kind of click a couple of buttons and let the machine generate the contract for you, you're going to want to be much more involved, understand, on both sides of things, and also build that personal relationship as well with the third party that as you go through that negotiation process, you both understand what the best result for you is. I've looked into negotiation practices in the past, there's some quite interesting podcasts out there. And they often talk about aim for the win-win, because almost certainly, whether you negotiate contract with that, that party again, or like a friend of a friend, you know, there's always kind of relationships. And if you get a reputation for kind of, even for win-lose negotiations, it's always going to come back and cause you challenges in the future. So yeah, the win-win's where you want to get to, typically you need relationships to be able to do that. And like I say then the computer software itself, just trying to support you and make that process a bit easier. And anything that is repeated, really take on the load of those ones. But keep the advisory nature for sure.

Rory

Right, so it's it's drawing on a kind of repertoire, that it builds up and understanding of, like you were saying, in-house clauses that are used more often while leaving leeway for, you know, leaving the door open to somebody to come in and create the more bespoke aspects of a contract.

Rich

Exactly right. I mean, one of the one of the capabilities we've built into Summize is to, like understand payment terms, for example, it's good example, payment terms. Now, obviously, if you're a supplier, you might want those payment terms to be going in a particular direction, you know, kind of payment terms want to be as short as possible. If you're a purchaser, you might want the payment terms to be slightly larger, obviously. So you've kind of got some kind of thing you're looking to, to optimise or to average out overall. If a contract comes in, and it's massively different than your average payment terms, that's something you probably want to know about. So, Summize software can do that, we can automatically tell you what the average payment terms are, how this relates to that one. And then obviously from from the human perspective, you're going to understand this particular contract with this particular third party, how important is it for us to get that one really tight on the payment terms? Or are we a bit happier to be kind of slightly more flexible? And that's really where that advisory part comes in. But as long as you have the data points to kind of guide you, then we see that as a real win.

Rory

So are you looking for the software to kind of learn over time? So you're building up examples for it? Are you looking to go for a more traditional route, of sort of setting out rules for the AI?

Rich

I think it's both. As with all these things, everything's a bit of a hybrid, isn't it? So you start with the rules to get a good baseline to get the data. But then obviously, over time, the learned behaviour element is incredibly helpful. We kind of typically think around things over three phases, really, when we talk about the augmentation. So, you start with the manual. So here's all the tools as a human, you're totally in control of everything. And then from that point onwards, then the next stage beyond that is like a suggested based approach. So "we've seen you do an X, we think Y would be the next best thing to do", or we think this is interesting to you, so really trying to help cut down the time it takes you to see the data point to understand what's going on. As you started to look at those suggestions, if the, if your use of those suggestions gets to a certain threshold, effectively what you're telling the system is that the suggestions are pretty good value. And then that's when you look to the automate. So everything we really do follows those three phases, really. So we'll start with the start with the repetitive manual thing, shift through suggested and then turn to automated. And we see that's a really nice, nice approach for tackling AI overall and integrating that into people's experiences, that you gain the trust, and then once you've — you know, really when when you look into any role via the if you've got an assistant or someone that's helping you do something or team of people, you'll typically follow the same process anyway, there'll be an education phase. Then you'll kind of monitor and then the trust builds up and you say, well, great, we're happy with all that goes and and then until something goes wrong, then we'll just keep going.

Rory

Right? Putting the AI on probation.

Rich

That's not it's not a bad way to think about it. Yeah.

Rory

So on that point of rules learned over time: some businesses, when they implement automation workflows, worry about leaving losing oversight of the process, over time, or pretty quickly. How do you manage this?

Rich

It's a really good point. And I think it's, I don't think there's a free lunch, when you're talking about this sort of stuff. So whether you're looking to automate something, or whether you're looking to do it yourself, there's always going to be some involvement in the process. So even in a fully automated system, you want to understand how well it's doing is it being effective. You know, you might have a fully automated manufacturing plant, but if everything that comes out, the other side has got defects in it, it's totally pointless, you've just wasted even more time. So I think keeping that regular quality control, staff check on how things are going, is it actually working is critical. So you just kind of change your involvement in the process. And that might, you know, may be the case that you can offload that monitoring capabilities. But it doesn't go you know, you don't go from having work to do to having zero work to do. It's always important to stay in the loop, even though obviously, the time involved in that, and perhaps the skills needed to do that oversight changes might free you up for more time. But yeah, if it's doing something on your behalf, I think I would always recommend that you keep an eye in to make sure it's doing it correctly.

Rory

Right. And then on the other side of that, I know that Summize, offers increased data insight into in contracts with a data system. What kind of data are clients typically looking to draw out of contracts in particular, and and how are they using those to improve their decision making going forward?

Rich

We say that businesses run on contracts. And I think when you start to think about it, you might might not think about it often. But when you start to think about it, it's absolutely true, everything a business does, is really signed into a contract. Whether it be for your employees, suppliers, or obligations, or whatever it be, it's in a contract, almost always in a contract somewhere, if not always in the contract. And then what we often see, is that people don't really have a clear view on what contracts they've been signed up for. Whether the contract sat in someone's inbox, which is quite often the case, that it gets signed, stays in the inbox, nobody ever knows about it apart from that individual, or whether partially centralised often in a slightly ad hoc way. So I think one of the key bits is like, can you get all the contracts into one place? If the business runs on contracts? Which obviously does, you kind of need to know what's in them, the first step of knowing what's in them is actually getting them gathered them all together, and have a process which keeps them all together. So it's one of the things that our product offers is the ability to kind of centralise your contracts. Then the next part there is to actually understand what's in them, and how that differs or aligns to your business risk appetite. So there's an element of that one. And then the other bit is simple things where they like, end dates on a contract, or maybe you've got to lease on your offices; when do you need to renew the lease? When when's the timeframe that you perhaps need to break the lease if you want to move? The cost implications of some of these things missing that date, is incredible. So one of the elements that we've got in our product is we automatically understand dates and their relation within the contract, whether it be a termination or renegotiation that whatever date, and then surfaced that into a central calendar, so even if it's even simple things like that one, giving visibility around kind of like the calendar for your contracts is incredible, but like I say it starts really around collecting them all together, understanding them, and then different parts of the business are interested in different pieces of information. Whether you're like, the C level might be interested more in the kind of holistic risk you have, and where strategic is whereas down to individual account execs are probably more interested in the specifics around renewals and delivery targets.

Rory

So on the product more specifically again, Summize offers integration with Word, with Teams, with Slack. Is that something that was based on customer demands? Or was that led by a specific concept of the system?

Rich

When the company started, it was really trying to help legal teams be more as effective and efficient with contracts, and legal needs, and I think what we what was pretty clear to us straight away is that a law department so in the existing business law department is often considered the cost centre. They don't generally generate money, but they really like obviously. but even though they're providing value to the business, they're not really like a revenue generator. So what what was clear is that any kind of budget constraints that they might have, for that team themselves, imposing a totally brand new system on the rest of the business, and getting the rest of businesses switched over can actually be quite challenging. And you look at businesses as well, they typically have services that they've integrated with, whether it be like CRMs, or whether it be your IoT side of things, or your document management, you've almost always implemented some kind of system. And you're unlikely to want to rip all those out and replace it with an all in one solution from your legal team, for example. So you're really kind of always trying to look to see how can you integrate that into the existing environment. And that's really something that's been critical to the way we've thought about the product, so integrated into office 365, or Microsoft 365, as it's now called, or whether it be into the the G Suite side of things, Slack, Teams, you know, these are the things that people are using today and continue to want to use, and obviously Microsoft Word as well, as is hugely used in the legal sector. So integrate what people are already doing, I think there's a couple of benefits there, the ease of adoption, obviously goes massively, massively improves this limited need for training. So that becomes a lot easier. And then obviously, working with the rest of the business as well, there's less of that pushback, because it's kind of where they already are. So one of the elements that we've got is the ability to interact with your legal team, we call it legal front door, whether it be for creating new contracts, or reviewing contracts. That capability is available Teams, Slack, or through the web application. So it's really easy to adopt. And then also, because they've adopted that piece of technology and something like Teams or Slack, for example, that chat experience is where we can start to preempt questions. So typically, and this always raises a bit of a laugh with any lawyers I talk to, but they'll typically get an email on a Friday at 5.30 with a Word document attached from somebody in the business that just says "FYI". What does that mean? When do you need? What do you need me to do? Do you need me to review it is an important client, you know, all that kind of stuff? The first questions you’ve got to ask are that information. Well, our software means we can preemptively ask that question before you even see it as a human. And I think when we come back to what we talked about earlier about augmented intelligence, that simple step of pre collecting that information is a huge value add. So, when the legal when the person in the legal team receives the request, they know who it's for how important it is, and with it being 5.30, can they go for the beer? Or do they need to kind of stay around and just and just do the work? Because that is what it is. So I think like I said, integration into existing tools. And practice is absolutely critical in for being a success. And it's really important to us as well, that our customers are successful, obviously, a long term partnership, but really kind of starts as quickly as possible. How can we get you to the point where you now see this project as a success? We'll talk about kind of expanding beyond that in the future. But yes, always around that first point where you're actually seeing the value. And I think the other bit to touch on as well is obviously we've all been through COVID and experience, experiences around that. And Teams and Slack, the virtual office. Before that it was used in some places, but probably a little bit kind of sporadically. More often people were used to kind of the in person meetings, I think what we saw very quickly was those virtual offices being adopted. And you only have to look at the Microsoft Teams, the usage went from double digit numbers in the millions, to many, many hundreds in a very, very short space of time. And I think even though we're you know, people are starting to move back into the office, bit more of a hybrid style approach thing. It's really, really centred around those virtual offices, still, people are still using Teams, because almost certainly somebody on your team is going to be working from from home on particular day. And I think really, that's where business happens now, in those environments, Teams and Slack. So it's critically important that the we're there in that mix, and we can be part of that story as well.

Rory

Right. So yeah, you'd say that if you're not coming into implementing automation with a specific strategy in mind for how employees can access that and whether it's recognisable or not, then you're almost at risk of immediate tool sprawl. I know that that's something that employees run into increasingly, with a range of different digital tools that they're being asked to use, it makes more sense to have them in in a single place.

Rich

Absolutely. I think I mean it's a great question really, because it talks a little bit to what are you trying to get out? You're buying some software, or product or whatever it is, what is the what's the win scenario for that piece of software? I think it's always an important thing is trying to identify, looking at, you know, six months or whatever, looking back, what is it that we get to this point of being successful? So, some products are more tool-based, like you say, and they are excellent at what they do. But they're probably confined and constrained in the kinds of impact they're going to have into the wider business. So the legal team, I'm sure, could make use of many of these tools, but they're never really going to go beyond the legal team in terms of effectiveness, really. So we think a lot more around kind of like business optimization, how can we help the business work better with contracts. Well, we're talking about the business, clearly, that's all departments, and every area. And in those cases, like you say the one off tools are probably not going to achieve what you want. And it's much more around the entire business process, making that successful in as easy a way as possible. And I think a lot of that really, many experiences I've had, and people I spoke to had as well. It's really that implementation phase where you have those business transformations, obviously, but it's the implementation phase where the business transformation really stalls. And so that's one of the real areas of focus for us, that we want to identify, like I say, the first milestone where you started to get successful, and then how it helped you through those. But that first point, if you can get that first point of being successful, the rest really follow a lot more naturally. Yeah, absolutely.

Rory

Something on once again, the more technical level, but that I noticed that Summize is advertised as offering the ability to scan documents for legal risks. How is that achieved? Is that using the same kind of repertoire of clauses that the AI has become used to? Is it identifying problem areas in that way?

Rich

I think exactly right, exactly what you've said. So we've got the ability to analyse contracts for clauses, whether they be PDFs or or Word documents, whether it's a scan, effectively a photo of a contract, and doesn't really matter to us. So we kind of ingest those, when we ingest them, we start to analyse them for the different clauses. The often what you'll see in a contract, as well as even though there might be a primary paragraph related to a clause, there's probably other sections all the way through the documents that have additional additional information or constraints around that clause. And I think typically, when you're looking at contracts, you might find the first bits or finding the subsequent bits is a lot harder from a human perspective. So one of the things we've got is to try to tease out those bits. So we'll tell you the highlights, the one we think is the most important, but then also, it's really easy to navigate through the other bits as well, that you may or may not have found. So I think that's kind of the ability, to kind of analyse it. And obviously, when we're starting to look at other entities, like dates, places, times, etc. What are they in relation to? Is it in relation to, like, termination or payments or whatever. So we can understand that information as well. Coupled with our ability to run the analytics across your other contracts, whether they're similar contracts or different contracts, you can start to kind of build that cross-contract picture now. How does this contract compare to others of a similar type? Is it better or worse? Or would it be? And what party is it with? Is that party something we genuinely have different terms with? I think all that kind of stuff from an analysis perspective, which which learns and adapts from usage. And then the other bit that actually ties in quite nicely to this as well is the concept of a playbook. So in case you didn't know, a playbook is typically you have a Word document, or maybe an Excel file of "given this particular scenario, this is what we recommend you do. If they disagree to X, Y, Z and it's come through three negotiations, then please escalate to somebody else on the team". So that kind of internal guidance, on how to deal with certain things. Again, typically, it's in a Word document that people print out, they're probably not always got the most up to date version, they probably always don't refer to it. So one of the critical things rules is for example, in Microsoft Word, which is where most most legal work typically tends to happen, we surface that playbook actually in Word itself. And we can be context aware as well, what you're looking at, so we can tell you about what the favourable positions are for or who to escalate to when you're in the contract, when you're reviewing it, and the time saved from that is incredible. Because that play book is also centralised, it means that any modifications to your positions over time are automatically reflected on everyone's system that's using using Summize. So there's real benefits to be had there as well.

Rory

Fantastic. So that that rating system as well, just to circle back to that, that that would be in house per customer. So what constitutes maybe a risky contract or a good contract for one customer, for another, it's a different set of a different metric that it's measuring it by?

Rich

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Right. And I think it's not just different per customer, it's almost different per party per customer as well. So with inside one customer, they may have different parties, like I said that you know, that their most important supplier versus maybe some of the not most important ones, then you're going to be looking those and analysing those in a slightly different way as well. So that's all alternately possible.

