First User Reviews of the ScanSnap S1500
March 31, 2009
Looks like the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 is in the wild and the first user reviews are starting to show up.
Fujitsu sent Sam Glover over at Lawyerist a S1500 and he has done a great review of it, including a comparison of his old S500 with the new S1500.
Like I said in the video clip, the S1500 is a great upgrade. It feels like the same scanner as my old ScanSnap, just better. And since I had no complaints, and lots of good things to say about my old scanner, that is a very good thing.
Even better, he’s put together a review showing the two ScanSnaps side by side.
ScanSnap S1500 first look from Sam Glover on Vimeo.
Also, over on Amazon, the first review has shown up by BookMan. Again, it’s very positive other than a little issue with Rack2Filer.
Overall, I’m thrilled with the Fujitsu S1500 – there is no question that it is the best one I’ve had (and I’ve had many) and is well worth the money (the S1500 is also the most expensive scanner I’ve ever purchased). I would recommend this to anyone who needs to scan documents.
Do you have an S1500 or S1500M ? What do you think so far?
Delaware Law Blog Has Great Paperless Tips
March 30, 2009
Though I am neither a lawyer nor live in Delaware, I’ve been enjoying some of the posts on the Delaware Employment Law Blog written by Molly DiBianca.
The author writes some really useful stuff that would be useful for any law firm considering the switch to a digital office, or as digital as possible.
For example, Preparing to Make the Switch to “Almost Paperless” touches on the costs and resources needed to transition to a digital office. The answer: for an established firm, it may not require much at all.
Making the Switch to Digital: Legal Research is a great and indepth runthrough of how to use Adobe Acrobat to make legal research easier. Even if you’re not a lawyer, the Acrobat tips are really useful.
If you work in a law office, or even if you are just considering moving your office to some sort of “almost paperless” workflow, I recommend checking out Molly’s posts.
Using a Windows ScanSnap On the Mac Using VirtualBox
March 24, 2009
In the past I have posted about how to use Japanese ScanSnap drivers, and have posted that the new Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M will be cross-platform, but what if you don’t want to mess around with foreign drivers or have an older ScanSnap scanner?
if you have access to a Windows XP CD, there is a free way that you can use your ScanSnap S510 or S300 on your Mac using VirtualBox. (This may even work with Linux too – I’ve never tried).
VirtualBox is a free open source program that will let you run Windows on your Mac. There’s no rebooting required like Boot Camp – you run Windows inside a window in your Mac. This is great not only for the ScanSnap but for any Windows program you may be stuck using.
There are two requirements to do this:
- You need to have an Intel mac. No Powerbooks or Powermacs, sorry.
- You need to have access to a Windows XP installation CD
Ready? Here’s how to do it:
1. Go to http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and download VirtualBox for OSX hosts
2. Double-click on the downloaded VirtualBox .DMG file and open it up. Then double-click on the VirtualBox.mpkg installer
Follow through all the prompts and click Close when done.
3. In the Applications folder, double click on the VirtualBox application
4. Once VirtualBox starts up, click the New icon
5. Go through the steps of the Wizard. At first, give your new virtual machine a name (you can think of a virtual machine as your new Windows-inside-your-Mac). Give it as much memory as you want but don’t go below the recommendation. For this I stuck with the base 192 Megs but you may want to bump it up if you can.
6. If you are doing this for the first time, chose New for Hard Drive and when you go through the wizard you probably want to choose Dynamic Storage
7. You can leave the name of your new virtual disk as-is and give it whatever you think you need for hard drive space.
8. Hit Finish to end the new virtual disk creation wizard, then Next to choose your new disk, then Finish
9. You’ll now see that the Settings and Start menus are activated. Before we start, we want to enable USB. Click the Settings Icon and then the Ports menu. Click Enable USB Controller.
10. Click OK and then the Green Start arrow
11. You’re going to get a message about it auto-capturing your keyboard. All that is saying is that if you are “in Windows” and you do something like Alt-Tab, it will be doing the Alt-Tab in Windows and not in your Mac. If you don’t want that, just hold down the left Command key. Hit OK.
