.KEYWORD cardscan
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Organize your contacts with CardScan
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY Thanks to beaming technology, it’s getting a lot easier to share contact information electronically. Even so, you’re still probably collecting tons of business cards, and the prospect of entering all that data into your Pocket PC by hand isn’t a pleasant one. Fortunately, there’s a solution. Peter Watt reviews a smart new business card scanner that’s a must for any office.
.AUTHOR Peter Watt
As Pocket PC owners, we have the ability to beam our contact details to other Pocket PCs and even to Palm devices. We can also synchronize these details with Microsoft Outlook on our PCs. However, there are still folks out there using plain, old-fashioned business cards.
If you don’t remember that far back, business cards are primitive bits of cardboard with all sorts of interesting information written on them. I have a pile of them somewhere. Actually, there are a few on my desk, some in the top drawer in my bedroom, and some in my study. Wouldn’t it be great if I had all that information right where I needed it, in my pocket? Ideally, I’d just suck the details off the cards into my Pocket PC and then throw the cards away.
Well, now I can do exactly that. CardScan Executive from Corex Technologies, which consists of a small scanner and some very smart software, can turn a business card into a Pocket PC contact in just a few seconds.
.H1 Installation
I tested the product by first installing the CardScan software onto my PC. You need 39MB of disk space to install the "Typical" set of components. When I selected the Typical installation, the setup program recognized that I had a partnership with a Pocket PC device and installed its own ActiveSync Module for Windows CE. It also connected without hassle to the Corex Web site to download the latest software updates. The Pocket PC portion of the software was installed automatically the next time I synchronized my Pocket PC.
The next step was to plug the small scanner into my USB port (a serial cable is also included). The device was automatically recognized and configured.
.H1 Using CardScan
That’s all there is to it! You simply feed a blank calibration card into the scanner and start feeding in years of accumulated business cards, as shown in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A Feed your business cards into CardScan as shown.
It takes just two or three seconds to scan a card, and then another two or three seconds for the software to work its magic.
The results were remarkably good. CardScan’s excellent OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine was able to handle a stream of cards with different font styles and sizes without errors. It was even able to extract company names out of some of the stylized logos on the cards. It automatically recognized cards that were printed in both landscape and portrait mode and handled them equally well. It was also able to ignore handwritten notes on the cards.
.H1 Intelligent technology
Probably the cleverest feature of CardScan is its ability to understand the context of the information on a card. Using textual cues, a knowledge of business card conventions, and just plain smarts, CardScan nearly always recognizes which piece of text is your contact’s name, job title, phone number, mobile phone number, fax number, email address, postal address, and so on. It then puts each piece of data into the correct field in the Contacts listing, shown in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B CardScan inserts the scanned text into its appropriate Contacts slot.
Of course, you get the chance to review the details and make any corrections or move details into different fields, if you think you’re smarter than the CardScan software. You also get a picture of the card for your records, and if there’s any good stuff on the back of the card, you can scan that in as well.
.H1 Choose a contact directory
CardScan has its own contact directory, which can be shared amongst licensed users. However, Microsoft Outlook 2000 had already been chosen as my contact manager, probably because of its close integration with Pocket PC. Somewhere along the way, CardScan recognized that I was an Outlook user, and so my copy of the program featured a prominent button that allowed me to transfer contacts into Microsoft Outlook, as shown in Figure C.
.FIGPAIR C You can easily transfer your contact information to Outlook.
CardScan also understands how to transfer contacts to other popular contact managers including ACT!, Ecco Pro, Goldmine, and Lotus Organizer.
To be successful, you really need to decide which contact directory is your master. Otherwise, you’ll have CardScan, Outlook, and Pocket PC all trying to update each other, and the result may be duplicate contacts or messages asking you to resolve update conflicts. I found life easier when I decided that Outlook was to be my master directory, Pocket PC was my portable (and maintainable) copy, and CardScan would simply be used to pick up new card details. I disabled the CardScan ActiveSync Synchronization option in Microsoft ActiveSync, and let the standard Contacts Synchronization process take care of all of my contacts. I think this is a fairly sensible approach for Pocket PC users.
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.H1 Share the cost
At a list price of $299 (with a street price of around $250), you’ll need to collect a steady stream of business cards in order to justify this product.
Another possible way to justify the cost would be to share the device. Have a CardScan scanner and software set up on your administrative assistant’s desk. In just a few seconds, your assistant can scan a card, check the details, and copy the contact into your shared contact database, where everyone in your workgroup can use it. By dragging the contact into your personal contact list, you can ensure that it’ll be copied to your Pocket PC next time you synchronize. You can’t get much easier than that. Every office should have one.
The old-fashioned business card isn’t likely to die off any time soon, so those of us who have evolved to the next level of contact sharing will just have to wait for the others to catch up. Until they do, CardScan will make the wait considerably more bearable.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on CardScan, visit http://www.cardscan.com.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Peter Watt is a Systems Architect with Unisys in Wellington, New Zealand, specializing in the use of Microsoft technologies in the enterprise. He can be reached at peter.watt@unisys.com.
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