Rory

Right, fantastic. And then just broadly, on the kind of outlook for automation in the industry: do you think that going forward, the old idea of kind of carving out the back office and just plugging in automation is maybe not reflective of what's actually going to happen? And that what will happen will be more of this integration between automation providing context, but work is still very much being in control?

Rich

I mean, for sure, let's say we talked about augmented intelligence, and I think it's much better framing, artificial intelligence feels a little bit scary, a little bit unknown. I think when you talk about it as augmented, it becomes a lot clearer about what you're trying to achieve. So look for the repetitive stuff, get the computers to do that. And then the advisory elements really keep that with the humans. But what benefitted or accelerated through data, to really try to combine those bits together, and when you look at some of the advancements we've seen recently in like text to image, some of these, the image generation stuff, it's phenomenal what AI can do. But it's, I don't know, if you've used any of these image generator things it's very, very much an iterative process. You put some keywords in, get some interesting images out, which probably aren't what you're after, three or four, ten, fifteen tries later and it's, actually something from that section is quite interesting. And that's a really good example for where the way we see things is you still got the humans involved in the loop. They're kind of managing and coordinating work that's done by a computer, you perhaps don't always understand how the computers got to a particular point. But if it's good data, then it's good data, whether it came from a computer or whether it came from a human.

Rory

Thanks so much for being on the show. As always, You can find links to all of the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website at itpro.co.uk. You can also follow us on social media, as well as subscribe to our daily newsletter. Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts. And if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a review. We'll be back next week with more insight from the world of IT but until then, goodbye.

Automation has been widely adopted across the sector, and firms have repeatedly applied it to laborious tasks such as document handling. Using machine learning and AI, a great number of documents can be processed, and decisions made without the need for painstaking human input.

But automation in the legal space requires careful thought, as contracts can be very complex and often require a human touch — here, a hybrid approach is needed.

This week, we spoke to Rich Somerfield, CTO at Summize, to explore the opportunity of automated workflows, and the demands of the legal sector when it comes to implementing tech of this kind.

Highlights

“I think what we've seen over the last 10 years or so, is people actually transitioning from other careers and sectors. And I think what we've found is that diversity is actually incredibly useful, incredibly beneficial people perhaps being in the services sector, for example, and bringing that to the IT team. I think, yeah, that that kind of diversity has been incredible, really, overall.”

“So typically, and this always raises a bit of a laugh with any lawyers I talk to, but they'll typically get an email on a Friday at 5.30 with a Word document attached from somebody in the business that just says "FYI". What does that mean? When do you need? What do you need me to do?”

“It's really that implementation phase where you have those business transformations, obviously, but it's the implementation phase where the business transformation really stalls. And so that's one of the real areas of focus for us, that we want to identify, like I say, the first milestone where you started to get successful, and then how it helped you through those.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Gartner: RPA software market will continue to grow as business demand increases
• What is Robotic Process Automation?
• What is machine learning and why is it important?
• How AI can help – and hinder – the supply chain crisis
• AI is now powerful enough to automate the back office
• How can CIOs help to close the tech skills gap?

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The Fujitsu SV600 scanner is a contactless scanner, differentiating it from typical products which rely on an automatic document feeder (ADF) and a fixed contact image sensor (CIS).

Comprising of a thin mat marked with various paper sizes, and a scanner that stands upright over it; the SV600 resembles a small desklamp. The head of the scanner contains rotating optics to capture images.

The SV600 isn't different for the sake of it. Doing away with an ADF makes it possible to scan misshapen, under-sized or poor quality documents that would otherwise risk a jam. It's also ideal for fragile or valuable originals, which you wouldn't want to entrust to pinch-rollers of a high-speed scanner. It can handle up to A3 paper, thick and inflexible media such as heavy card, and with no glass to scratch it's fine to leave in staples or paperclips.

Placing the optics further away from the originals allows for a greater depth of field, meaning that thicker objects can be captured without a loss of focus at their extremities. As a result, the SV600 can scan small 3D objects, and it comes with software custom designed to help capture magazine and book content. As with other ScanSnap models, plugins are available to scan directly to Microsoft SharePoint, or to the cloud services Dropbox, SugarSync and Evernote.

While a typical A3-capable device would be huge and heavy, the SV600 is the size of an entry-level desktop A4 scanner, making it easier to store. In use it needs a footprint larger than A3 paper. The scanner has a slightly top-heavy look that made us worry at first that it would be prone to wobbling on an unsteady desk, but it turned out to be stable. That said, we wouldn't advise using it where colleagues could brush past and knock it over.

Scanning

Installation is as simple as any USB device, and Fujitsu's software makes scanning simple. To begin you line up the first original and press the large, robust-feeling Scan button. After a moment's delay for you to get your hands out of the frame, the scanner head sweeps the scan area with a slit of white light. When this goes out it's safe to remove the original.

You continue scanning by placing additional pages on the mat and pressing Scan when each is set - we found that the scan head had always returned to its resting position before we could line up the next original, meaning that we never had to wait for the scanner before we could continue. After you've finished scanning, the software presents a preview of the pages, which you can either accept or correct. At the default settings, saving the scan produces a straightforward image-only PDF file.

The SV600 comes with its own version of Fujitsu's ScanSnap Manager software, modified with options that help make the most of the scanner's potential. When scanning a bound original it can divide double-page spreads into individual pages, and also straighten out page curvature in a book or magazine - although you'll need to show it where the page corners and spine are. The results are impressive, although the optical character recognition (OCR) component failed on one image that had undergone a lot of straightening.

Some of the software's features are so smart they are easy to overlook. We worried before the first scan that it wasn't clear how to line originals up, or even exactly where you should put them on the mat, but we needn't have: in our tests, images were cropped, deskewed, and rotated without a single error - scanners almost always have the odd failing here. Users aren't limited to scanning single documents, either: we crowded the scan area with a scruffy assortment of receipts, business cards and postcards, and the software delivered an individual image of each.

We spent a fair amount of time changing settings between scans, finding that the defaults could be slightly better chosen and that changing them could be a little fiddly. Accessing the scan settings involves right-clicking a taskbar icon, and when enabling OCR for PDF file output the default is to apply it to the first page only. Although the page-turn mode (where a scan is triggered each time you turn the page of a bound original) is a great idea, we had to consult the user manual to discover how to enable it. In practice we found it too easy to turn the page before the scanner was ready; sometimes having to turn back and forward again to trigger a scan.

Speed tests

A well-specified duplex document scanner will outpace the SV600, but it's still rapid. For our standard test, which involves 10 sheets of paper, we manually flipped over the six double-sided pages for duplex scanning. At 150 dots per inch (dpi) the job took two minutes and 25 seconds, including a few seconds of post processing before the document was ready to save. A 10-page simplex test took a minute and a half. Scanning a single A4 page took 11 seconds, while capturing a postcard-sized photo at 600dpi took 14. In page-turn mode, capturing five double-page spreads in sequence took just over 90 seconds.

Image quality isn't this scanner's strong point. Scans from paper laid flat on the mat appeared to suffer from a small amount of distortion, causing straight lines of text to appear wavy. Images appeared processed to boost their contrast, which didn't always improve them, and the scanner was sensitive to light as demonstrated by the image on the right.

We scanned successfully in a range of lighting conditions, contrast and colour fidelity seemed at their best with less ambient light. Allowing a shaft of sunlight to fall across the page proved too much for the scanner to handle, however; the bright area was completely washed out.

Conclusion

This scanner's image quality is disappointing and a tad on the slow side. Plus it can't be left unattended like a similarly-priced ADF scanner. But it can make true A3 scans without folding, capture stapled or bound originals without the need for unpicking, and scan and straighten even thick books.

It's also easy to use, and smaller and quieter than conventional rivals. While not ideal where outright speed or quality are essential, the SV600's flexibility makes it a good all-rounder for low-volume archiving, or the perfect partner to an existing sheet feeding product.

Verdict

A unique and versatile scanner, the SV600 is good, but you'll have to make sure that you use it in low-light conditions to avoid washed out images.

Scan capability: 285x283dpi, 24-bit colour, simplex

Speed: 3 seconds per page (up to A3)

Paper handling: none

Interfaces: USB

Supported operating systems: Windows XP/Vista/7/8

Power consumption: Off 0W, Standby 5W, Active 12W

Size: 210x156x383mm

Weight: 3kg

Benchmarks Scan speed (A4 document): 6.7ppm (150dpi colour)

Scan speed (6x4" photo): 4.3ppm (600dpi colour)

A mouse with a built in scanner sounds fanciful, but LG's Scanner mouse is surprisingly functional. As the name implies, it's a wired laser mouse with a built-in hand scanner. While traditional hand scanners insist on painstakingly slow and even movements, yet still often produce jagged images, the Scanner Mouse lets you sweep across an area of text or graphics at almost any pace, displaying a live on-screen preview of your scanned content as you go.

Using technology developed by Swiss digitisation specialists Dacuda, the Scanner Mouse employs a CMOS chip to take video of the page you're scanning. The overlapping video images are processed and aligned with each other in real time by software installed on your PC. Once you've finished scanning, it'll even correct the alignment of images scanned at an angle.

The overlapping video images are processed and aligned with each other in real time by software installed on your PC.

The software also has integrated Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so once you've completed a scan, you can simply copy its text into any document. We were particularly impressed by its ability to turn a scanned table into individual text cells that can be pasted into Excel spreadsheets. You can also paste blocks of text or images and share your scans on social networks. The OCR can handle well over a hundred languages, but can't interpret hand written text with any accuracy.

The scanner has a maximum resolution of 320dpi; medium and low resolution modes are 200dpi and 100dpi. Higher resolutions are best for OCR accuracy when scanning small fonts, but scanning at a lower resolution reduces the storage requirements of your scanned image. This is rather important, as you only get a limited amount of scanner memory, the usage of which is indicated by an on-screen progress bar that appears alongside your scanned image as it appears on your monitor. The largest scan size the LSM-100 can handle is A3.

Probably the biggest problem is that it isn't all that comfortable to use as a mouse. It's perfectly functional, and you can get used to it, but its flat sides and shiny surface compare poorly to the ergonomic moulding of other pointing devices. As well as the usual mouse buttons, there are two buttons on the side. One switches the mouse into scanner mode, but the other performs common fourth-button functions such as moving back in your web browser. This doesn't make much sense and can't be changed. The mouse wheel also becomes a zoom control in scan mode, which is a rather more intuitive adaptation.

If anything, the fact that the LSM-100 is also a mouse puts us off using it. It saves on USB ports and is handy if you're on the move and don't want to stuff too much kit into your laptop bag, but we don't want a second pointing device - we just want to scan things. The mouse functionality really just gets in the way and it's easy to catch your fingers on the mouse buttons while you're scanning.

Despite this, and the fact that the size of your scan is limited by how much available memory your computer has, the Scanner Mouse actually is actually the best hand scanner we've ever seen and its OCR is incredibly accurate, making it a brilliant tool for anyone who wants to scan snippets of text, images, or tables.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

If you have a fairly powerful laptop with a decent amount of memory, the LSM-100 is a great option for scanning on the move. In the office, however, traditional flatbed or sheet fed scanners are still superior. LG is to be commended for its innovation, however, and we hope to see more video scanning technology in the future.

CMOS scanner

320dpi optical resolution

Up to A3 scan size

USB2 interface

One year RTB warranty

Part code: LSM-100

Software requirements: Windows 7/Vista/XP, dual core processor, 1GB free RAM, 1GB disk space

Citrix has acquired AppDNA in an effort to strengthen the application management side of its virtual desktop offering.

The UK-based AppDNA is best known for its AppTitude product, enabling businesses to monitor which applications they have running in their environments and the best way to migrate them onto new systems.

During his keynote speech at his company's annual conference, Citrix chief executive (CEO) Mark Templeton said the acquisition would help businesses "beat the big countdown clock" to 2014 when Microsoft stops offering support for Windows XP.

"Millions of customers have millions of apps linked to Microsoft XP the problem is migrating them forward," he said. "Some [apps] work, some don't, but the biggest problem is you can't predict what is going to work."

"So we decided we were going to do something about this and bring on-board what has been a fantastic partner of ours."

Although Citrix did not reveal the price it paid for AppDNA, a statement on the London Stock Exchange website claimed it was $92 million 32 times the amount investment to kick-start the firm earlier this year.

It was born from its parent company Camwood and was reported by The Sunday Times as bringing in 8.8 million in sales. The acquisition is expected to be finalised by the end of November.

Cloud Pro was due to meet with the company during this week's Citrix Synergy event but received a cancellation email this morning before the announcement. The firm was also unable to give us comment on the acquisition.

Canon's new ImageFormula DR-C125 is an A4 document scanner designed for the desktop of anyone who needs regularly to capture multiple-page documents. With a dedicated host PC, it would also be at home serving low-volume demands in a workgroup. It has a remarkably small footprint that's no bigger than a typical VoIP desk phone, achieved with what Canon says is a unique vertical 'J' paper path.

Sheet-fed scanners don't come all that much cheaper than the DR-C125, but the new ImageFormula's specifications are better than you might expect at the price. It's a duplex colour device with a 600dpi optical resolution, ultrasonic sensors for detecting when more than one sheet has been fed into the scanner (known as ultrasonic double-feed detection) and a reasonable 1,500-page daily duty cycle plenty for the intended application. It's rapid, too, with a claimed 25 page-per-minute and 50 image-per-minute maximum speed.

Canon has clearly worked hard to make the DR-C125 as easy as possible to share desk space with.

Canon has clearly worked hard to make the DR-C125 as easy as possible to share desk space with. The upright design includes clips for tidying up excess cable lengths, and the shallow footprint means it can sit unobtrusively behind other items on a desk although the extending paper guides atop the input tray mean that you can't quite place it flush against a wall or partition at the back.

Depending which font you're thinking of, we'd say that the scanner's paper path is more 'U' than 'J' shaped. Sheets are pulled through a conventional input and pass through a 180-degree turn with a radius of about an inch before being deposited in the output tray, which lies parallel to the input. There's a flip-switch to enable a straight path for special media, but the 60-degree tray angle means that this is only truly straight when the scanner is placed at the very front edge of a surface, allowing paper to fall to the floor.

