When people ask me for Windows document management software recommendations, I more often than not point them to Lucion FileCenter. I’m a Mac user myself, but everyone[1] that I have pointed to FileCenter likes it.
It’s very full featured, has nice automation tools, and best of all, it stores your files in the normal Windows filesystem and not in some proprietary database.
The company has recently released FileCenter Version 8, and I’ve been playing with the new features. Stay tuned for some deep dives later, but for now here are some highlights of the new version.
Inbox Tab
You have always been able to define a cabinet as an inbox for incoming documents, but FileCenter 8 has promoted this to a new tab and button on the toolbar. They’ve also added some new functionality.
You can click the Inbox button to define a Windows folder as your inbox, and then you can even add multiple folders and switch between them. This is handy if you have scans coming from different locations.
There’s also a new File Item button so that when you have a document (or multiple documents) highlighted, you can click the button and file it away out of your Inbox.
PDF Editing
FileCenter 8 has improved the ability to edit PDFs. When you are viewing a PDF in the application, you can hit the Edit PDF Image button.
When you do this, you are brought into the Image Editor where you can straighten, crop, redact, and generally edit the content of PDFs. It’s not as full featured as Adobe Acrobat, but it does much of what you might need.
File Naming
Naming Options
A great feature of FileCenter has always been its Naming Rules which let you automatically name documents based on criteria you define.
With FileCenter, they’ve added some new tokens such as Date Created and Date Modified, which can be handy when naming files.
Custom Lists
While, as I’ve said, you have always been able to define tokens for automatically naming files, sometimes it can be helpful to have a list of static names to choose from.
In Version 8, you can define these Custom Lists. For example, I created a list of Utilities:
This gets really powerful when you combine it with the aforementioned tokens. You can built a filename with both dynamic tokens (for example, the date or folder name) and static text from your lists. Handy and consistent.
Upgrading
There are a few more new features, but those are the biggies for me. Apparently if you bought FileCenter 7 in the past 12 months you should be eligible for the FileCenter 8 upgrade (a year seems pretty generous to me).
If you don’t fall into that, you can contact sales@lucion.com or call 801–722–7099 for upgrade pricing.
Or, of course, if you’re happy with FileCenter 7, there is nothing forcing you to upgrade. Keep on going until you’re ready to take the plunge.
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As far as I know! ↩