12. Now it’s time for the First Run Wizard. Pop in your Windows XP CD, choose where it is, and hit Next and Finish if it’s right.
13. Now we get the beautiful blue Windows install screens we know and love. Hit Enter to choose your new Unpartitioned Space and choose to format NTFS. Then let it run.
14. Create a Shared Folder so that your Mac can see documents that your Windows VM has scanned. Click the Shared Folders icon and then Add A Shared Folder.
15. Choose or create a folder and then click Make Permanent and hit OK
16. Before your new shared folder will work, in the top VirtualBox VM menu, choose Devices and then Install Guest Additions. Choose VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe and follow the prompts
17. Map that new folder to a drive letter, say in this example the Z drive. In Windows Explorer. go to My Network Places, Then Entire Network, then VirtualBox Shared Folders and you should see \\VBOXSVR\Scanned (or whatever you called your new folder). Right click on that and choose Map Network Drive and give it a drive letter.
18. Now it’s time to follow Fujitsu’s instructions for installing your Windows ScanSnap. Don’t plug in your ScanSnap yet but install the software on your Setup CD.
19. Plug in your ScanSnap and turn it on. You will likely find.. nothing happens. Your light on your ScanSnap may blink. You need to tell VirtualBox that you want to enable it first. Click on the Ports icon on the bottom of your VM and choose your scanner from the list of devices.
20. Scan away! Either scan to a folder or using ScanSnap Organizer. Either way, if you want your PDFs to be accessible by the Mac you will probably want to scan them to your drive that you created in step 17.
There we go. It’s really not as complex as this 20 step tutorial may make it sound, but if you give it a try let me know how it goes.
Going For A Paperless Life
March 23, 2009
Mike Elgan over at Computerworld has written a pretty good article about taking the paperless concept out of the office and into his every day life.
It’s a good overview of how he does it and the tools that he uses. There are some DocumentSnap favorites in there.
As a kind of “lifestyle experiment,” I’ve been trying to completely eliminate paper as a data storage medium for the past six months. I’ve gotten rid of most check-based bill paying, moved most of my reading to digital forms, nearly stopped paper mail from coming to my house, eliminated paper records and nearly purged all paper-based files. I’ve gotten into the habit of literally photographing anything with words on it that I might want to remember later, and uploading them on a service I’m going to tell you about.
I’m now ready to declare my experiment a success.
The biggest upside to going paperless is that finding information is more like a Google search and less like a scavenger hunt. But I’m also a lot more productive and waste a lot less time, and my life is a lot less cluttered.
The tools that the author uses to take his life paperless are Evernote, Shoeboxed, Earth Class Mail, reQall (that one is new to me), and of course the Amazon Kindle.
Great article. Check it out here.
New Comment System
March 22, 2009
Possibly boring site note here. I’ve just moved the comments over to Intense Debate. If you notice any bugs or have any other issues, just let me know here or via the contact page. Thanks!
Do You Use A MacBook Air With A ScanSnap S300M?
March 19, 2009
Reader T. Joseph Carter wrote in the following question about using a MacBook Air (with only 1 USB port) and a ScanSnap S300M.
I’m considering a ScanSnap S300M to carry with me–but the laptop I carry is the MacBook Air, which has just one USB port. It’s much higher power than the average USB port (made to power the Superdrive Apple sells for it), but I’m wondering if someone’s managed to get the S300M running off the MacBook Air’s single USB port.
Fujitsu says that it simply requires two USB ports, but the answer sounds suspiciously like a level one support response. I used to have a Palm PDA sync/charge cable that ended in a barrel connector and mini-USB. It wasn’t as good as using the AC adapter, but it worked if you needed to power the thing off USB.
Anyone tried this for the MacBook Air by chance? Can you suggest a good place to ask if not?
Thanks, I’m buried in paper here!