The DR-C125 comes with a fairly substantial software bundle.

The DR-C125 comes with a fairly substantial software bundle that includes the usual OCR, business card scanning and PDF authoring applications, along with Evernote's increasingly common scan-to-cloud app. While comprehensive, Canon's setup program triggers separate installers for each application, which could prove tedious if you're rolling out multiple scanners. The bundle also contains a SharePoint plugin and a TWAIN driver, but perhaps of most interest is Canon's own, newly developed CaptureOnTouch software. This supports one-touch scans, where the operator simply loads paper, hits the scanner's start button and waits for the results to appear.

Canon's CaptureOnTouch scanning software is surprisingly useful.

Working together, the scanner and CaptureOnTouch make an excellent pair. Using the default, fully automatic setting, documents are captured, de-skewed and rotated where necessary before being displayed in a generously-sized preview. The software automatically switches between colour modes and between simplex and duplex, discarding blank pages and presenting the user with exactly what they expect. The results can be printed or emailed, saved as JPG or TIFF image files, or as a PDF with searchable text.

As usual we tried everything we could to upset the scanner's feed mechanism, repeatedly loading the same badly-sorted mix of documents comprising crisp A4 sheets, lightweight papers and tissue-thin magazine pages. Using the standard J-path we had no hitches at all, with even the magazine pages surviving multiple trips through the scanner without creasing or jamming. Notably, there was no evidence of images bleeding from one side to the other on even the thinnest pages. While one badly-centred magazine page defeated the automatic de-skew, the automatic orientation performed flawlessly.

Impressive performance didn't come at the expense of image quality.

While hardly a rocketship, this is an impressive performance for such a comparatively affordable scanner. Fortunately it didn't come at the expense of image quality; we were happy with all of our test scans, although in some photographs we noticed a tendency for bright white areas to be bleached out entirely, losing any subtle shade detailing. The scanner is designed for office documents, however, and here the exposure was well-judged, and the resulting images clear and sharp.

The DR-C125 has just two consumables; the feed and retard roller, which are replaced together in an exchange roller kit. This costs around 37 and is rated at 100,000 pages, so running costs are typically low. Power consumption is also very low, with the scanner consuming just nine watts when active, dropping quickly to just one watt within 30 seconds after finishing each job. The scanner switches itself off four hours after the last scan, reducing power consumption so much that we couldn't measure it. While it seems a small gesture it does reduce the power wasted over a night or a weekend, so it's to be welcomed.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

The ImageFormula DR-C125's compact and clever design makes it an easy scanner to live with, but that's only half the story. Paired with Canon's new CaptureOnTouch software the DR-C125 is adept at rapidly capturing and processing documents, helping users turn out consistent and predictable high-quality scans with the minimum of input or support. If you need an affordable desktop document scanner, this is one you can simply deploy and forget about.

A4 duplex sheetfed scanner Optical resolution: 600x600dpi 24-bit colour Scan speed: 25ppm/50ipm (simplex/duplex) Compatible with Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X Power consumption: sleep 1W, standby 2W, scanning 9W (peak) Part code: 5005B003AA Details: www.canon.co.uk

The AcuLaser MX20DN is the latest addition to Epson's ever-popular range of mono laser multi function printers (MFPs) for small-to-medium sized workgroups. It has the obligatory USB and 10/100 Ethernet ports, a web interface for remote administration and the ability to scan to shared folders on network servers or a USB stick. A version with an integrated fax machine - the MX20DNF - is also available.

The MX20DN has a pretty standard set of features but a few stand out from the rest. The most notable of these is its 1,200x1,200dpi print resolution - twice that of many similarly priced MFPs, although most can manage quality that's roughly equivalent to a 1,200dpi resolution through driver-based enhancement. You can also make up to 999 copies of a page and there's both duplex printing and scanning, which makes it simple to copy double-sided documents.

If fully upgraded with two optional 250 sheet paper trays, the printer can handle a maximum of 800 pages, including the 50-page capacity of the special media tray. The latter is of more use for printing on envelopes and card stock, though, and can take a maximum paper weight of 220gsm. We were pleased to find that it printed our envelopes without creasing them or causing a paper jam.

The Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) worked a little less smoothly. It's brilliantly useful, making short work of scanning large numbers of both single- and double-sided documents. However, the MFP sometimes failed to notice that we'd inserted a page into the ADF and instead attempted to scan from the flatbed platen. It's a minor annoyance, which mostly occurred when we tried to use the ADF to scan or copy just one page.

We were pleased to find that - once you've configured the printer's network settings - it's as easy to scan directly to a remote folder or USB stick as it is to scan from Epson's excellent Windows scanner interface. Image scans were a little disappointing, though. A photo scanned from the flatbed platen at the MFP's maximum 600dpi scan resolution was boldly coloured, but looked a little gritty and had lost some of its more detailed shading and subtle colour tones. We had no complaints about its scan speed of 16 seconds, though. We had no objections about our text scans either. Even at low resolutions, text was clear enough to read and OCR with ease. Unlike some of its competitors, Epson doesn't bundle any OCR or document management software with the MFP.

Print quality is excellent and the MFP can perform high quality hardware emulation of rendering languages including PCL 5a, PCL 6 and PostScript. Whatever standard you use to describe pages to the printer, the results are excellent. The pin-sharp text you'd expect from any laser printer worth its salt is supplemented by smoothly shaded greyscale graphics and excellent rendering of detailed line drawings in the high quality 1,200dpi and photo-quality modes. We found that photos actually looked better when we didn't use the driver's photo mode, which produced a grainy half-tone effect rather than the smooth shading we'd seen on our embedded photos, business illustrations and graphs in text and graphics mode. Print speeds are excellent all round and near Epson's claims, at 26ppm for mono text and 21ppm for our graphics-heavy greyscale documents.

The real appeal of a mono laser printer is in how cheap it is to run. The MX20 isn't the cheapest, at 1.7p per page ex VAT even if you buy high-yield 8,000 page recycling program toner cartridges, but its Total Cost of Ownership is gratifyingly low. The only other consumable you have to worry about is a 165 Maintenance Kit every 100,000 pages. If you just print 100 pages per month, you can spend less than 400 over three years, including the printer's purchase price. Heavy users, who print 3,000 pages per month, will go through 2,384 over three years. However, the sweet spot is held by medium users - those who print around 750 pages every month. They'll spend just 859 over three years. We'd advise extending Epson's one-year onsite warranty to three years, too.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

If you're after a reasonably priced mono network MFP that doesn't cost too much to run, can handle a decent number of pages every month and quickly produces good quality prints, you can do much worse than the MX20DN. Its clunky physical interface and the quality of its photo mode put it out of contention for our highest rating, but it's earned a solid five stars.

PERFORMANCE Mono costs: 1.7p Normal speed: 25.9ppm Scan speed: 2.6spm SPECIFICATIONS MANUFACTURER Epson Model Aculaser MX20DN Maximum native print resolution 1,200x1,200dpi Maximum enhanced print resolution 1,200x1,200dpi Maximum optical scan resolution (output bit depth) 600x600dpi (24-bit) QUOTED SPEEDS Quoted speed, A4 28ppm TESTED PRINT SPEEDS First page from sleep 22s Two greyscale 10x8" photos - total time 9s Six greyscale 6x4" photos - total time 14s TESTED SCAN SPEEDS Full scan area preview 8s A4 document at 150dpi/300dpi 20s/23s TESTED COPY SPEEDS Single A4 page, default quality 8s 10 A4 pages (many to many), default quality 38s PHYSICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL Standard interfaces USB, 10/100 Ethernet Optional interfaces None Dimensions (HxWxD) 448x494x430mm Weight 18.4kg Noise 69 dB(A) Duty cycle (pages per month) 20,000 pages Power consumption standby 10W Power consumption idle 10W Power consumption active 847W PAPER HANDLING Maximum paper size Up to A4 Maximum paper weight 220gsm Standard paper inputs (capacity) 1 (300) Maximum paper inputs (capacity) 4 (800) Output tray capacity 150 sheets Duplex Yes Automatic Document Feeder capacity 50 COPY FEATURES Maximum number of copies 999 Maximum copy resolution 1,200dpi FAX FEATURES Maximum mono fax resolution N/A Maximum memory capacity (mono pages) N/A GENERAL Technology Mono laser Language(s) Emulations: PCL6, PCL5e, Genuine PostScript 3TM, PDF1.6, ESC/Page(B/W), FX, ESCP2, I239X Supported operating systems Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Server 2003/Server 2008, Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later Memory, standard (max) 256MB (512MB) Other features and options None BUYING INFORMATION Price inc VAT £394 Consumable parts and prices 8,000 page C13S050582, £147; 3,000 page C13S050583, £84; 8,000 page C13S050584, £136; 3,000 page C13S050585, £79; 100,000 page Maintenance Unit C13S05119, £165 Price per A4 page inc VAT 1.7p Price 2nd paper cassette inc VAT 250-sheet C12C802641, £116 Capacity of supplied black toner (pages) 2,000 pages Estimated total ownership cost - three years' light use (3,600 mono pages) £315 Estimated total ownership cost - three years' medium use (21,000 mono pages) £859 Estimated total ownership cost - three years' heavy use (108,000 mono pages) £2384 Warranty duration and terms One year onsite Supplier www.printware.co.uk Details www.epson.co.uk Part code C11CA95001BX

The ability to generate PDFs isn't far behind email and word processing as an essential business tool, but at 401, Adobe pitches Acrobat Pro X as a premium product for specialists rather than for every office PC. Various other applications provide sophisticated PDF management for a fraction of the cost (such as Nuance PDF Converter Professional 7), and there's no shortage of free utilities that can convert printable documents to PDF, so Acrobat Pro X has its work cut out to justify its high price.

Advanced configuration and pre-flight checks for professional printing jobs is one strong justification. Adobe's and Nuance's PDF printer drivers both offer control over font embedding and the downsampling and compression quality of images. Adobe goes further, though, with the option to avoid downsampling images that are just over the desired pixels per inch (ppi), which can produce quantisation errors.

Acrobat Pro also supports CYMK conversion and colour spaces, and includes templates for various PDF/X standards. These ensure compliance with ISO standards designed for graphic content exchange and long-term archival. When preparing a document for mass distribution, if nothing else it's reassuring to be using software from the inventor of the PDF format. InDesign and Quark XPress users needn't buy Acrobat for these features, though, as these packages have similar features built in.

Acrobat Pro also includes extensive tools for online collaboration. Documents are converted to PDF and uploaded to www.acrobat.com, and colleagues are emailed a link to invite them to review the document, add comments and make amendments. Significantly, the other people don't need to have Acrobat Pro installed the free Reader 9 is sufficient although the new Reader X is better because of its new Comments tool pane that shows the status of comments and amendments.

For documents originating in Word 2010, changes can be imported back into the original document for approval. However, this process proved to be messy and confusing. The dialog box for reviewing changes appeared to have a bug that made some of the text unreadable; perhaps that explains why Accepted and Rejected tags made elsewhere weren't visible, and the results were often erratic. Word's own Track Changes feature is much more polished and agreeable.

Acrobat Pro X has been updated to integrate with Office 2010, adding tools such as the one described above into an Acrobat tab on the Ribbon. Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher and PowerPoint all include buttons for Create PDF, Create and Attach to Email and Create and Send for Review. Word also includes a Mail Merge button, sending personalised PDFs by email to a mailing list. Outlook's PDF tab is designed for email archiving, either manually per message or folder or automatically based on a schedule. Archives and activity logs can be saved over a network, and can include embedded indexes for faster search.

Meanwhile, plug-ins for Internet Explorer and Firefox capture web pages to PDF with a single click, complete with active links. The Internet Explorer plug-in also includes an option to click on specific areas within a page to be included a convenient way to exclude extraneous clutter from a captured page.

Word and PowerPoint (but strangely, not Publisher) also get an Embed Flash button, which brings in pre-prepared Flash animations in SWF format, as long as they're self-contained rather than relying on other files. They also accept MP3, Flash Video (FLV) and various other video formats, which are given an SWF wrapper with transport controls and automatically converted to FLV where necessary.

The ability to include Flash content in PDF files isn't new to this release it first appeared in version 9 but the option to design them in Word and PowerPoint might just raise awareness of this feature enough for it to gain some support. Whether it deserves to is another matter. We can't decide whether building media playback and animation into PDFs is a useful extension of the format or just a confusing dilution of its perceived role as a static digital document. In the nebulous world of digital information, there's something innately reassuring about the PDF format's analogy with paper.

It doesn't help that these multimedia objects appear a little untidily in Adobe Reader, requiring a click for activation. It's also disappointing that PowerPoint's own animation tools aren't translated into Flash for PDF export, although perhaps that's hoping for too much. Then again, in some respects this feature is more polished than PowerPoint's built-in handling of rich media, so it could be used simply for presentations rather than for PDF export.

So far we've barely mentioned the Acrobat Pro X application itself, but there are plenty of reasons to fire it up. As with Adobe Reader X, many existing features have been consolidated into tool panes that appear on the right side of the screen, tidying up the interface and grouping features together in a more logical order. The Comments pane manages the annotation process, while Share is home to the Adobe SendNow service, sharing PDFs up to 100MB by sending recipients a link.

The Tools pane is easily the busiest. It includes a myriad of features: rotating, cropping, deleting and inserting pages, making simple text edits, designing interactive forms and collating responses, performing OCR, signing and encrypting documents and more.

It also includes an Action Wizard section, new to this version, which walks users through seven common tasks such as Publish Sensitive Documents and Prepare for Review. Some of these are rudimentary Archive Paper Documents comprises a single step: Add Document Description. The OCR wizard is more involved but we didn't warm to it. The fact that the language defaulted to English (US) for every page we scanned except for one that it decided was in Korean is enough to make us look to a dedicated OCR package such as Nuance OmniPage. Wizards can also be edited or created from scratch, which could prove useful for making sure complex workflows are followed to the letter.

