Customer Reviews

ScanSoft PaperPort 11 Professional [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(31)

 

 

I have been using Paperport for years. Each upgrade has added nice new features but also bugs. But the bugs were minor and I could live with them.

Recently I received several ads in the mail and an email from Nuance to upgrade from v10 to 11. Ad sounded great and the price $99 was reasonable. So I figured "what the heck." Clicked on the email link to upgrade and takes me to a non-existing website. Typed in the website link from the mail ad, again, no website. Probably should have clued me in, but I went against my best judgement and called Nuance to buy the download.

Installed the product. Registration didn't work smoothly but wasn't a big deal. Then I tried to scan a document. I checked the "Capture Assistant" box and clicked scan. Scanner does its thing then at the end of the first page, I get the famous Windows XP error box to report error to Microsoft. So I rebooted and tried again, without the Capture Assistant. Scanned my document OK this time. Sounds good, right?

Wrong. I have an automatic document feeder (ADF) which allows me to scan both sides of a document (at least in previous versions of Paperort). Wtih v11, I can only scan both sides automatically if I use Capture Assitant. Except whenever I use it, it crashes. Now I cannot take advantage of my ADF and have to scan 2-sided docuements page by page manually! That would be fine for a couple of pages but a nightmare for a 10-page (20-sides) docuemnt. So I should contact customer support for help, right?

Wrong again. You have to PAY for support. That would be fine it I'm don't know how to use the product and need a little guidance. But I SHOULD NOT have to pay to report software crashes. And what if I pay for help and they can't help me? Do I get my money back?

I sincerely hope an update soon will fix my problem. But I doubt it will happen since very few people will pay to let Nuance know about these issues. And if they don't know about the bugs, they are unlikely going to fix them. Soon I will likely attempt to take advantage of my "30-day money back guarantee". Probably have to pay a fee for that too!

If you want to manage both scanned and electronic documents, there is really no alternative to PaperPort. And that's too bad, because this flawed product just goes on and on with little or no improvement.

What flaws? The major one is that the program has two completely separate modes of operation, organize or view. The thumbnails are too small to read, so you can't label the document until you switch to the view mode to see what it is. Then, you have to go back to organize mode in order to apply the label, key words, what have you.

The next flaw is really a bug, but one that PaperPort perpetuates release after release. normally, you would want to sort your view of thumbnails by date, with the most recent ones on top. PaperPort pretends it can sort this way, but in fact when it indexes, it destroys the file dates of every file, rendering sort-by-date useless.

And this is emblematic of the company's attitude, which seems to be "too bad." As others have stated here, support is horrible and actually worse than no support at all. It is outsourced to India or the Philippines or somewhere, and those people know less about the product than you or I do. And you pay for it.

But getting back to my title, there really is no alternative. PaperPort is a perfect example of what happens when market forces are not at work. No one else competes in this space, so Nuance (I love that name) has no reason to improve it, other than to bring out meaningless expensive upgrades on some kind of schedule.

So if you have to organize your documents, this is all you have.

I've used Paper Port for several years, starting with the version that was bundled with the Visioneer Strobe Pro. It was the only game in town that I could find and, having learned how to use it, I stayed with it through version 10 pro. I have not had substantial problems with it that could not be solved using their knowledge base. But, after a recent reformat when I had to reinstall the software, I found I could not activate it. It was brought home to me again that Nuance's policy of charging for all e-mail support after the first incident is no longer acceptable for a piece of relatively expensive, complex software that requires a certain level of computer expertise to install, run and maintain. I was thinking of upgrading to V. 11 but since v. 10 is fine for my needs as were versions 7, 8 and 9. I won't throw another cent down that Nuance upgrade rathole unless and until they change their policy on supporting it. If you have a previous version of PP that is working and that serves your needs, stay with it. It is obvious, after reading the other reviews, good and bad, the Nuance has not yet learned the nuances of making an easy to use, reliable product nor has it learned how to provide the support that the people who pay for their software deserve. P.S. the activation problem turned out to be a server glitch on their end that I only learned about after chancing a call to their (free) Customer Service.

I have been a user of PaperPort since it came bundled with Visioneer. With each successive upgrade the product became worse - more bloated, slower, and buggier. Simple things like remembering default scan settings don't work. Now this version 11 crashes every time I scan. I have to force quit using Task Manager. And to report this to them I have to pay them. Totally unacceptable. I will never buy another version of this software again. Stay away. Be warned.

Be warned and take heed. Avoid my mistake in having purchased this "product".

