I've been googling about on and off for a day or two looking for a filing system for the office: We're falling over with around 250 of those old lever files with three years records of client information.
The bits that are unavidably on paper are things like: who said what at a publication, and what alterations did we discuss with a client. But once the bill is paid, we don't need those.
So everything else is a tiff or jpeg, accounts copy in windows, copy in word, and emails, with insignificant numbers of faxes or bits of correspondence to scan in.
All we need is to call them up in around 8 fields, or combination of fields: i.e. Client by date etc.,
Seems dozens of proprietary packages should exist, but I'm hard pressed to find one suitable.
Any idea would be appreciated?

What's your ballpark price? We are in the process of revamping our paperless system from a custom-desighed one to an off the shelf one with complete OCR and workflow capabilities. ~27k

We're only a small office, with around a dozen people, that would be just about my annual entertainment budget. I was more on the lines of something cheapo "Off the shelf"!

Well.... Nevermind then.

That looks very interesting and about our price range, I'll check it out over the next few days - thanks

I got one of these a few months ago:

Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-4110EOX2
http://www.fel.fujitsu.com/home/v3__product.asp?pid=353&inf=dsc
(now discontinued and replaced with the 5110 - http://www.fel.fujitsu.com/home/v3__product.asp?pid=380&inf=dsc&wg=75 - this one does 600dpi max (up from 300) and has USB2.0 instead of 1.1)

It's a scanner with 50 page sheet feeder plus it'll scan both sides concurrently. Comes bundled with a FULL version of Acrobat (not bad as this is almost £200 alone), plus an OCR plugin which is pretty amazing IMO. Under £300. Does about 15 sheets per minute, single or double sided, will automatically detect colour/b&w docs and generate the right output file, saving space, plus it detects paper size too.

I just scan all the bits of paper I get into OCR'ed pdf's (with the text *under* the scanned image, so even if the OCR fails I can still read the doc) then I can find anything using acrobat's PDF search feature (which will search folders of PDFs too). Plus, I can back up all my important docs which is very useful considering the number of things I can never find again.

It does do colour, but this is not a photo scanner. The quality is fine for docs, but really not for photos. Note also that it's NOT a twain device, you have to use the software they supply (fine by me, it does exactly what I want it to)

Definitely recommended!

Hugo

It took me a few months to get round to this, but it arrived yesterday and, to me, it's about the best invention since inventions (barring the Empeg, of course). I've already got shot of two bin liners full of documents, which are now neatly filed on my laptop.

Any changes to the music library and the whole filing folder are backed up once a week and kept at an external location on an external USB hard drive, as you might expect! I used to have an accountant, in the days of floppy disks, who posted the back-up in our post every night, so that, in case of fire or theft, the data arrived next morning (Royal Mail providing).

In which case you've got a better backup strategy than most businesses. Our backups at work are kept on site, on top of the server.

The nearest our studio ever got was that they thought that it was a place in Lancashire!!!