Acrobat Pro X can also create Portfolios collections of PDFs, or any other file type for that matter, wrapped up in a smart animated front end. The most obvious use is for distributing collections of documents where making a good impression is important press packs, for instance. However, while Portfolios were introduced in Acrobat Pro 9 in 2008, the idea doesn't seem to have caught on; we've yet to see a single instance of it in the wild. The five new templates for the front end certainly look smart but the glossy animated interfaces can be a little tedious when you just want to get to the information.

Various file types included in a Portfolio can be previewed directly in Adobe Reader rather than having to be extracted first, but while audio and video clips were handled well, previews of Word and Excel files were too small to be legible. We also spotted a bug whereby changing the name of a folder updated in one place but not another, which runs the risk of placeholder names wandering through to the final cut.

It's now possible to include URLs and embedded web objects such as video, with the content downloaded as the portfolio is viewed rather than at the design stage. It's a smart idea but, as with Flash integration, its execution in Reader X is a little untidy, with an image placeholder that gives way to a warning message about connecting to the internet. Once again, it might confuse people who thought they were looking at a static PDF. Still, we'd hate to be Luddites and mark Adobe down for expanding into new territories. Flash integration, Portfolios and dynamic streaming content are all interesting developments that might prove to be extremely valuable.

As we noted at the start of this review, there's little point in investing in Acrobat Pro X simply to be able export documents as PDFs. Nuance PDF Converter Professional 7 does that perfectly well and costs just 57 ex VAT.

Another option is Acrobat X Standard (278 ex VAT). However, with no Flash and Portfolio support, Action Wizards, pre-flight checks for professional printing and various other missing features (see Adobe's site for the full list) it seems underpowered compared even to Nuance's application.

There's nothing here that we'd deem essential for existing users, but Office 2010 support might be the exception. Meanwhile, as a reflection of its increasing multimedia capabilities, Acrobat Pro X is now available as part of Acrobat X Suite, which also includes Photoshop CS5, Captivate 5, Presenter 7, LiveCycle Designer ES2 and Media Encoder CS5. The Suite costs 947 ex VAT, or 635 to upgrade from previous versions of Acrobat, Photoshop or Captivate. It's disappointing that the suite doesn't include Flash Pro, though, or at least the simplified Flash Catalyst.

Those running Acrobat Pro 7, 8 or 9 can upgrade for 190 ex VAT. You may be able to get Acrobat Pro, or indeed other Adobe programs, at significantly lower prices than the retail prices quoted here. Adobe's Cumulative Licensing Program can lower software costs for large, bulk orders.

Verdict

There are a few areas that could be neater, but by and large Acrobat Pro X is up to Adobe’s exacting standards. It feels like a professional product, with features that address everyday needs of its users and are elegantly executed.

Whether Adobe’s attempt to expand PDF format into rich media and interactivity will catch on remains to be seen, but there’s little to fault in its implementation. For those with less ambitious aims, this isn’t a must-have upgrade. Still, for new and existing users alike, it’s easy to see how Adobe justifies Acrobat Pro X’s premium price.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Processor: 1.3GHz or faster

Memory: 512MB (1GB recommended)

Hard disk: 1.9GB free space

Display: 1,024 x 576 pixel resolution or higher

OS: Windows XP (SP3), Server 2003 (SP2 for 64-bit), Server 2008, Vista (SP2), 7. Also available for MacOS X 10.5.8 or later

There are countless ways to publish and share documents electronically, but it seems we still can't get away from paper. A scanner is therefore a great thing to have in the office for digitising and archiving, but professional examples are normally too heavy and fragile to travel well or they're part of an immobile multifunction device.

If you do need to capture documents when you're away from the office, HP's Scanjet Professional 1000 might be the answer. It's a compact and relatively lightweight autofeed scanner that comes with its own fabric carry case. There's no AC adaptor or battery to cart around; a single USB connection to a laptop provides all the necessary power. Significantly, it's a duplex device, allowing you to scan both sides of a sheet of paper in a single pass.

The Scanjet looks like a quality product. Although it's made from glossy black and white plastics, they're stylish rather than showy, helping ensure it doesn't look toy-like next to a business computer. It feels sturdy, too, with a reassuring lack of flex or creakiness that suggests it would survive several years of being bundled into car boots or overnight bags. There are just two buttons, neither of which are essential to the scanner should they get a heavy knock, and the USB port is slightly recessed for extra protection.

As you'd expect, installing the device is a case of running the install CD then connecting up the USB cable, although HP's quick start guide seems to suggest that all four bundled CDs should be installed before you connect the scanner which isn't actually necessary. Before you can use it for the first time you'll need to wait around 30 seconds for an automatic calibration, after which we experienced no further delays or warm-up periods. We did have problems configuring the default action for the Scanjet's physical Scan button, however. Whatever we selected, Windows' configuration dialogue returned each time the button was pressed.

Unlike a conventional sheet-fed scanner, there's no paper tray or input hopper with the Scanjet 1000. Offered a sheet of paper, its rollers automatically draw it in a few millimetres ready for scanning. Although there's no guide to keep the sheet straight, we didn't miss it: the paper stayed remarkably tidy in all our scans, and the device's short and level paper path helped prevent any transport problems. Unfortunately, the rear-mounted USB port means that you have to position the cable with care to avoid paper snagging as it exits at the back. It would be better moved to the side.

HP's simple TWAIN interface is well laid out, presenting all the essential options in an uncluttered way. However, while the scanner can capture one or both sides of a sheet of paper in greyscale or colour, the options are set manually rather than auto-detected. While some sheet-fed devices scan the paper first, then let you set options based on the preview, here it's a two-stage process: if you want to preview and scan you'll need to load the document twice.

This frustration aside, the Scanjet is easy to use and at all but the maximum 600 dots-per-inch (dpi) resolution discreetly quiet. It's also reasonably swift, capturing a single side of colour A4 at 300dpi in 17.5 seconds. Duplex scans are little slower, with the extra processing adding around 7.5 seconds to a 300dpi scan when tested on an Atom N450-equipped netbook.

For a compact device the results are reasonably good. Scans were quite sharp and detailed, particularly at 600dpi, and free from errors or artefacts. Colours lost a little of their intensity, but overall the quality was easily good enough for scanning business documents out in the field, for which the 600dpi resolution is obviously more than enough. We couldn't perceive any difference in the brightness, colour or quality of the two images created through duplex scans.

Although you probably wouldn't want to scan photographs with the Scanjet 1000, it isn't just limited to A4 paper. HP bundles Presto! BizCard 6, which lets you capture business cards, convert them to text and add them to a database. While it's useful, particularly if you have a stack of cards, it can be quicker to just manually add a new contact to Outlook or another contact management program.

For more extensive optical character recognition there's also Nuance's OmniPage, while PaperPort helps organise your scanned documents along with your existing Office and PDF files. This useful set of programs rounds out a practical and high-quality package that's ideal for mobile scanning.

Verdict

The Scanjet Professional 1000 faces little competition – it’s the only portable duplex sheet-fed scanner we know of and it works well too. At £112 ex VAT it's also pricier than the competition and rather more expensive than a standard flatbed equivalent, but if you need to scan paper documents when out of the office, it’s a good choice.

Portable sheet-fed scanner 600x600dpi optical resolution 48-bit colour Compatible with Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7. Mac compatible (supplied software is PC-only) Product code: L2722A

The pen is one of the oldest bits of technology on the planet. Although it has been refined throughout the ages, the basic concept has remained unchanged. Whether it's a stylus writing on clay, quill on parchment, a fountain pen or a biro, you use a tool to make an essentially permanent impression that can't easily be manipulated or duplicated afterwards. Although it's now possible to extend the reach of the inked word by photocopying or scanning, manipulating ink on paper is still more difficult than it would be on a computer.

Written text typed on a computer can be easily manipulated and distributed. However, not everyone finds typing comfortable and many are quicker at writing by hand than they are at typing.

Arguably, the Livescribe Echo Smartpen gives you the best of both worlds. It's an electronic pen that captures your handwriting as you write and transfers it to your computer. It therefore combines the convenience and portability of a pen with the flexibility of typed text.

Captured handwriting is stored on the Echo's 8GB of internal memory. It's then transferred to your PC via a USB cable. The Echo not only saves what you write, it can also recognise and save drawings. Thanks to its built-in mic it can also record what people around you are saying as you write. This data can also be transferred to a computer.

The potential here is great. For example, you can use the Echo to not only make notes during a business meeting or a lecture, but record what's being said as you write. This allows the nuances of speech, often lost in a written transcription, to be captured. LiveScribe calls these voice-annotated documents Pencasts which can be saved and shared as Flash movies.

Data from the pen is stored, reviewed and shared using the Livescribe Desktop software. The upload process starts automatically when the Echo is plugged into a USB port. Pencasts can be saved or exported to PDF.

However, if you want to turn your written words into typed, editable text, you need to augment Livescribe Desktop with the MyScript optical character recoginition (OCR) program, which costs an extra US$30 to download. Given the already non-trivial cost of the Echo, this should really be included in the box.

In practice it all works smoothly, but there are several constraints. The pen itself is larger than the average writing instrument making it somewhat unwieldy to hold and write with. Although it is smaller than its predecessor, the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, it's still a bit too big to carry around in a pocket.

Obviously, if you want a comprehensive record of your writings you will have to remember to use the Echo constantly, for everything you write. You'll need to be sure its internal battery is kept charged and, most restrictively, you'll have to write on special paper.

An A5 sized 50 sheet book of this special paper is included with the Echo. There is a network of tiny dots on each sheet that make the paper look grey, and it is these that enable the pen to record what you write. The pen's tiny infrared camera captures pen movement over these dots at a rate of more than 70 images a second. You therefore can't write on ordinary paper and expect to have your writing recorded.

The paper also has some tappable controls along its bottom edge which allow you to access the pen's special features. You can use these controls to play back audio for example. There's a 3.5mm headphones jack on the top of the pen so you can listen in private though the pen also has a loudspeaker built in.

There are also controls for accessing the pen menu with information displayed in a tiny OLED screen that is just 96 x 18 pixels. This can display the time and also give information as you move through menus on the pen for things like settings and choosing and running applications.

This special paper doesn't come cheap. At the time of writing, a pack of four A4 notebooks cost 17.99 and four A5 notebooks cost 14.99 from amazon.co.uk. You can print your own paper on any 600dpi PostScript-compatible colour laser, but that is still an extra, on-running cost.

500MB of free online storage is available if you register your Echo with Livescribe. You can use it to share documents privately or publicly. If you opt to share documents publicly, anyone can see your uploads, and you can create links to those documents which can be emailed or tweeted. If you choose private storage, people will need a Livescribe account and your explicit permission to access your documents.

The Echo can run apps too. The Livescribe web site has more than 60 currently available, from translating dictionaries to the almost inevitable Hangman game. The pen comes preloaded with a virtual piano (you draw the keys then press the pen nib on them to make notes). These all seem more like an aside or adjunct than core features, but they might be fun and/or useful depending on your tastes and needs.

We really like the idea of the Livescribe Echo Smartpen and the practicalities of use have been well thought, although the extra expense of the OCR software is very irritating. However, to make the most of it you will need to revise how you approach one of the most natural activities we do, sticking to special paper and always making a conscious decision on whether to use the Livescribe Echo Smartpen.

Verdict

The Livescribe Echo Smartpen is a clever product that allows you to capture the spoken and written world for later recall and distribution. It works well, but might be too unwieldy for some people and its high price could pay for some typing lessons, which may be a better use of money for heavy note takers.

System requirements: CPU: 600MHz or faster Hard drive space: 300MB Operating systems supported: Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.5.5 or higher

If you are the kind of person that goes to a lot of conferences or networking events then you probably find yourself picking up plenty of business cards. Even in this modern age, that old fashioned small rectangle of card seems to be the most popular way of exchanging contact details with someone you meet face-to-face.

However, when you get back to the office, you are left with the tediously time-consuming task of typing the contents of these cards into your computer. Thankfully, you can just simply scan the cards into your computer instead.

There are several business card scanners on the market. The IrisCard Anywhere, the latest model from long-standing manufacturer Iris, looks very impressive on paper. The Anywhere is a small, portable, battery powered scanner that can scan not only business cards but also other documents up to A6 in size (105 x 148mm). The bundled software can store the scanned information and export it to a wide range of applications and data formats.

The scanner's small dimensions of 160mm long, 43mm tall and 56mm deep means it shouldn't take up much room in a laptop bag. It is powered by its own internal battery, which is charged via a mini-USB cable. Iris claims the battery is good for more than 150 scans.

Since scans can be stored on the scanner's internal 512MB of flash memory, cards can be scanned without the aid of a computer. Alternatively, scans can be saved to a USB flash drive, or to an SD card (or microSD card in an SD adaptor). These ports and slots are located on the back of the scanner. A 1GB SD card is supplied which should be more than enough storage. Scanned cards are, by default, saved as JPEG files. In our tests, these were between 102kb and 228kb in size depending on its complexity.

The scanning procedure is very straightforward. Having inserted the SD card or USB stick, or left the slots empty if you want scans stored on the scanner's internal memory, you press the power button and wait the adjacent light to stop blinking. You then feed a card into the front of the scanner and it is pulled through to the back. Then you feed in another card, then another and so on.

The scanning process is fast, and usually processing is finished by the time a card is spewed out of the back of the scanner. Only really colourful cards, or those containing photographs, seemed to need a bit longer. A light flashes while processing is underway, and it goes out when processing is finished so that you know you can insert a new card.

You can leave your business cards as JPEG files, but doing so seems like a waste when you can use the contact details from each card in other software. To make that happen, you need to use the provided CardIris Pro 5 software.

When connected via USB to your PC or Mac, the scanner's storage acts like any external drive, so you can view its contents and delete them when you've imported cards to the Cardiris Pro 5 software.

CardIris Pro 5 imports multiple scanned cards as a batch and uses optical character recognition (OCR) to read the contents of your scanned cards. It then creates entries for each contact in its database and fills in the appropriate fields. Inevitably, its OCR didn't get it right all the time, but it was pretty accurate, and the very well designed user interface makes it easy to correct any errors.

CardIris' contacts database has a fairly good range of fields for contact information including Skype number, email and web site address. You can add custom fields for otherwise unsupported information, such as a Twitter name.

