If there's one company determined to lead the way into the paperless office, it's Adobe. The Acrobat PDF format has become the standard for digital documents on almost every platform, and now Acrobat Messenger bridges the gap from existing hardcopy documents to digital, portable PDF files. Messenger works as a cradle-to-grave application, taking a paper document all the way from scanning to end-user delivery. It interfaces directly with a scanner using an ISIS driver, and not the more common TWAIN drivers, because Messenger uses its own scanner interface, whereas TWAIN drivers are designed to present an interface for the scanner within the host application.
The nice things about Messenger are its simplicity (scan, preview, and deliver) and its options for delivery. The Acrobat PDF files created by Messenger can be saved to disk, posted to a Web site, delivered by fax (with the appropriate modem), sent through e-mail, or printed--any combination of these is possible.
However, at the time of this writing, Messenger runs on Windows NT only, which is a drawback for the many small offices that aren't running Windows NT. Messenger is a flexible and useful tool, but it needs to have more flexible system requirements.
For the larger office, in which numerous paper documents must be scanned and delivered or stored, and a PC and scanner dedicated to the task, Messenger is a streamlined application capable of saving tremendous amounts of time. --Mike Caputo
