Vox Pop: Workflow for the Fujitsu ScanSnap?

In comments about yesterday’s “Making friends with paper” post, I was reminded by 43f member Adam Hooks…

A couple months ago, on a MBW episode, Merlin, you recommended some scanner/pdf solutions and you said you would elaborate on that on 43f at some point. I thought this was related to reducing your reliance on paper. How did your scanning experiment go?

Adam remembers correctly that I purchased and preliminarily fiddled with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M for OS X (Info, Amazon). It’s a small-footprint, high-speed document scanner that a lot of people have been talking about lately. I’d read so many reviews and blog posts about how easy it is to use that I was intoxicated by the dream of a life – if not without paper storage – where I could at least try to minimize my unnecessary paper clutter and start making document archiving easier and more searchable.

Given the not inconsiderable cost of the unit, I’m embarrassed to say that I got busy with other stuff and haven’t yet returned to using the ScanSnap in any automated way.

Doesn’t mean I’m not interested or haven’t gotten started…

My initial experiences, while tentative in terms of time commitment and true workflow integration, have been very positive so far. It’s easy and fast to set up the S500M and then start scanning one- or two-sided documents. The beauty part is that the included “ScanSnap Manager” app not only stores your document preferences, but directs the USB input from the ScanSnap right into the destination app of your choosing (which can, of course, be an OCR app – that’s where it gets powerful).

Initial experiments scanning directly to image-only PDFs were very positive, while scanning into “Yep” and “DevonThink Pro Office” (which has on-board OCR) seems to point even closer to the direction I eventually hope to go.

I know at least a few of you are ScanSnap studs who have come up with workflows that are really happening for you (hint: looking at you for a blog post here, Mr. Norbauer). In the absence of a more detailed report from me, I’m hoping a few of you can chime in here.