The program is a basic but competent contacts manager. Data can be exported from CardIris Pro 5 to a wide range of external contact management applications including GoldMine, Lotus Notes, Outlook, Outlook Express and GroupWise, and to a variety of formats including HTML, XML, vCard, .csv, JPEG, TIFF, and even straight into an email.

It can retain the scanned card images as an aide memoir. You can view both the front and back of each card, rotate and crop cards, and even change the brightness and contrast of each image. More usefully, you can attach notes and a picture of the person in question to each business card.

There's no getting away from the fact that the OCR capability in CardIris Pro 5 is not perfect, so you will need to check every scan over and make a few tweaks here and there. This wasn't a time-consuming task though, and the scanning process is straightforward too.

Overall, the IrisCard Anywhere is a clever product that does its job well. What may prove more troublesome is being diligent enough to use it regularly, instead of accumulating a huge pile of unscanned cards.

Verdict

The IrisCard Anywhere 4 can be used to scan business cards and then store their contents – as well as facsimiles of the cards themselves. The CardIris Pro 5 desktop software, which works on both Macs and PCs, can be used as a contacts database and can also export contact data to a wide range of external applications and file formats. Some tweaking of the scanned and processed text may be required, but voracious business card collectors will find this perfectly acceptable.

Document feeding: Sheet feed type (single) Resolution (default): 300dpi Document Size (Max): Up to A6 Interfaces: SD, xD, MS, MS Pro, MMC, USB Slave (type-B Mini), USB Host (Type-A) for USB flash drive Output File format: JPEG On-board flash memory: 512MB Battery: 700 mAh Lithium polymer rechargeable battery through USB cable

This is a versatile application, able to create PDF, Word, Excel and HTML documents directly. Although it handles basic character recognition well, in our experience, it's handling of page layouts is much less good. We'd therefore only recommend it for converting pages with comparatively simple designs.

Anybody who has a lot of paper documents to convert to electronic ones, needs Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Using a scanner to create an image of a page and then intelligent software to recognise the letters in that image is a lot quicker and cheaper than having them retyped. OCR software, such as Abbyy Finereader, is often bundled in slimmed-down form with scanners and all-in-one printers, but a full version offers many extras.

Abbyy started in Russia, but is now a well-known name for OCR in Europe and the US. FineReader 10 is the latest release of their flagship OCR product and boasts of being able to convert printed text or digital photos to PDF, Word, Excel and HTML documents.

Each of these options has its own particular use. Scanning to PDF provides the ability to archive documents in their text form, rather than the much bigger bitmap images of the same pages. They can also be made searchable, so people using an OCRed archive can take advantage of fast indexing.

Converting to Word documents makes the results completely editable, so if you need the information in the paper documents as the basis for revision or new work, this is a very direct conversion. Excel is useful for reproducing numerical tables, though of course formulae underlying the numbers will have to be recreated. Finally, converting to HTML is the ideal route if you want to add printed material to a Web site or intranet.

The program itself is remarkably simple to use and its main editing screen reflects this. A toolbar across the top offers large, easy-to-read icons for opening, scanning, reading and saving documents, while the main part of the screen shows two panels, the left-hand one for the bitmapped image either a scan or a photo and the right-hand one for the result of the OCR.

At the bottom is a magnified image of the bitmap page, which can be drawn up like a shutter, if needed, so spelling queries from the program can be checked against the original. On the extreme left is a column of thumbnails, so you can easily switch between pages in a multi-page document. With an Automatic Document Feeder on a scanner, multi-page documents can be scanned and OCRed as batch jobs.

Click on the Open icon to call up a file containing an image, either from a previous scan or from a photo, or the Scan icon to link directly to a scanner connected to the PC. The program then picks out the areas of the page which it sees as text and recreates them as frames containing live text in the right-hand panel. It also duplicates images of any bitmap data it can't see text in.

Our test system was originally connected to one of Kodak's latest ESP 5250 all-in-one printers, but we kept seeing internal scanning errors when trying to scan pages through FineReader 10 even though the same device scanned into PaintShop Pro without error. We switched printers to a Canon PIXMA MP640, which worked without problem.

The accuracy of Finereader 10 is good when recognising bulk text and we had near 100 percent correct translation to editable text. When it comes to formatting, though things aren't as good. We tried several different documents, from straight reports to multi-column newsletters and were disappointed with the reconstruction of layouts.

Headlines were reproduced in point sizes different from the originals, in some cases being put in text boxes which were too small, so the internal text was truncated. A column of text that in the original was justified, reproduced ranged right in the OCRed copy and Finereader 10 Professional used text boxes to reproduce columns in an original.

The use of text boxes may not seem a problem, as long as the format is preserved, but rival products, particularly OmniPage 16 Professional, are moving to the use of columns to handle columnar text, because it's so much easier to edit the result; columns can be linked, so text can flow from one to another.

Finereader 10 also had trouble with some coloured text, completely ignoring characters printed in orange in an original, even when we highlighted them manually as a text box. For comparison, this was again something OmniPage had no trouble with.

Finereader 10 Professional includes Adaptive Document Recognition Technology (ADRT), an ABBYY technology which the company claims recognises headings, headers and footers, page numbers and footnotes in multi-page documents. This might be of more use, if the program handled some of the layout basics better.

Verdict

This is a versatile application, able to create PDF, Word, Excel and HTML documents directly. Although it handles basic character recognition well, in our experience, it’s handling of page layouts is much less good. We’d therefore only recommend it for converting pages with comparatively simple designs.

Processor: 1GHz OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003 Memory: 512MB available Display: 1,024 x 768

The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen is a device aimed at students and professionals, offering the ability to record everything you write down and upload it to your computer for editing and sharing.

Audio notes can be recorded on the on-board microphone and linked to the text you write. In theory, the option to leave the encumbrance of a laptop at home and handwrite your notes and diagrams is an attractive one. Does it work out that way in practice though?

Our retail package included a 2GB Pulse smartpen, 3D headset, ink cartridges, dock/charging station, sleeve and a 100 sheet, ruled notebook of the special 'dot paper' required to record your scribblings.

The pen itself is smartly designed and light, it might be too bulky for smaller hands but on the whole it felt comfortable. Getting started was very straightforward. Having downloaded and installed the software from the Livescribe website you simply have to set the date and time of the device and start jotting. The text capture is accomplished by a tiny infra-red camera in the nose of the pen, which records your handwriting and compares it to the minute dots on the paper, giving the digital rendering of your page scale and accuracy.

Once you've finished writing you simply put the pen on its cradle and watch your page appear on your desktop. It can then be exported as a .PDF file or an image, both of which can be easily shared or edited. In our tests the Pulse captured text flawlessly though the lack of optical character recognition was a let down. If converting your written word to computer text is a must, there are third-party software packages available, but they will have to be bought separately.

The microphone includes presets for more popular venues such as conference rooms and lecture halls, which genuinely improve the quality when used correctly.

The main features of this pen work perfectly and offer what the company boasts. The clever little gadget doesn't stop there though, it also works as a full featured calculator, offers the more musical user a simple piano - which generates sound based upon a drawn set of keys - and also has the capability to translate text written in English to Swedish, Arabic, Mandarin and Spanish; with the equivalent word spoken by the pen with the correct accent and intonation.

The included software was only a demo but we have it on good authority that more extensive features will soon be available, although whether these features will come at extra cost is unconfirmed.

The software bundled with the pen is adequate, with a basic interface for managing your installed pens and notes. To use the software you have to be running Windows XP, Vista, 7 or Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later. There isn't currently any support for Linux users, though the development kit has been made available in the hope that the community will put together a package. WINE support is also sketchy at best, so we couldn't recommend this to sole-boot Linux users at the present.

Another issue worth noting is the special paper and refills that are needed to use the device. While they're not at all extortionate (a four-pack of 100 page notebooks retails for around 12, the ink refills are around 5 for four) we feel that they might put off more casual users or the more skint students. The paper can be printed freely from the company's website though, although the cost of ink is still a consideration.

For the more image conscious users there are stylish leather bound notebooks and smarter looking pads available too.

Verdict

With a few minor tweaks it would be the perfect smartpen, although in its current state it still trounces the competition on most fronts and is a must-have for any conscientious student or business person. The major issue is the lack of OCR software, and this is something many aren't prepared to budge on. For the money the Pulse costs character recognition should come out of the box, so take note Livescribe!

Pen Design: Ergonomic design with anodised aluminum coating, titanium colouring with silver band and black accents Processor: ARM 9 Screen: 96x18 OLED Display Camera: High speed infrared camera (over 70 images/sec) Storage: 1GB NAND (over 100 hours recording time), 2GB NAND (over 200 hours recording time), 4GB NAND (over 400 hours recording time) Battery: 300 mAH rechargeable lithium (non–removable) Other: Mono recording smartpen embedded microphone, binaural or stereo recording 3D recording headset, embedded speaker, 2.5mm audio jack, USB mobile charging cradle Dimensions: 155mmx14mm (HD) Weight: 36g System requirements Intel-based Mac with Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later, including 10.6 Windows XP with SP3 or Windows Vista or Windows 7 600MHz CPU or higher 300MB minimum free disk space Available USB port Internet connection

Brother's surprisingly compact DCP-8085DN is designed for a small office or workgroup. Its price and its 1,200dpi maximum native resolution puts it in a similar category to HP's popular LaserJet M2727 MFP series, and although it lacks the HP's fax capabilities its quoted speed of 30ppm at a recommended maximum monthly duty cycle of up to 3,500 pages are superior to the HP. It's also faster than Brother's own HL-6050D, which we reviewed last year.

The DCP-8085DN has a 250 page paper tray and a specialist media tray that can handle stock of up to 163gsm, although it put a slight crease in some of our envelopes. Its paper capacity can be supplemented by the optional 500-sheet LT5300 tray, which is available for around 70. It comes with 64MB of RAM, which can be upgraded to a maximum of 576MB. Branded Brother 512MB SO DIMMs are hard to come by, although we've seen compatible modules on sale for a reasonable 55 inc VAT.

In the box, you'll find Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista driver discs, which include Nuance's PaperPort 11 SE document management software and Brother's MFL-Pro Suite. Custom installation options enable you to specify your installation directory and add an optional BRScript PostScript 3 emulation driver, in addition to the default PCL3 driver. The installer searched our network and successfully located the MFP on our network and helpfully set our PC as one of the printer's default "scan to" locations for scanning. You can also set a security pin code to prevent unauthorised users from scanning content on to the target PC.

The MFP's simple built-in menus are displayed on a five-line mono LCD screen. Common options like duplexing, quality, and N-up printing are bound to dedicated buttons. The DCP-8085DN also supports PIN-code secured printing. This means that your document won't be printed until you use the printer's numeric keypad to enter the PIN code you specified in your print properties. This is an excellent feature if your office handles sensitive information.

Brother's web administration interface is far from pretty but it does the job. It replicates all the options available via the printer's menus. Its front page displays the same content as the LCD panel on the device, which is handy for remote troubleshooting. The default user name, "admin", and password, "access", can be easily found both on Brother's website and in the MFP's documentation. The interface was a slightly slow to respond at times and would benefit from a few annotations, particularly for slightly more complex tasks like setting up scan profiles, but there's little to really fault about it.

We performed our standard text and illustrated business document tests at 600dpi and were impressed with both. Complex shaded graphics were perfectly graduated, and even thin lines tended to be smooth rather than jagged. Text at 8pt and above was sharply defined, although the printer struggled with our 6pt and under tests even at its highest resolution and these sizes looked a little spidery.

We didn't quite see the quoted 30ppm in our mono text print tests, but it achieved an average speed of just under 26ppm for text and close to 25ppm for our heavily illustrated greyscale document. 10 sides of duplex text printed in 53 seconds.

The DCP-8085DN has a 50-sheet duplex ADF scanner as well as an A4 flatbed. The easiest way to use either is by simply pressing the Scan button on the front of the device. The MFP can also scan to an FTP server or to a USB drive connected to its PictBridge port. You can scan to any PC on your network that you've installed the driver on. It lacks the convenience of some MFPs, which come with preset single-button shortcuts, but you can set up your own One Touch scan profiles and the on-board scanning interface is flexible and easy to use.

If you're scanning to a PC, you have to go through four menus and press the Start button before you can begin. You can scan the object on the platen or ADF as a file, to your default image editor, to an email or use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scan the text of a document into your default text editor. The ADF can handle both simplex and duplex scanning. The scanner interface isn't as advanced as those from Canon and Epson, but it's much less annoying than even recent HP scanner interfaces. It can't auto-crop your scan area, but helpfully remains open between scans and proved sufficient for all our scanning tasks.

Scan speeds weren't particularly fast except at low resolutions. While a 150dpi A4 flatbed scan took just 14 seconds, we had to wait 35 seconds for the same scan at 300dpi and 42 seconds for a 600dpi scan of a 6 x 4in photo. A 10-page colour simplex ADF scan at 300dpi took five minutes.

The DCP-8085DN is a capable office copier, although we had to set its brightness to maximum to ensure that graphics-heavy copies didn't look murky. The usual enlargement and reduction settings are present, with some pre-sets to make it easy to convert between common sizes. It defaults to single-sided copying but a duplex button and menu make it easy to switch modes and a duplex copy emerged in 32 seconds. A standard copy from the platen took 10 seconds and 10 single-sided sheets copied from the ADF emerged in just 29 seconds.

The DCP-8585DN is economical to run, with costs of just 1.2p per page if you buy Brother's 8,000 page high yield toner cartridges (TN-3280), which cost around 95. It comes with a 3,000 page standard yield cartridge (TN-3230) but there is an additional cost in the form of a 25,000 page drum unit (DR-3200), which can be replaced at a cost of 110. Including the cost of the drum, each page costs 1.6p.

Verdict

The DCP-8085DN is easy to use and produced high quality results in all our tests. It did well in our graphical print tests and produced stunning looking business documents, although font sizes under 8pt looked a little spidery. This MFP is fast, easy to use and produces high quality prints. Its costs aren't the lowest around, but they're typical for printers of this price range. If you're looking for a multi-functional device without fax capabilities, this MFP is a solid addition to any small office.