Since the MacBook Air has only a single USB port and since the ScanSnap needs two USB plugins if you are not using the AC adaptor, I am not sure of the best way to get this to work.
Has anyone tried it out or found some creative workaround to get the ScanSnap S300M working with a MacBook Air without the AC adaptor? Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.
Contact Form Fixed
March 18, 2009
Quick site admin note. Helpful reader Andy Scott wrote in to let me know that the contact form was broken which was no small feat since, you know, the contact form was broken.
It’s fixed now, so thanks a lot Andy! If you tried to get in touch with me earlier and was thwarted, go ahead to the Contact Form and try again. Sorry about that!
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 & S1500M Are Now Cross-Platform
March 18, 2009
Update: It now looks like the ScanSnap S1500 and S1500M are now on Amazon!
As you may have seen, Fujitsu posted a press release yesterday saying that the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 (for PC) and ScanSnap S1500M (for Mac) are now released.
My main question was – will they be cross-platform like most USB devices? In this ScanSnap 1500M post, commenter rei said that he was told that they in fact would be.
I have just confirmed with Fujitsu that yes, rei is right. You will be able to plug the ScanSnap S1500M into a Windows machine and vice versa (as long as you install the correct software). This is tremendous! No more Windows to Mac (or vice versa) workarounds!
This feature alone makes the S1500 models a big improvement. Here are a few more details that Fujitsu shared with me:
- ScanSnap Manager comes in two flavors, the Windows version (ScanSnap Manager V5.0) and the Mac version (ScanSnap Manager V3.0)
- There is a Windows setup disk that comes with the S1500 and a Mac setup disk that comes with the S1500M, but each comes with both versions on the DVD (!)
- When the Setup Disk is installed, Setup detects PC or Mac and displays the appropriate installer for that platform.
- Aside from ScanSnap Manager, the Setup only contains the specific applications for the model detected.
- No, it doesn’t come with both the Windows and Mac versions of Acrobat. Acrobat comes on a separate CD.
If you go to the Fujitsu US store, you can actually see the S1500M there. However, it doesn’t appear to be on Amazon or other similar sites yet and I am told that if you do order it there, it will be back-ordered. Apparently it should start hitting stores around March 20. I’ll re-post when I see it available.
As mentioned, the biggest headache of previous ScanSnaps (and there weren’t many) was the fact that they were not cross-platform. This addresses that.
Shoeboxed and Freshbooks Integrate To Make Billing Easier
March 17, 2009
If you’re a small business that has to deal with a lot of billable expenses, this might be a great solution for you. Shoeboxed, a company that lets you digitize receipts and business cards, and FreshBooks, which is a web-based way to track time and invoice clients, have made a pretty cool integration between their two systems.
Here’s how it works:
- Mail your receipts off to Shoeboxed
- They scan them and import them into your Shoeboxed account
- From there, you can go to the Export page and export to FreshBooks
- In FreshBooks, create the invoice to your client
All in all, sounds like a pretty cool integration to save time and re-typing. Obviously you need to be a member of both to use this though.
Shoeboxed has put together a video to show how this works.
Very cool use of APIs, and according to the video they are offering a free trial of FreshBooks to check it out. Shoeboxed also has a 30 day free trial.
Mozy and Carbonite Reaching Out To Abandoned HP & Yahoo Customers
March 11, 2009
In the last few weeks, two online backup services, HP Upline and Yahoo Briefcase have both announced that they are closing.
While some have said that this is a sign that the online backup market is not sustainable, both Mozy and Carbonite have been clever and used it as an opportunity .
Nate from Mozy has posted a blog post entitled “Hey Upline Users, We Love You!” giving a discount code to ex-Upline users.
Dave Friend, co-founder and CEO of Carbonite, has posted two blog posts: one on Yahoo Briefcase and one on HP Upline, discussing the decision to close both.
By the way, I really appreciate the fact that Dave personally blogs and shares his insight. It’s great.
What do you think, is Upline and Briefcase a sign of things to come, or is it just separating the wheat from the chaff?
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