Hi Chris, Nice lead in... :-P
<snip> I have considered buying Adobe Acrobat and then converting all of my Word Documents to Adobe documents. Then I could scan in the attachments. All of this digital information... <snip> Great idea, I currently use Adobe Acrobat for what you are describing, it is a great tool and will let you make anything you print into a pdf by simply printing to the "adobe printer driver", for MS Office docs there is a special driver that lets you import special formats (i.e. styles and TOC's in word) and use them as bookmarks in your pdf. You can then go into acrobat and edit your bookmark tree to whatever extent you want to carry it. This can make for some pretty impressive looking docs. As far as scanning in documents goes... that may be a little tedious and I have never had much luck with keeping scanned docs looking very "clean" that's why I would never personally go the scanning route. If you can get a good scan then it might be alright but even then you may want to hire someone to scan it all because it would probably take an unusually long time... Do you have the option of going back to the test houses that evaluated your products and asking if they have soft copy available? <snip> Better yet. Does anybody know of a service where you can send 1000's of pages of info to them for them to scan and convert to pdf files. This would prove valuable during the initial conversion. <snip> You might want to try your local printshop, I haven't checked but there must be some entreprenuer out there that has thought of this. I can't imagine it would be cheap though... I think you're on the right track, since I started organizing my reports in soft form it has been much easier to refer back to it when needed as well as get information to those who request it. I still keep one hard copy of everything. One thing to watch out for is security, we all know how easy it is to track electronic copies right? :-P If you make versions that contain proprietary information for internal use you will need some way of ensureing those copies are never distributed by those who should know better but do not. Also be careful with the security options in Acrobat, you will want full control over the master copy but may want to limit editing/printing rights on the distibuted versions.. Just a few things to think about... Cheers, Jeff Bailey Compliance Engineering SST - A Division of Woodhead Canada Phone: (519) 725 5136 ext. 363 Fax: (519) 725 1515 mailto:[email protected] Web: www.sstech.on.ca All comments contained in the message are my own and do not necessarily express the views of SST/Woodhead Canada. -----Original Message----- From: Chris Maxwell [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 11:58 AM To: 'EMC-PSTC Internet Forum' Subject: Compliance Documentation Hi all, I do have a question, but the setup is sort of fun, so here goes: Well, I'm at that point. A few years ago, when the EMC Directive was first effective, we had a couple of products that we put through testing. We started keeping "Compliance Folders" which consisted of a cover report generated with MS Word combined with our in-house test reports and third party test reports held together with a big rubber band. This was fun for a couple of products. It was also fun when our company could remember what we called ourselves and what our product names/models were. Well, business is good...too good. The corporate captains have been buying other companies, OEMing products from other people, OEMing products to other people, changing the corporate name, changing the corporate logo, changing product model numbers ... (buying 25,000 coffee stirrers with our logo on them, we used about 20 before they changed the logo. Anybody what a now obsolete GN Nettest coffee stirrer?) Now I have about 20 large folders with anywhere from 100 to 600 pages each. Every time we go through these excercises, I spend hours sniffing toner at the copier (may explain some of my personality) putting different headers and revision numbers on these documents. I then go through 1000's of sheets of paper to run off copies for our representatives and then 100's of dollars in shipping costs to get these 10 pound paper packages to the four corners of the Earth. This is on top of the revisions that we normally incorporate for product re-tests, re-designs ... My question is, is there a better way? I have considered buying Adobe Acrobat and then converting all of my Word Documents to Adobe documents. Then I could scan in the attachments. All of this digital information, I could then store on a CD ROM drive with a main directory for my cover report and sub-directories for all of the various 3rd party reports, CDRH filings ... We could then offer our Compliance information via pdf files on the web. Is anyone doing this? Do you have any recommendations for what software to use? What scanners work best? What scanner resolution will duplicate test reports without losing precious information? Better yet. Does anybody know of a service where you can send 1000's of pages of info to them for them to scan and convert to pdf files. This would prove valuable during the initial conversion. Has anybody tried this and been sorry they did? I'm ready to go digital. My goal is to incorporate word processed reports, third party test lab paper copies, third party test lab pictures, hand written data ... into a coherent package for storage and revision. I assume that many of you fight this same battle. Any hints or pitfall warnings would be greatly appreciated. Chris Maxwell Design Engineer NetTest 6 Rhoads Drive, Building 4 Utica,NY 13502 email: [email protected] phone: 315-266-5128 fax: 315-797-8024 ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. 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