Rated pages-per-minute: 30ppm Print dpi: 1,200dpi print resolution Scan resolution: 600 x 2,400dpi Connectivity: USB, PictBridge USB, 10/100 Ethernet, parallel interfaces Dimensions: 475 x 531 x 451mm, Warranty: 1 yr on-site warranty (with registration). Power consumption: 10W standby, 11W idle, 940W active Part code: DCP-8085DN

There are laser printers, inkjet printers and then there's Ricoh's gel ink devices. Although Ricoh describes it as a gel, it's more like a slightly viscous ink and the machines work like high-speed inkjets. Most of the range are single-function printers, but the GX3000s is a multifunction device, providing copying and scanning, though no fax or memory card print.

This is a large machine for an inkjet, not far short of a medium-range colour laser, and sits very tall on the desktop. Although the head assembly, inside the machine, is quite substantial, it still seems bigger than it need to be, given the facilities.

At the top is a straightforward flatbed scanner. The spec sheet quotes the scanner's resolution at 1,200ppi, but the manual supplied with the machine states a basic resolution of 300ppi, so the difference must be made up through interpolation. 300ppi is high enough for effective OCR, but too low for photo scanning, particularly if you need to enlarge the images afterwards.

The control panel is straightforward, though the number pad is a little superfluous in a machine without fax functionality. There's a two-line by 16-character LCD display, with a useful backlight, and menu controls are positioned in front of this. To the left of the display are three small mode buttons for Print, Scan and Copy and on the extreme right are black and colour copy buttons and one to cancel a current job.

At the bottom of the front panel is a single, 250-sheet paper tray and pages are fed from this, turned through 180-degrees and finish up on a pull-out support, directly above the tray. There's no separate multi-purpose tray or slot and if you want to print photos you have to replace the plain paper in the main tray.

The four, gel ink cartridges slot in behind a cover to the right of the paper tray, so the machine is very easy to set up physically. Each cartridge has a capacity of 1,000 pages, except black, which is rated at 1,500 pages.

Software installation isn't as straightforward as the physical setup and we had problems getting the setup routine to recognise the machine connected through its USB link, the only connection available, unless you pay for the optional Ethernet card. In the end we had to install both printer driver and TWAIN scanner driver manually - not ideal.

As mentioned, the machine's spec sheet and its manual disagree on a number of aspects of the machine. The spec sheet quotes speeds of 29ppm for both black and colour print, while the manual goes for a more conservative 18.5ppm. Compared with our test results, both are optimistic, with the spec sheet figure somewhere on a small planet near Betelgeuse.

In fact, our five-page black text print took 32 seconds, giving a speed of just over 9ppm, while the 20-page document took just under two minutes, or 10.2ppm. Our five-page black text and colour graphics print returned 7.7ppm. These are all reasonable speeds, particularly for an inkjet printer, but they're nowhere near Ricoh's claims.

Print quality varies with type of document. Black text isn't wonderful, with a ragged and slightly striped appearance, indicative of under inking. While it's OK for internal documentation, you might think twice before presenting it to a customer. Colour print is better, with bright colours and reasonable coverage, though again there's some paper fibre show-through. Registration of text over colour is good.

Photo prints at default and high-resolution are good, with smooth colour gradations and decent detail in both brightly lit and shadowed areas of images. This printer is not designed primarily for printing photos, though.

With the relatively high yields of the reasonably-priced ink cartridges, page costs come out generally low. The black page cost at 1.55p racks up well against both inkjet and laser competition and the colour page cost of 9.34p is also reasonable in this market.

So where exactly would the Aficio GX3000s fit in your business? Although Ricoh publishes no figures for duty cycle, you're looking at a machine that's suitable for the same kind of workload as a mid-range colour laser. It would sit quite well in a small office or servicing a workgroup of two to five people.

Given the quality of its plain paper output, though, and the price of colour laser printers, it's not easy to see why you would take the gel ink route unless, ironically enough, you also have a requirement for photo printing on specialist media. This, the printer does much better than any colour laser.

Verdict

A big, colour multifunction machine using Ricoh’s gel ink technology. It’s a solid and reliable device for printing, scanning and copying and has a low TCO, but doesn’t fax and has only USB connection. Print quality, particularly black text on plain paper, is more workaday than holiday in the Maldives.

DPI: 3,600 x 1,200dpi enhanced, 29/29ppm A4 colour printer Paper tray: 1 x 250 sheet paper tray Duty cycle: Not stated Connections: USB 2, optional Ethernet Languages: RPCS (Windows GDI) Features: Gel ink, duplex as standard

With more and more multifunction printers entering the market, sales of single-function scanners may have dropped, but in one way this has improved offerings, as scanner makers have to offer extra features. HP's ScanJet N6310 is a duplex machine, with an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and a transparency scanner. Although aimed at the office market, the ability to scan slides and negatives gives it uses in the SOHO environment at one end and in the graphics market at the other.

The ScanJet N6310 is styled in off-white and dark grey, with every corner curved. The big radii on these corners make the machine look modern and well designed, so it would sit just as well in an office full of Macintoshes as it would surrounded by PCs. The driver software is provided for both platforms, too.

There's a 50-sheet ADF on the top of the scanner and its feed tray extends to take legal-sized paper, as well as A4. The ADF is duplex, so can scan both sides of each page in a single job. In the underside of the lid is a transparency adapter, which can take up to three, 35mm negatives or a couple of mounted slides.

The hinged lid isn't counterbalanced that well. The hinges have two notched positions, around 80 degrees and around 45 degrees. The fully-open position is fine and the lid stays where you put it, but the half-open notch (as shown in the photo with this review, as it happens) appears to hold the lid, but when you let go it bangs down onto the flatbed. We imagine this isn't intentional.

The control panel, which juts out from the front of the machine, has a backlit, two-line by 16-character LCD display and a series of the usual buttons for menu navigation and to start and stop a copy job. There's a single USB socket at the back, as well as a low voltage input from the separate, black block power supply. Shame there's no front panel USB socket for scanning to memory drives, though, as this would add an extra facility to the scanner's feature set.

Software provided with the ScanJet N6310 comprises control utilities for scanning and copying which comes from HP, OCR software from IRIS and document management software PaperPort, from Nuance. HP's own utilities include a range of standard scan presets, such as Scan document to PDF' and Scan picture to email', which speed up the whole scanning process. You can add your own, with parameters that best suit the documents you want to capture.

To test the scanner, we started by scanning a 10-page single-sided text document from the ADF at 300ppi into the ReadIRIS OCR, which took just 29 seconds to scan though longer for the OCR to do its work. A 10-side duplex scan took three minutes to complete, even though it was being scanned to PDF without character recognition. Each page makes three passes through the scanner, but this does mean the scanned document remains collated.

We then scanned a 15 x 10cm photographic print at 600dpi, which took just over half a minute and finally a 35mm transparency at 2,400ppi, the maximum resolution of the scanner. This resolution is needed if you, for example, want to enlarge a 35mm transparency to a 300dpi, 10 x 8in (roughly A4) print. This would require image dimensions of 3,000 by 2,400 pixels.

When scanning high resolution, the ScanJet N6310 doesn't excel on speed. It took 5:20 to make the transparency scan, quite a bit longer than the average dedicated slide scanner, so if you have a lot of transparencies to scan, a slide scanner would be a better option.

As for the quality of the scans the machine produced, text scans were adequate for both PDF creation and OCR and the colour image scans we produced at low and high resolutions showed good colour reproduction of business graphics and photo images. The scanner is well equipped to be used for small-scale archival work, using either compressed page images or recognising the text and storing it in the form of a searchable PDF.

HP is trying to widen the scope of business scanners with the ScanJet N6310, to deal with changing requirements, particularly increased emphasis on photo scanning. It has managed this pretty well and with the quality and speed of the scans we produced, this scanner is well worthy of consideration. It's not a production scanner, though, and you should think in the 100-300 pages per day range as a target.

Verdict

A business scanner with some pretentions to the graphics market, at least when it comes to resolution and transparency scanning. Scanning is easy, thanks to HP’s utilities, and scan quality is up to the company’s usual high standards. Speeds are variable, though and if you have a lot of slides to convert, a dedicated device will suit you better.

2,400dpi, 15ppm, duplex A4 scanner 24-bit colour, 256 greyscale 50 sheet (75gsm) auto-document feeder Multiple-feed protection Built-in transparency detector Nuance PaperPort, Readiris Pro 11 OCR, scan to PDF, JPG, TIF

Colour laser multifunction printers for workgroups are a convenient and often cost-effective option, as they serve as scanner, copier and fax machine, as well as a networked printer. Konica Minolta's Magicolor 4695MF is a substantial machine designed for relatively high duty cycles and includes both PCL and PostScript Level 3 emulations.

If you're installing the machine you'll know just how substantial, as it weighs 55kg, so is a definite two-person lift. It's not clear why it has to be quite so heavy or have such a large footprint there are A3 machines that take up less desk space. Once set up, though, its conventional lines mean it won't be a stranger to anybody who has used a photocopier before.

The control panel is straightforward, with a 4-line by 16-character backlit LCD display, bracketed on the right by a four-way menu navigation ring and on the left by fax function buttons. To the right of the navigation ring is a number pad for fax dialling and to the right of that are mode buttons for fax, scan and copy, as well as colour and black-and-white start buttons and one for cancelling a job.

At the top of the machine is a 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and a very large, counter-balanced cover for the A4 flatbed scanner. There's a 250-sheet tray at the base of the front panel, where you load paper in landscape mode, like a copier, and there's a 100-sheet, multi-purpose tray that folds down from the right-hand side for occasional print on special media. The output tray hangs like a balcony from the left-hand side of the machine, further increasing its footprint.

Although a 500-sheet secondary tray is available as an option, it seems odd not to provide a higher capacity tray as standard, on a machine with a 120,000-page duty cycle. In a busy office, you could be refilling it rather too regularly.

Because of its basis as a copier, the Magicolor 4695MF can perform some neat tricks. As well as fairly normal enlargement and reduction copying, the machine can produce a duplex copy from two scanned pages, enlarge a page up to four pages and repeat a small, scanned image multiple times on a single page.

There's a copy of Nuance PaperPort for document management, but the machine also comes with Konica Minolta's own PageScope suite, covering network handling. Both PCL and PostScript Level 3 are provided in emulation.

The Magicolor 4695MF is rated at 24ppm for both black and colour pages, but under our tests, where we print in normal mode and include processing time, we saw no more than 17ppm for black text print. Our five-page, text and colour graphics test took 1:05, or a speed of just 4.61ppm and printing a 10-page, 20-side duplex document took a very leisurely 4:42, giving a page speed of 2.13ppm. This slow duplex speed may discourage customers from making the paper savings available with double-sided printing a shame.

Print quality, using Konica Minolta's Simitri HD polymerised toner, is generally very good, with almost die-cut black lettering and vibrant colour graphics. Konica Minolta claims prints are matt, but they're only semi-matt, with black in particular still having a sheen to it. Photographic images, as long as you select photo print in the driver, are more natural than from many colour laser engines.

Colour photocopies from both the flatbed and the ADF are perfectly acceptable, though some tints look a little faded. The scanner has a maximum 600dpi resolution, so is fine for OCR and general-purpose scanning. It produces good images and there's sufficient onboard memory to hold several page images, so when copying, the scanner doesn't have to wait for the previous page to finish printing.

All consumables are at the front of the device, behind the hinge-down front panel, and toner and drum units slide out from the front, keeping maintenance easy. Toner cartridges provide 4,000 pages in standard capacity or 8,000 pages in high capacity and the drum units only need to be replaced after 30,000 pages. The fuser, transfer belt and transfer roller are considered to be maintenance items and have service lives of 120,000 pages.

Given the going rate for the consumables on the web, we calculate page costs of 1.21p for a black page and 6.63p for colour. These are reasonable rates, though not exceptional, and if you feel the service life of your printer will run to more than 120,000 pages, you need to add 1.12p to the cost of both black and colour pages, nearly doubling the black page cost.

Alternatively, Konica Minolta can sell you the BizHub C20, essentially the same machine as the Magicolor 4695MF but on a per-click basis, and this may prove more economic, if the machine will be used heavily.

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Verdict

This is a heavyweight machine, which should be able to handle print, copy, scan and fax functions for a good-sized workgroup. Print and scan quality is good, but print isn’t as fast as the spec sheet figures suggest. TCO is likely to be good, particularly before you reach 120,000 pages, when extra maintenance kicks in.

Resolution: 2,400 x 600dpi Speed: (Manufacturer’s claimed), 24ppm A4 duplex colour printer Paper handling: 250 + 100 sheet paper trays Duty Cycle: 120,000 page one-off monthly duty cycle Connectivity: USB 2.0 and gigabit Ethernet ports Languages: PCL6 and PostScript L3 emulation drivers

The government agency responsible for maintaining the Land Register for England and Wales is streamlining its paper-based processes by implementing new document management and imaging systems.

The new systems, which will be made available to up to 100 authorised Land Registry staff across 26 different sites, will be integrated with the department's Oracle E-Business Suite of applications to enable the paperless storage and retrieval of purchase invoices and related documents.

The new systems, provided by specialist vendor Version One, will allow the authorised users to view scanned documents either by drilling down through its Oracle E-Business Suite or via Version One's web browser DbWebQuery.

Debbie Wilkinson, the Land Registry's head of financial accounting, explained that the new document management systems needed to be integrated with the Oracle finance applications to speed up the processing of purchase invoices and help the agency move towards paperless processes.

"Version One's systems used alongside a Kodak i260 scanner will enable us to centralise accounts payable, improve our payment performance [and] cut costs whilst both supporting our green agenda and aiding us in our ultimate aim of being a world class accounts payable department," she said.

The land and property registry will also use the document management vendor's electronic storage system in conjunction with Oracle workflows to electronically authorise purchase invoices. And optical character recognition (OCR) technology will enable the data on scanned invoices to be automatically captured and verified before being uploaded - significantly reducing any reliance on manual data entry.

Wilkinson added: "By having central receipt of all invoices, the accounts payable team will be able to instantly know where an invoice is in the approval chain. This will improve our relationships with suppliers and further improve our payment performance. In addition, Version One's OCR will significantly reduce manual data entry minimising the associated risk of human error."

She also said the integration of the document management systems with the Oracle suite would play a key role in helping the registry become a more efficient accounts payable department, so that it will be able to act as a shared services centre for other government departments and agencies in future.

The new document management deployment is expected to go live by the end of 2008. And it comes only a fortnight after the department signed a a 50-million IT outsourcing deal with Steria to manage its distributed IT infrastructure (DITI) and extranet resources.

A good solid multifunction printer can save time and space in a workgroup, doubling as a photocopier and fax machine, as well as handling network printing and scanning. Lexmark's X560n is just such a workgroup device, big and well-featured and set to perform its tasks day in, day out.

The X560n weighs 40kg, so is definitely a two-person lift, and the printer section has a large enough footprint that the A4 flatbed scanner is hardly any wider. The scanner is fitted with a 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder.

Paper feeds from a 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom of the machine and although this is supplemented by an unusually high-capacity 150-sheet multipurpose tray which pulls down from the front, a main paper tray that can take only half a ream is going to need regular attention in a busy office. A 500-sheet second tray is available as an option, as is a duplexer a shame this isn't standard.

The control panel on the X560n is wide and busy. As well as a number pad for dialling fax numbers, there's a separate shortcut pad for regularly used destinations. A large, 85mm backlit, mono LCD display shows status information and menus, though the default display of toner levels is not as useful as Lexmark thinks. Menu navigation controls are directly in front of the display and at the right-hand end of the control panel are large green and red buttons, to start and stop a job.

Setting up and maintaining the multifunction printer is pretty straightforward. Fold down the front cover and there are four, combined drum and toner cartridges stacked one above the other, inside. It's always easier to maintain a device which integrates each drum and toner into a separate cartridge and in this case the cartridges slide easily in and locate positively, making maintenance very easy.

Bundled software provided with the X560n includes Abbyy FineReader Sprint OCR, as well as genuine Adobe Postscript Level 3 and emulated PCL 6. Lexmark provides a useful address book tool, which automatically gathers together fax and e-mail lists and can present them on the printer's display, so you can fax or e-mail directly from the machine.

The company has always had good network support for its printers, too, and you can access the control panel from any network PC, assuming you have the correct permissions.

We really do need an ISO standard for print speeds, as the measurement methods used by manufacturers vary considerably and most give outlandishly optimistic figures. Lexmark claims 30ppm for black printing on this machine and 20ppm for colour. This doesn't include page rasterisation time nor, if the machine is sleeping, it's warm-up time, or calibration' as the company calls it.

Our tests produced a fastest print time of 54 seconds for a 20-page, black text document, which gives a real-world print speed of 22ppm. This is by no means a poor speed, but is only just over two thirds of the specification.

Printing colour graphics as well as black text produced a speed of 12ppm for a five page document, again a fair speed, but considerably lower than the claim. A five-page colour photocopy took just under a minute and a 15 x 10cm photo print completed in an impressive 18 seconds.

The prints themselves are excellent. Black text is dense and sharp, even with the printer's 600dpi resolution. Colour graphics are vivid and bright, eminently suitable for business use and even photos, not normally a strong point of colour lasers, look less overblown and picture postcard' bright. The limited colour gamut of laser engines normally curbs any subtlety in photos, but this one is better than most, in this respect.

The scanner also has a resolution of 600dpi, but this is quite adequate for general office scanning and copying and more than enough for accurate OCR. There's no USB socket for walk-up scanning or printing, though.

The drum and toner cartridges are available in 4,000 and 10,000 page capacities, which again makes the default 250-page paper tray seem underspecified. The black cartridge is only available in the higher capacity, but for best economy it's best to fit high-capacity cartridges all round.

Using the best internet prices we could find for the cartridges gives costs per page of 1.1p for black and 4.5p for colour. Both these prices are good, making this machine an economical choice when printing black or colour. These costs, of course, assume that you'll be doing your own maintenance and in a small office this could be carried out by just about anybody, after simple training. If you prefer, you should be able to tie up a maintenance contract on the machine and pay by the page.

Verdict

This is a robust multifunction device, suited to a busy small business or a small workgroup. Despite its slightly dated looks, it's good in all important aspects, such as print quality, speed and running costs. Top tip - if you’re expecting to use the machine heavily, it's worth buying an extra paper tray from the outset.

In brief: 30ppm, A4 workgroup colour laser multifunction Resolution: 600 dpi Paper handling: 250-sheet paper tray, plus 150-sheet multi-purpose Duty cycle: Max 60,000 pages, monthly Connectivity: USB 2, 10/100 Ethernet, parallel Software: Emulated PCL6 and Adobe Postscript L3 drivers

Spam sent from webmail accounts created using CAPTCHA breaking technology is on the increase, according to Marshal.

It said that there was more spam capable of beating the response test, which is used to ensure content is generated by a human manually typing letters and numbers rather than a computer. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers & Humans Apart) was developed by Carnegie Mellon University in 2000 to stop spam robots.

However there are ways to get past this security such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which is mechanical or electronic translation of the electronic images. Sometimes it was possible to completely bypass the CAPTCHA.

"In email security we've developed pretty advanced OCR technology to deal with image based spam," said Bradley Anstis, vice president of products at Marshal. "I think some spammers are using tools we've created against the industry to help them break the CAPTCHA codes."

However, he did go on to say that the bigger problem was that many businesses and websites were not even bothering to implement CAPTCHA.

"Even though CAPTCHA technology is evolving and there are new ways of doing it its still up to the companies to deploy these on their websites," Anstis said. "That traditionally has been the hardest thing to do."

The report said that using webmail accounts for spam made IP reputation or message header inspection less effective. Spam would be generated from Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail accounts, so they would look to come from legitimate sources.

"This email is typically generated using a well-formatted composition type engine so the headers are really tidy and bodies are really neat," Anstis said.

"Traditional spam filters that look at the structure of an email message looking for addresses of bulk mailers are less effective. Webmail messages conform to all right the standards."

Business scanners have a very different purpose and design from their flatbed, graphic design siblings. Where flatbeds typically have high optical resolutions and are used for producing very high-quality colour scans, often of photographic originals, business scanners are much more concerned with high throughputs of text documents and are used primarily for OCR and document archival.

Xerox's DocuMate 262i is a neat scanner, about the size of a small bread loaf, and feels very solid and well made. Being sheet fed, it can only take individual sheets and can't scan from books or magazines, but it can deal with up to 38 pages a minute, according to Xerox. Since it's a two-sided (duplex) scanner, this translates to up to 76 sides per minute.

Paper feeds conventionally from a rear paper tray to a front one and the only controls are buttons to switch between simplex and duplex scans and one to select between nine different pre-defined scan modes there's a blue, single-digit display to show which one's selected.

The paper trays aren't ideally designed. The rear feed tray folds up neatly out of the way when the scanner's not in use, but unless we missed something, the front one doesn't. There's a choice of simple output tray or output tray with ID/credit card front feeder. This combination clip-on provides a small feed tray, which rests against the front of the scanner, so cards can be fed.

However, it has to be moved away from the scanner when scanning from the rear tray and Xerox has devised a slightly bizarre scheme using two spring-loaded latches which your rotate either side of the front feeder til they clip onto it and pull it forward. The latches have to be released again when you want to use the front feeder. How much simpler to have a simple peg or catch to hold the feeder in its forward position?

Xerox supplies full versions of Nuance PaperPort 11 for document management and OmniPage Pro 15 for OCR. Both are market-leading applications which do their respective jobs very well. You can OCR directly from within OmniPage Pro, though it's probably quicker and easier to scan and OCR as separate operations, using PaperPort.

Under test, the DocuMate 262i completed a 10-page scan of assorted documents, including invoices and tabular documents in 17 seconds. This equates to a scan speed of 35ppm, very close to the rated speed. A10-side duplex document (five pages) took 11 seconds, or 54ppm. Both these tests were conducted at 200dpi, the default resolution of the scanner, which is good enough for archival.

Increase the resolution to 300dpi, the minimum for effective OCR, and a 10-page document takes 25 seconds, or 24ppm. The scanner takes around 10 seconds for the lamp to warm-up, so this time needs adding on to the first scan of a session. With larger scanning jobs the DocuMate 262i can take 50 sheets at once any warm-up time will be a smaller proportion of the total and the scan speed will approach the rated figure more closely.

Pages feed well and even given the high speed, there are few misfeeds. The scanner includes ultrasonic double-feed detection anyway, and the software can auto-straighten and auto-crop pages.

There's a single USB socket on the back of the scanner as a local connection to a PC Macs are not currently supported. A network adapter is available as an option.

The facility to scan ID/credit cards from the front is a useful extra. Feed the card by sliding it onto the guides on the front feed tray and the scanner takes it in, spits it out onto the output tray below and produces a duplex scan of the front and back of the card, as separate pages. As with any job, a card can be scanned in colour, greyscale or black and white.

Xerox puts a 3,000 page-per-day duty cycle on this scanner, so while it doesn't have the vigour of heavy-duty devices like the Canon ImageFORMULA DR-X10C which is designed for scanning bureaus and dedicated archival departments a single DocuMate 262i would be able to handle most of the output from even a reasonably big department. At the price, it would be reasonable to add a second or third unit if that department grows in size, too.

Verdict

This is a fast, efficient, duplex business scanner, which is easy to use and comes with a good selection of useful support software. Given its comparatively low-price, it's well-specified, with features like double-feed sensing, de-skewing and auto-cropping. The front-feed card reader is effective, if a little Heath Robinson in implementation.

Dpi: 600dpi, 38ppm (76spm) A4 sheet-fed scanner Colour: 24-bit colour, 256 greyscale Paper handling: 50 sheet auto-document feeder Duplex: Yes Duty cycle: 3,000 pages per day Software: Nuance PaperPort 11 document manager, OmniPage Pro 15 OCR, Kofax Virtual ReScan 4.2 image enhancer, Vioneer OneTouch bundled

Adobe Acrobat made its public debut back in 1991 and the PDF (Portable Document Format) it introduced was intended to become the universal format for design-rich, cross-platform electronic communication.

The launch of the World Wide Web in the same year forced Adobe to radically revise its plans, but the Acrobat platform survived and eventually prospered by making itself indispensable in a whole host of workflows situations, from documentation distribution to commercial printing.

Recently however Acrobat has been showing its age and come to feel slow, lumbering and old-fashioned: a dinosaur in today's fast-pace internet age. With the chronically unimpressive version 8 release it even seemed that Acrobat might be reaching the end of its useful life. The good news is that that's not the case at all. In fact version 9 is the most exciting Acrobat release since the launch of the all-important free Reader application.

Back from the dead

This new vitality is evident in the introduction of important new features across all areas of PDF handling and across the entire range of Acrobat authoring tools. It is most obvious, however, in the new, top-of-the-range Adobe Acrobat 9 Extended package.

The source of this new lease of life is clear. It springs from the merging of the previously separate technologies PDF and Flash, and allows Acrobat to leave its static ePaper roots behind. Previous versions of Acrobat already supported the embedding of SWF content, but playback depended on the user having separately installed the Flash player. After its takeover of Macromedia, Adobe has been able to roll the Flash player into Adobe Reader. Universal, reliable and web-efficient media delivery is now integral to the Acrobat platform.

The benefits of this Flash transfusion are most directly felt in the handling of video. The advantages of this for designers are clear, but these days video isn't limited to such high end use. With the ever-increasing spread of webcams and movie-capable cameras and camera phones, video is now an everyday part of computing life. Thanks to Flash, Acrobat now reflects this, making it almost as easy to handle moving images as static pictures.

However there's a problem: Flash only supports its own web-optimised Flash Video (FLV) format. No doubt support for FLV output will spread but in the meantime you'll need a converter. And that's exactly what Acrobat 9 Pro Extended provides. The Video tool lets you import files in a wide range of formats including AVI, MOV, WMV and MPEG, which Acrobat 9 Pro Extended will then automatically convert to FLV, pull out your selected frame as a poster image and wrap everything up in a Flash-based player.

Acrobat's Video tool lets you add impact to existing PDFs but to take full advantage of the new support you'll need a dedicated design environment. No doubt this will come with the next release of Adobe's Creative Suite and the benefits of PDF-based Flash support for the likes of InDesign, Premiere Pro and Encore are enticing.

For now though, and for more general use, Adobe enables the main Microsoft apps to fill the gap by providing new Embed Video and Convert to Flash Format commands. This is an excellent example of Acrobat's ability to work closely with, and make the most of, end users' most popular applications. Acrobat 9 sees updated versions of all its macro-based PDF authoring capabilities across the full range of Microsoft's office applications - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook and Internet Explorer. It also provides dedicated PDF authoring for Lotus Notes and, via the latest versions of the Acrobat Print Driver and standalone Acrobat Distiller, for any application that can print.

Archiving improved

One major reason for using PDF is to keep searchable records and Acrobat 9 sees a number of improvements on this front. The first is support for 256-bit AES encryption, but the web page conversion tool - Web Capture - is also now much better thanks to native Flash support, and the ability to only convert selected areas of the page.

Even bigger strides have been made when it comes to converting hard copy to electronic archive with improved OCR technology and wider support for scanners. Combined with the improved output to Word's DOC format, Acrobat 9 can now double up as a dedicated OCR app. When it comes to data retrieval, Acrobat 9 also adds easy searching across all PDFs within a folder.

Rather than dealing with single PDFs, you'll often want to combine PDFs from multiple sources and even include other file formats. Previously this was left to PDF Packages which simply bundled all files together - not exactly professional. A major advance in Acrobat 9 - and an excellent demonstration of the new Flash integration - is the conversion of packages into "portfolios". These provide an attractive, interactive front-end to your component files.

Creating portfolios is a simple matter of dragging and dropping files onto the main Edit Portfolio window, then choosing a layout from a list of presets provided, adding a welcome page and header, selecting a colour scheme and specifying the file details as they will appear onscreen. It's all very straightforward and the results certainly look very polished. Designers can go further by using Flash and Flex to create their own custom layouts.

Flash-based PDF Portfolios help make the whole Acrobat experience more interactive and more modern, but in fact users have been interacting with their PDFs almost since they were invented - filling forms, signing documents and commenting on projects. Originally such interaction was restricted to users of the paid-for Acrobat apps, but recently there'sbeen a significant shift with users of the high-end Acrobat applications able to unlock this functionality for users of the free Reader program.