As the title states, this "product" is extremely disappointing. It is extremely buggy. As others have noted here, it causes frequent system crashes, it is intrinsically unstable as well and the PDF files that it produces are inconsistent and unreliable.

The Form Typer is a veritable abomination, totally unimproved over prior versions of this "product", being totally unreliable, poorly controllable with unstable and unpredictable entry placement. These failures are all the more remarkable since control, reliability and stability are the very features that you would require to have in a product that would function as a "form typer"! You cannot precisely control or predict where your printed output will align. Happily, there are other products on the market that are precise.

This "product", between the "freezes" and system crashes it causes, when it functions at all, is sluggish, even when compared with prior incarnations running on the same machine.

To make matters worse, this "product" is far overpriced in light of its horrible functionality, poor performance and reliability.

If, incredibly, you are still considering purchasing this pre-beta-level "product", you should know that Nuance has gone to extreme lengths to prevent the user from installing its "product" on more than one machine.

Even the "product's" "nag" screens are buggy! Once you have purchased, installed and registered the, I hesitate to call it "product", you are repeatedly, and unpredictably, "nagged" to register it!

I have been a software professional and developer since 1966. My computer science students over the years easily have produced better, more reliable and stable software. In all my years in the business I have rarely if ever seen a "product" so unworthy of being put out the door and foisted on unsuspecting purchasers.

Don't waste your money. Skip this product.

This is the first time I have been so dissatisfied with a product, and a company, that I have taken the time to write a review to warn others away. I bought PaperPort 11 Pro packaged with OminPage Pro 15 on a 15 day "free" trial. The price was for a package of PaperPort Pro 11 with OminiPage Pro 15 packaged with it for "free." I emphasize "free" because Nuance billed my account and collected their money for the PaperPort the day after I placed my order. I suppose I should have been alarmed by the haste with which they grabbed the money. Reminiscent of a snake oil salesman who has just sold you a guaranteed miracle cure, grabs your money, and then gets out of town before you find out that you will be lucky if the cure doesn't kill you. Nonetheless, I soldiered on. After days of constant lockups and crashes (and not on a low end PC run by an idiot) you can well imagine how delighted I was to get an email from Nuance telling me that they were preparing to relieve my bank account of nearly three times the price of the PaperPort for the "free" OmniPage Pro 15. Amazon review Guidelines say I shouldn't mention the specific price. I suppose I can say that you had better watch out on any pricing scheme Nuance my throw out as a lure. Trust me, you are seeing the bait, not the hook. It is not that I didn't read the offer carefully, I'm an attorney. Read the other reviews and ask yourself -- even if the software was the best in the world, do you really want to trust yourself to a company that can enable even the illiterate to understand Caveat Emptor?

I've used PaperPort for years mostly because it was the best of a bunch of poor options. However, Version 11 is buggier than earlier versions: every time I launch a Microsoft Office product, the PaperPort installer starts up.

There is no reference to this in the PaperPort Help file or in the ridiculously inadequate knowledgebase on the PaperPort site. Another bug imprints a "trial copy" legend on your PDF files. This one is explained in the knowledgebase, but requires you to tinker with the Registry to correct it. That's a bit ridiculous. Why are they distributing code with a known bug?

Nuance expects you to pay $9.95 for e-mail technical support - even if it's a bug in their own product.

The product is a modest performer at best, but Nuance's awful technical support policies are the real sinker here.

I've requested an RMA for a refund.

Jerry

Nuance touts that there is a major speed improvement from the previous versions, but my personal experience shows that it is even slower. The new features are not that great either. I wish I did not upgraded to this version.

With apologies for its length, this review is intended to be the one I wanted to find but couldn't. It is written primarily for users who have used previous versions of Paperport, particularly Paperport 9, and with justifiable fears about Nuance are wondering if it's worth it to make the switch.

It is.

I bought this release fully expecting to have to send it back. I am a long-time Paperport user, but I had to return Paperport 10 when I tried it because it was completely unusable. Add that to (1) the fact that Nuance seemed to be another large software company ruining the work of a more innovative small company, (2) the poorly-functioning support web site where access to even user groups is intermittent at best, (3) the quasi-paid users who troll the user groups spreading false-positive disinformation, and (4) the need to pay for support after the first call, and I wasn't looking forward to this.

But I was shocked. For me, this is a wonderful release. First, here are some things you need to be aware of:

* You have to be careful installing it because its tentacles reach into almost all your other business software. It won't hurt your other software, but it might install improperly. So be sure to (1) uninstall any previous versions of Paperport and reboot, (2) disable your antivirus software (especially Norton), and (3) install with as little else running in the background as possible. Your chances of success will increase dramatically.

