Nuance Introduces PaperPort Professional 12

Sept. 2, 2009 - PRLog -- LONDON, UK –  Nuance Communications, Inc. , a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions, today introduced PaperPort Professional 12, a new release of the world’s most popular scanning and document management application for Microsoft Windows.  The new release makes it faster and easier for home and office users to get organised and win the battle over paper.  PaperPort Professional 12 delivers significant interface enhancements, dramatic speed and accuracy improvements, integration with Microsoft SharePoint, and a range of new features that help users do more with all of the documents and digital photographs on their PC.

Today, more than ever, organisations are under increasing pressure to do more with less and to get a handle on budgets.  Studies have shown that 15 percent of all paper documents get lost and that office workers spend up to 30 percent of their time trying to find misplaced documents.  PaperPort Professional 12 adds a number of new features designed to scan, organise and eliminate piles of paper – including invoices, contracts, photographs, and forms – and convert them into searchable electronic files that can be easily accessed and shared.

The most dramatic enhancement in PaperPort 12 is a completely new user interface, matching Microsoft Office and the upcoming Windows 7 “ribbon” approaches to ease-of-use.  The redesign combines PaperPort’s visual document desktop, which is highly valued by both users and industry experts, with ribbon-based menus that are easier to find and use.  A new “Scan Now” interface addition makes scanning just one click away from any part of the application.

PaperPort 12 features significant increases in speed and accuracy, allowing users to view and navigate PDF files up to five times faster than the previous version, with a 40 percent improvement in optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy.  New PDF features make it possible to convert scanned paper forms into fillable PDF forms and create secure industry-standard PDF documents.

To provide advanced functionality for businesses, PaperPort Professional 12 also includes three levels of integration with Microsoft SharePoint. This provides centralised content management, allowing for remote access and document customisation in SharePoint repositories via VPN and network connections.  
“With millions of loyal users, we had the responsibility to make sure that any change to the PaperPort interface would deliver real enhancements to ease-of-use,” said Robert Weideman, senior vice president and general manager for the Nuance Document Imaging Division.  “To get it right, we included the PaperPort community and designed the new version based on extensive feedback and testing.  The result is a product that is unmatched in its ease-of-use and time-saving value.”

What’s New in PaperPort Professional 12?
PaperPort Professional 12 includes a number of valuable new features, including:

   Tabbed Ribbon User Interface – PaperPort 12 is even easier to use because all of the program features are presented on a set of tabbed ribbon-style toolbars that logically group functions with clear text descriptions.  The new “Scan Now” button lets people scan documents with one click — without having to change to the scanner settings view.  A customisable Quick Access Toolbar appears above the ribbon toolbars making it easy to put the most frequently used features in one easy-to-find location on the desktop.

   Do More with PDF

o   PDF Viewer Plus - Open and display PDF files faster than ever using PDF Viewer Plus, a newly developed Nuance PDF handling application that is fully compatible with PDF files created from any source. PDF Viewer Plus opens files much faster than the general-purpose ImageViewer (also available in PaperPort 12) for reduced memory requirements and smaller file sizes. The new viewer optimises the rendering resolution for each element on the page to yield a cleaner display and optimum print resolution.

o   New PDF Tools – PDF Viewer Plus provides a wide range of new PDF features, including improved annotations and dynamic or transparent stamps. In PDF Viewer Plus, you can send images within a PDF document to the ImageViewer, where they can be enhanced using Scanner Enhancement Technology (SET) tools.  Upon closing ImageViewer, the modified images automatically appear back inside the PDF.

o   PDF Forms – Fill and email PDF forms and create new ones – either from scratch or by using an updated FormTyper to make any static form fillable instantly. FormTyper is now integrated into the PDF Viewer Plus and uses Logical Form Recognition technology to detect the form elements. It also gives greater control over element properties.

o   Industry-standard PDF Creation – Using the PDF Create Assistant, people can create industry-standard text-based PDF documents from any application directly with a simple right-click through the Windows or PaperPort Desktops (up to PDF version 1.7). Another option is to create PDF documents by printing directly from any application using the PDF Create printer driver.  The PDF Create Assistant also enables people to create PDF packages, batch create PDF files, and much more.

o   Searchable PDF – Searchable PDF files are now available through Scanner Profiles, via a right-click “Save As” operation on the PaperPort Desktop, or directly in the PDF Viewer Plus application. This makes the content of your scanned paper documents or image files accessible to search engines such as Windows Desktop Search or Google.

   More Accurate OCR – PaperPort 12’s optical character recognition (OCR) scanning accuracy has been significantly increased over previous versions. This improvement yields greater success when searching the content of Searchable PDF file archives. What’s more, users can now apply language settings to OCR for even greater accuracy in all supported languages.

   Support for SharePoint – PaperPort Professional 12 is able to communicate with the Microsoft SharePoint Services 2003, SharePoint Portal 2003, SharePoint Services 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 document management systems. Now you can get files from these systems, process them as desired, and then save the results by sending the output files back through the Send To Bar. For added convenience, ScanDirect supports scanning to PDF with the results directed to SharePoint.

To see more of the new and exciting features in PaperPort Professional 12, please visit Nuance.com/PaperPort.

Pricing and Availability
PaperPort Professional 12 from Nuance, geared towards office professionals and workgroups, is priced at £99.99 inc. VAT, with multi-seat and enterprise site license discounts available.  PaperPort 12 Standard, tailored to home and small office customers, is £49.99 inc. VAT.  Both products are available immediately through Nuance’s global network of authorized eCommerce, retail and corporate/government/academic resellers.

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