Acrobat.com

Acrobat 9 sees another similarly important paradigm shift for PDF-based interaction. For a while now Acrobat has supported centralized server-based hosting of PDFs but the set-up involved meant that few took it up, instead sticking with the awkward and inefficient round-robin email approach. Now, Adobe has come up with an extraordinarily ambitious fix for the problem - it's providing all of its users with free hosting on the completely revamped Acrobat.com site.

Select the "Share Documents on Acrobat.com" command and you can post your PDF to the site and it will automatically send out emails with an invitation to view and download (in the process avoiding potential problems with email security and file size settings).

Of course that's not the end of the matter - you also need to collate and track the comments and forms data as they are returned. For shared review, this process is largely automatic: when reviewers publish their comments to Acrobat.com these are now automatically reflected in the hosted PDF and made visible to all.

For forms, the published data can simply be sent to your Inbox for manual collation or now routed via Acrobat.com for automatic handling. When data is received, a notification appears in your system tray and clicking on this opens Acrobat 9's revamped Tracker where you can see a consolidated view of returns, and quickly email all those participants that haven't responded.

Further advances

That's by no means all when it comes to new forms and collaboration features. For producing advanced XML-based forms, there's the new standalone LiveCycle Designer ES (not for the faint-hearted). For occasional use the reworked Start Form wizard is likely to do all that you need - automatically spotting potential form fields in any PDF, including those created from scanned hard copy and now letting you check that they are setup correctly. When you've collected your responses in the Tracker you can now search, sort and filter data much as you would in a spreadsheet before exporting for advanced analysis.

In terms of document collaboration and review, the new Document Compare command should prove very useful. This automatically highlights differences between two versions of a PowerPoint presentation, for example, right down to recoloured images.

Acrobat 9 even enables real time review. Use the Send and Collaborate Live command and you can email others a PDF or Acrobat.com link that, when opened, opens up a new Collaborate Live task pane. Using this, you can synchronise your current page views and exchange chat messages. Using the Share My Screen command you can move beyond page sharing to share and discuss any currently open application with up to three users in a new browser window, though this capability isn't actually tied to Acrobat - you can simply sign up at Acrobat.com.

Apart from the FLV video conversion all the features described above are available not just in Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, but in Acrobat 9 Pro. So what else does Extended offer to justify its hefty price tag?

Well, first it takes in features formerly covered in the separately released Acrobat 3D (now discontinued), which means that you can insert a whole range of 3D models in formats such as 3DS, OBJ and DAE. These can then be rotated in 3D space, relit and re-rendered and all from within the free Reader application. There are also new features on this front, including a dedicated 3D Reviewer and the ability to export models to 2D vector formats.

Acrobat 9 Pro Extended also adds support for an entirely new media type: maps. Once you've set up or "georegistered" a map involves (with boundary co-ordinates and the map scale), users of Reader can interact with it by viewing the latitude and longitude coordinates, measuring distance, area and perimeter and exporting locations and measurements.

Adobe Presenter

The real stand out, and major selling point, for Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, however, is the inclusion of Adobe Presenter 7, which costs 309 exc VAT on its own. This is an add-on for Microsoft PowerPoint that dramatically increases its power. To begin with it adds advanced media handling which lets you insert flash SWF animations, record, synch and edit an audio commentary for your slides, and insert, capture and edit video. You can also create interactive quizzes based on a range of question types: multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank and so on.

The real strength of Presenter has always come from the fact that you can then export your media-enhanced, interactive PowerPoint presentation to Flash SWF ready for high-impact, web-efficient playback in any browser. Now, there's another near-universal publishing option available: PDF. And with the Flash player now integrated into Adobe Reader, the resulting PDF is just as rich and engaging as SWF.

Conclusion

Acrobat 9 Pro Extended is certainly not cheap and if you aren't going to use its advanced capabilities - and it's difficult to imagine how you could use all of them - you could save a great deal of money by looking at the alternatives.

On the other hand when you consider everything that the PDF format is now capable of - and remembering that Extended is considerably cheaper than the Acrobat 3D release that it replaces and throws in Adobe Presenter for good luck - you have to say that it's good value.

It certainly is in the US where the RRP is US$699. Here UK rip-off pricing applies, depriving Acrobat Pro Extended of an otherwise well-deserved Recommended award.

It's a real pity as Acrobat 9 gives the PDF platform a new lease of life and Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended lets you make the absolute most of its wide-ranging power.

Verdict

With its incorporation of Flash-based media handling and new integration with Acrobat.com, the Acrobat platform fully embraces the internet age - at last.

Processor: 1.3GHz or faster processor

OS: Windows XP SP2 or above, Windows Server 2003 (SP2), Windows Vista

Browser: Internet Explorer 6.0 or above

Memory: 256MB of RAM (512MB recommended)

Hard disk: 2.13GB of available hard-disk space

Display: 1,024 x 768 screen resolution

Optical drive: DVD-ROM drive

Graphics: Video hardware acceleration (optional)

Dedicated scanners are not just multi-function machines without the printing bit, they have a valid use in their own right. Anyone needing to convert printed documents to electronic files - either bitmap images of the pages or, more usually, editable text via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - a flatbed scanner is the best approach. Although flatbeds start at around 100, to get something with throughput and reliability suited to a office or corporate department, you need to spend rather more.

HP's ScanJet N8460 is near the top of the company's range of dedicated flatbeds and is geared to high throughputs, with a duty cycle of up to 1,500 pages per day. Its friends might call its design utilitarian, while others would say it's pug ugly. The lid of the machine has a deep step in it to accommodate the Auto-Document Feeder (ADF) and the scanner is wider at the top and bottom than it is in the middle.

Along the long edge of the main body are controls for different scan jobs, including scanning directly to selected applications. There are four soft function keys, so you can set up your own specialist jobs. There's also a 16-character LCD display providing status information and instructions. Copy functions are also catered for, though obviously you have to have a suitable printer available, to work in collaboration with the scanner.

Lift the lid with its bulbous ADF and, slightly surprisingly, the whole unit doesn't overbalance. Instead you can get at the flatbed for individual scans or scans of non-sheet originals, such as pages from books. The scanner has a single USB 2.0 port at the rear, which is its only means of connection to a PC. There's little point in have a high-volume document scanner like this networked.

A number of different file formats are supported as the destination of scans, including BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and PDF. PDF documents can be made searchable and may include searchable images. If you're using common document applications, like Word, you can scan directly into an open document, via OCR. Scan drivers are provided for versions of Windows from 2000 on and they include 64-bit as well as 32-bit software for both XP and Vista.

Under test, the scanner completed a 35 page, single-sided, 200dpi job in 1 minute 11 seconds, 11 seconds longer than the claimed speed of 35ppm would suggest. A 10-page duplex document took 46 seconds, but that was at 300dpi, suitable for OCR. If you're scanning longer documents for read back or conversion to PDF file, you should be able to get close to HP's specified speeds. This is an impressive throughput even for a scanner in this high-end market.

Documents scanned in duplex mode, unlike those printed in duplex - where each page has to pass through the print mechanism twice - only pass through the ScanJet N8460 once. In duplex mode it scans both sides of the paper in one pass, so you do get a true doubling of the scan speed, when converting double-sided documents.

If documents need to be OCRed after scanning, of course, overall conversion speeds drop. OCR quality is high, though, because of the excellent bundled software. As well as the highly-regarded Nuance PaperPort document manager and Readiris OCR, there's a full version of Kofax Virtual ReScan, which tidies up each scan prior to recognition. It also does neat tricks, such as inverting pages inadvertently scanned upside down and deleting blank separator pages from documents. There were very few recognition errors in the OCR samples we produced.

A more basic error would be a completely missing page within a scanned document, caused by the scanner misfeeding two or more pages at once. Again, unlike a printer, where the paper used is always clean and uncreased, documents fed into a scanner can be folded and dog-eared, making it easier for misfeeds to occur. Although the ADF on the ScanJet N8460 is pretty good at separating sheets, the machine also has an ultrasonic detector, which can tell when multiple sheets are fed at once. It issues an alert, so the problem document can be fed again.

This is not a scanner for photographs or other high resolution images. If you're concerned with graphic art or photography, you'll need a scanner with a higher overall resolution and you probably won't need a bulky ADF unit on its lid. In a business environment, though, particularly in any department concerned with filing or archiving material, the ScanJet N8460 is a thoroughbred scanner, which can cope with high volume and handle it in an efficient and cost-effective way.

Verdict

If you need a scanner which can convert large numbers of documents from single or double-sided pages to electronic media, the ScanJet N8460 does it with skill. Whether in manual or batch mode, the well-chosen software works alongside a carefully-engineered scanner mechanism to deliver high quality scans and OCRed pages.

Resolution: 600dpi, 35ppm (70spm) A4 scanner Colour: 24-bit colour, 256 greyscale Paper handling: 100 sheet auto-document feeder Duplex: Yes Extras: Ultrasonic double-feed protection Software: Nuance PaperPort 11 document manager, Readiris Pro 11 OCR, Kofax Virtual ReScan 4.1 image enhancer

Medium sized business and enterprises looking for top colour and mono print speeds plus multi-function capabilities have traditionally had no option but to go for a laser printer. With its new Edgeline technology, HP has turned this notion on its head as its latest CM8000 family delivers up to 60ppm mono and 50ppm colour but are essentially inkjet printers.

The new printers target businesses with a real appetite for paper as they aim to satisfy a monthly volume of 25,000 to 50,000 pages. They're pitched against colour copiers from the likes of Xerox, Canon and Konica and although they provide support for A3 printing are optimized for A4 operations with the bulk of printing comprising text and business graphics with around 40 per cent colour output.

Clearly, standard inkjet technology is totally unsuited to high-volume printing for a number of obvious reasons and Edgeline aims to solve them all. It's been seven years in the making and uses four, water resistant, pigment-based inks which HP claims offers superior contrast and brighter colours to dye-based inks. The biggest problem HP needed to tackle was drying time otherwise you'll end up with a soggy mess in your output tray at these speeds. The printer uses a unique bonding agent which is delivered by a pair of dedicated print heads. The agent is applied first where it grabs the ink and pulls it into the paper and a blower is used for final drying.

The next problem is keeping the print head nozzles clean and the printer uses a series of lasers to measure the droplet sizes. If the droplet gets smaller it indicates that the nozzle is getting blocked so the printer 'spits' ink though the problem nozzle to clear it. Paper is introduced to the print head array by placing it on a large rotating drum which uses a vacuum to hold it in place and is large enough to accommodate three sheets at a time. To stop ink 'spits' ending up on a page the drum has slots between each paper position and cleaning only occurs when these are level with the relevant print head.

The printer is very simple to operate and we found build quality to be exemplary. Opening the side panel reveals the drum with the print heads located above and fitted to assemblies that can be pulled out for easy access. However, the print heads are not consumables and are designed to last the life of the printer. The ink cartridges are located below and are very easy to remove and replace. Printing costs are a little difficult to estimate as the printers are purchased with yearly maintenance contracts which include replacement ink. However, HP claims 30 per cent lower running costs than equivalent toner based lasers with costs of between 2.5p to 4p per colour page.

One feature we really like is the new operator control panel. The print formatter runs XP Embedded allowing HP to provide a higher level of access via a large 10in. touch panel. The menu system is very intuitive and HP had added video clips to show users how to clear paper jams and replace consumables. This ties in with a feature coined 'digital breadcrumbs' where each accessible component has an LED on it. If a jam occurs the panel runs a step by step video and uses the LEDs to show the user where to go. There's also less risk of injury as the printer's blower runs at 30C which is a lot less than a laser fuser unit.

Combine the operator panel with the options available in the bundled drivers and users have a lot of features to play with. From the printer you can access functions such as copying, scan to email, network folder or the internal hard disk and display a job status. The scan function supports a wide range of formats including PDF, JPEG and TIFF whilst OCR comes as standard. This is provided by ReadIris Pro which is installed on the embedded XP and can output to HTML, CSV and XML. From the driver you can select the professional colour mode but the general office mode aims to deliver draft copies that reduce costs by around 30 per cent and are good enough to used as final copies. We compared draft prints from the usual suspects with those from the CM8060 and they are, indeed, much better quality.

During performance testing we found HP's quoted speeds to be somewhat optimistic although speed really will depend on the type of document as pages may require more than one pass. A basic 100-page Word text document was delivered in 143 seconds for an average of 42ppm. Our 120-page DTP test document with its collection of colour graphics and photographs dropped into the output bin in 237 seconds in professional mode and 209 seconds in general mode for speeds of 30.5ppm and 34.5ppm respectively.

The CM8060 may not impress in the speed stakes but it really scores for print quality. Text is razor sharp even down to the smallest font sizes whilst mono photographs also show very good levels of detail. Charts and graphs in our test reports were cleanly produced and colour blocks laid down with no white edging showing placement to be very accurate. The printer isn't aimed at photographic use and we did find that colour pictures lacked a certain vibrancy. However, the characteristic banding often found with many high speed lasers is virtually non-existent for the professional mode. As with mono pictures we also found the printer was capable of resolving a lot of detail in darker areas of colour photographs. With our performance test we could see colour fades with almost no stepping at all and grey shades using different mixes of cyan, magenta and yellow were reproduced faithfully with no colour casts evident.

The CM8060 delivers an innovative colour inkjet technology that looks a very solid alternative to high volume lasers. We couldn't achieve the quoted speeds during testing but quality is undeniably good and the printer design and operator panel makes it extremely user friendly.

Verdict

Lasers beware as HP introduces a new high-speed inkjet printing technology. Print speeds are below par but the CM8060 delivers top output quality, very low running costs and a quite remarkable level of features.

600 x 600dpi A3 colour inkjet Up to 60/50ppm A4 mono/colour 1.6GHz Intel Pentium M-730 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 2 x USB 2.0 2 x EIO slots JetDirect Fast Ethernet print server 80GB hard disk 600 x 600dpi colour copier 3 x 500-sheet input trays 100-sheet ADF tray 80-sheet bypass tray Drivers for Windows 2000 onwards, Linux and Mac OS