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You might worry about the toll scanned documents will take on your electronic storage.
This is, of course, a concern, but it shouldn’t be a deal breaker. A scanned PDF file consumes
about 250KB per page for black-and-white documents, and 500KB for color. If you stored
only black-and-white documents, you’d be able to save 4000 pages per 1GB of drive space.
Software
A good scanner should come with drivers to make it work with whatever computer
systems you have in your organization. The driver should allow for the management of
the following:

• Resolution
• Color bit depth
• File type
• Default folders
To fully enable your environment, you will need an application that can perform optical
character recognition (OCR) on scanned documents, and that will combine the text with
the original image in a PDF file. At the Windows desktop level, a very common application is
Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro. Your Mac users can use Acrobat or an application such as ReadIris Pro.

PDFs
Why should you standardize on PDF? First of all, there’s its sheer prevalence. If you download
a document from a website, for instance, more often than not it is in the PDF format. But there
are other reasons to consider PDF for your paperless documentation needs:

• Open format Adobe has submitted the PDF format to the ISO to have it formally
declared a standard.
• Multiplatform PDF files are viewable on Windows, Mac, Unix/Linux, and many
mobile platforms.
• Accuracy Adobe PDF files look just like their paper counterparts. You can also add
a layer of digitized text for easy searching.
• Security PDFs can be digitally signed and password-protected to ensure only
those with the proper security credentials can open the file.
• Searchable text Text can be searched within a PDF file for easy information
location.
If you’ve never seen a PDF document before, Figure 6-1 shows what one looks like.
Work Smart
In an organization, it is a good idea to define recommended practices for everyone to
follow:
• Be realistic Look at your documents and decide which ones you really need. Sure,
you should hang on to last year’s third quarter report, but do you really need to
spend time and effort memorializing a flyer for the company’s 1995 summer picnic?
Recycle what you don’t need.