One key aspect of the paperless office philosophy is the conversion of paper documents, photos, engineering plans and all the other paper based systems to digital documents. The technologies that may be used include:

▪ High speed scanners - used for scanning very large volumes of paper;

▪ Wide format scanners - used for scanning engineering drawings;

▪ Photo and negative scanners;

▪ Digital Mail Solutions;

▪ Digitization of postal mail - provides online access of scanned contents;

▪ Online post offices - outsourcing management of snail mail;

▪ Book copiers - used for taking photos of large books and manuscripts;

▪ Fax to PDF conversion;

▪ Multifunction printer;

▪ Document management system.

Each of the technologies uses software that converts the bitmaps into other forms depending on need. Generally, they involve some form of image compression technology that produces smaller raster images or the use of optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the document to text. A combination of OCR and raster is used to enable search ability while maintaining the original form of the document.

An important step in the paper-to-digital conversion is the need to label and catalog the scanned documents. Such labeling allows the scanned documents to be searched. Some technologies have been developed to do this, but generally involves either human cataloging or automated indexing on the OCR document.

Things to keep in mind: