EmiratesMac - View Single Post

Magnus · 10th April 2007, 21:52

Review: DevonThink Pro Office
by Magnus

In the December 2006 issue of shuffle we reviewed DevonThink Pro and Devon Agent. Now we’re taking a look at the Office version. Since the Office version has everything in the Pro version with some added functionality, we’ll focus on what’s special in the Office version.

Database manager
Whether Office or Pro version, DevonThink is at its heart a database manager in which you can stick all your documents to make them searchable and retrievable for later use. What the Office version adds is (http://www.devon-technologies.com/pr...parison.html): Email archive, Scanner including Fujitsu ScanSnap support, Optical character recognition, and Web sharing. The Office version a whopper of a download weighing in at 88MB. Once installed you can open databases created with the Pro version, it’s totally compatible across versions. The Email archive feature is helpful if you have a lot of email and you want the emails collected with the rest of your data in one place. DevonThink Pro Office can import email from most common email programs. Scanner and OCR support are necessities if you’re going to use this software to create the paperless office. Is it a utopian dream or actually possible? You decide. Perhaps with DevonThink Pro Office it’s at least a bit more feasible.

Web sharing
The feature that definitely interested me the most was the web sharing. In effect it turns in DevonThink Pro Office running on one Mac into a server, which shares its database across a network. A few clicks and the server is running. From Safari you will see the DevonThink Pro Office servers running on your network under Bonjour. Double click, give username and password, and you’re connected. After that it works like your own localized Google search engine. You type in what you’re looking for, it searches through the database and displays what it finds. In the browser you can click on a hit to download a file and it will download, just like it does on the web.

Limitations
The main limitation I see is with the web sharing. I would prefer it if I could open a remote database with DevonThink Pro Office, and not just search through it with a web interface. The web search is a nice feature but only goes so far to making this into a multi-user system, which is where I think the real power would lie. Imagine you’re an office of ten people. You constantly share documents, search for documents, create documents, etc. Sure a shared folder will do some of that, but it’s limited. That’s what I would like to see DevonThink Pro Office be. As of now it doesn’t seem to reach that far in functionality.

Conclusion
DevonThink Pro Office is hard application to classify. If you need to keep track of lots of information in one place, search through it and retrieve documents, it’s a good choice. And if you then need to make that information available to others on your network, the web sharing comes in very handy. OCR and scanner support are convenient if you intend to scan documents a lot. Whether all this is worth $150 is a different issue, and probably depends on how committed you are to really using the software.

SIDEBAR
You can find DevonThink Pro Office at http://www.devon-technologies.com/pr...ink/index.html. It sells for $150 and you can download and purchase it from their site. The copy for this review was provided by Devon Technologies.

BOX
Devon Database is a package
As an interesting tidbit, DevonThink databases are really Mac OS X packages. You can see inside the package by right clicking on it and selecting “Show package content”. In there is a folder “Files” and inside it are all the files in the database. I guess this means you could copy files from the database, but I don’t think it means you can copy files into the database this way.

10th April 2007, 21:52	#17 (permalink)
Magnus Administrator Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: Dubai Posts: 8,397	Review: DevonThink Pro Office Review: DevonThink Pro Office by Magnus In the December 2006 issue of shuffle we reviewed DevonThink Pro and Devon Agent. Now we’re taking a look at the Office version. Since the Office version has everything in the Pro version with some added functionality, we’ll focus on what’s special in the Office version. Database manager Whether Office or Pro version, DevonThink is at its heart a database manager in which you can stick all your documents to make them searchable and retrievable for later use. What the Office version adds is (http://www.devon-technologies.com/pr...parison.html): Email archive, Scanner including Fujitsu ScanSnap support, Optical character recognition, and Web sharing. The Office version a whopper of a download weighing in at 88MB. Once installed you can open databases created with the Pro version, it’s totally compatible across versions. The Email archive feature is helpful if you have a lot of email and you want the emails collected with the rest of your data in one place. DevonThink Pro Office can import email from most common email programs. Scanner and OCR support are necessities if you’re going to use this software to create the paperless office. Is it a utopian dream or actually possible? You decide. Perhaps with DevonThink Pro Office it’s at least a bit more feasible. Web sharing The feature that definitely interested me the most was the web sharing. In effect it turns in DevonThink Pro Office running on one Mac into a server, which shares its database across a network. A few clicks and the server is running. From Safari you will see the DevonThink Pro Office servers running on your network under Bonjour. Double click, give username and password, and you’re connected. After that it works like your own localized Google search engine. You type in what you’re looking for, it searches through the database and displays what it finds. In the browser you can click on a hit to download a file and it will download, just like it does on the web. Limitations The main limitation I see is with the web sharing. I would prefer it if I could open a remote database with DevonThink Pro Office, and not just search through it with a web interface. The web search is a nice feature but only goes so far to making this into a multi-user system, which is where I think the real power would lie. Imagine you’re an office of ten people. You constantly share documents, search for documents, create documents, etc. Sure a shared folder will do some of that, but it’s limited. That’s what I would like to see DevonThink Pro Office be. As of now it doesn’t seem to reach that far in functionality. Conclusion DevonThink Pro Office is hard application to classify. If you need to keep track of lots of information in one place, search through it and retrieve documents, it’s a good choice. And if you then need to make that information available to others on your network, the web sharing comes in very handy. OCR and scanner support are convenient if you intend to scan documents a lot. Whether all this is worth $150 is a different issue, and probably depends on how committed you are to really using the software. SIDEBAR You can find DevonThink Pro Office at http://www.devon-technologies.com/pr...ink/index.html. It sells for $150 and you can download and purchase it from their site. The copy for this review was provided by Devon Technologies. BOX Devon Database is a package As an interesting tidbit, DevonThink databases are really Mac OS X packages. You can see inside the package by right clicking on it and selecting “Show package content”. In there is a folder “Files” and inside it are all the files in the database. I guess this means you could copy files from the database, but I don’t think it means you can copy files into the database this way.