On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 2:13 PM, John Aldrich<[email protected]> wrote: > Guys, our sales department has a bunch of business cards they want to enter > into a database of some sort. I’m guessing the easiest way to do that is > some sort of business card scanner. Anyone got a recommendation for a good > scanner for this?
We use products from CardScan (formerly Corex). It works very well. The hardware is just a device slightly larger than your fist. It attaches via USB, and has an external wall-wart power supply. That's our older 600c; newer models may be faster/smaller or not need external power. The software maintains a separate database of cards you've scanned. Each record in that database contains the image of the card and the data it's extracted via OCR. The OCR is very good -- I've never seen the card orientation (horizontal/vertical) come out wrong, and it does an amazing job identifying which fields are location vs company vs title vs name. The database is just a single file, and acts like a document for the most part. No special service or software needed to run that. There's a feature that will sync the CardScan database with various apps like Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc. They appear to have licensed IntelliSync for this. It does a decent job. It has duplicate and conflict detection, and will prompt for resolution if needed. The CardScan software has a verification feature. Scanned cards start as unverified. You can view unverified cards, and compare the image with the OCR data. You can click a data field, and it will highlight the region of the card it guessed from. This lets you quickly spot errors. Then you confirm the card as verified. You have the option of sync'ing only verified cards. The current release of the software is friendly to running as not-admin. In the past you had to play around with filesystem and registry permissions. There is a CardScanAgent.EXE background process. The installer puts that in HKLM Run, but if you remove it stays removed. However, running the CardScan main program will start it and leave it running in the background. I have no idea what it does, but so far it's been apparently harmless to leave it running or not. YMMV, etc. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