* If anything goes wrong after that, it will almost certainly be because of your scanner. There are a huge number of scanners out there with a variety of drivers, and Paperport 11 does so many things that the driver must be TWAIN compliant and have no frills. Paperport even has a complex "hint" file that has customizable rules for a huge number of individual scanners. In my case, I had to use my free call to get my scanner working properly. All it took for our three different HP all-in-ones was to uninstall the complex consumer driver and install the "business" driver instead. Gone is the fluffy scanner interface that you never use for scanning, copying, faxing and printing. In its place is a simple TWAIN driver that is controlled by Paperport or any other scanning software you may have. So, be sure to update your scanner driver with a simple TWAIN driver, and recognize that WIA or TWAIN-WIA probably won't work quite right.

* The first call is free, but after that e-mail or phone support will cost you. Save up all your problems for one mega call. (I only had the one problem.) Thankfully, Nuance's real-person phone support doesn't seem to be in India and is very good. It's been a long time since I had a customer support experience that didn't feel like an expedition with the Peace Corps.

Now, here are some of the things that are huge real-life improvements over Paperport 9 and earlier releases:

* The "Capture Assistant" will change your scanning life. You can set up as many profiles (color photo, flatbed, black-and-white, high compression, etc.) as you want. Just about everything is customizable so you set it up once and never touch it again. You can set these profiles so that the resulting scans are auto-cropped to have a certain size of margins, pages are resized automatically, stray dots are removed automatically, pages are auto-straightened, and so on. Outputs can be set automatically to a variety of different file types, with a different profile possible for each one. Resolution is likewise customizable. If you scan even a few things a week, this is a BIG DEAL. In addition, once the scan is done, you have a chance to delete, add, rotate or rearrange pages before the document is created. It's fast, intuitive, and once the scanner is set up, bulletproof.

* The available high-compression file type has reduced my color document file sizes by about 75%. They're actually much clearer, too, but it does take the software a little more time to display the pages, probably because of the decompression necessary.

* Paperport 11 is finally able to handle all current types of .pdf files. In older versions, you needed to print a .pdf file back to a Paperport .pdf file to have all the functionality you wanted. So far, the software hasn't skipped a beat in handling and modifying a wide variety of .pdf documents.

* The annotation tools are terrific, and much easier to use and change after the fact. Settings are readily available on the fly, annotation by annotation, and annotations are easily moved and copied once made. I occasionally have trouble having annotations print correctly if I need to do it directly from Adobe Acrobat Reader. In those cases, I may still need to print annotated files back to another .pdf file to "lock in" the annotations if I want to work with them from Acrobat.

* The dual desktop is surprisingly useful, and the main program controls are much more accessible and intuitive. They also seem to actually work all the time. The software has been very stable for me for months. It is also much more customizable, so you don't have to set up the same thing over and over again.

* The form typer works well for me. Getting a .pdf form and converting it to editable fields takes a few seconds, with few if any errors. Older versions were much less stable and accurate.

* The printing options to Paperport from other programs work well and produce files that are more readable yet considerably more compressed.

There are a lot of other advantages, but this is long enough. I think the reason it has received such poor reviews on these pages is that the initial scanner setup can be hard. Once that's done, my experience is that this is WELL worth the money for an upgrade and is indispensable for us for multiple uses. Given our horrific experience with Paperport 10, I'm more than pleasantly surprised.

My advice? Give it a thorough chance. The 30-day return policy has worked for me before, but I'm completely sold on this release.

I have been a user of PaperPort since version 9, skipped the upgrade to 10 because of bad reviews, received an upgrade notice in the mail, so I decided to buy it. It turns out it was a bad decision. The scanner that I use with 11 is the same as with 9 and is on Nuance's hardware compatibility list. The problem is, it took me uninstalling and reinstalling the program to get the scanner to work at all with PaperPort. Then, when I did get it installed - and I used the advanced setup option with it, tested it, all looked good - except everytime I scan something, the program crashes! It is literally unusable as a scanning solution.

I have seen a few companies with products that were once really good, sell it off to another company, and the product support seems to be essentially abandoned. It seems that this may be the case. There are no updates or bug fixes for 11, and I will not buy another PaperPort version in the future. I will attempt to go back to 9, and probably stay with that. If I run into any issues with it over time, I will look elsewhere, and I recommend others do the same. I normally don't write reviews for products, but this one is so poor, I just had to warn people.