Go to a conference, an afternoon seminar, or even a high-powered dinner party, and you're likely to come home with a fist full of business cards. A quaint holdover from the 19th century, business cards are actually one of the primary ways to circulate names, addresses, and contact information in the modern world.
Business cards are incredibly flexible, and decidedly low-tech. You can be simple and just put your name, address, and phone number on a card. Or you can get fancy, and populate your little piece of real estate with a logo, two addresses, a company slogan, and more. Today's business cards increasingly are filled with Internet-related information, like e-mail addresses and Web sites.
While business cards are a great way to transmit information, they're not terribly practical for information storage. They're easy to misplace, and it's hard to search through a stack of cards to find somebody in particular.
One approach that I have used in the past for dealing with business cards is to photocopy a dozen or so cards onto a big page, punch holes in the paper, and keep everything in a three-ring binder. The cards that I find myself referring to again and again get typed into my computerized address book.
Another way to manage your business cards is to scan them into your computer directly, then manage the information using CardScan, a nifty product by Cambridge-based Corex Technologies. Stripped-down versions of CardScan ship with some scanners, such as Visioneer's PaperPort. Corex just shipped Version 4.0 of its full-strength application, priced at roughly $80.
CardScan is actually two products in one. The first is a Windows 95 contact-management program that is specially optimized for managing scanned business cards. The second part of the CardScan equation is the CardScan 300 business card scanner. This $270 device connects to a Windows-based computer through the parallel port and lets you scan cards directly into the CardScan application.
The CardScan application program is a pleasure to use. The address book creates a little database with the fields for each of the pieces of information that goes on a business card. Although I prefer free-format address books to those based on fields, CardScan is flexible enough to store many different kinds of addresses.
For each business card, CardScan stores an image in its database. The program then analyzes the card, looking for the person's name, address, phone, and other information. The program automatically recognizes words like ''Fax'' and ''Pager'' and assigns the information to fields with these labels. Slogans show up in a field called ''Other.''
Once a card is scanned into a database, you can go back and proofread the information. As you correct it, CardScan will automatically display the particular part of the card from where the information was scanned.
CardScan has a great ''QuickSearch'' feature that lets you quickly find the entry for a person by just typing a few letters of their name.
By default, the QuickSearch screen displays the person's name, company, and phone, although you can customize this. To see the person's full record, just click on the name. You can also click on a little icon of a telephone to dial their phone number or click on an envelope to send them e-mail.
There are a few rough edges here and there. The CardScan program crashed on me frequently; I never lost information, but programs shouldn't crash. The program doesn't let me click on URLs and automatically open them in Web browsers, and it sends e-mail using Microsoft's MAPI system, rather than just using the ''mailto:'' system that Internet Explorer and Netscape use.
But my biggest gripe is with paper envelopes. It would be nice if I could just click a button and have an envelope come off my printer with the address, bar code, and return address. You can do this with CardScan, but it's difficult.
Although CardScan's software can work with conventional scanners, the optical character recognition does a much better job when used with the company's special-purpose scanner. Cards that I've scanned with my Visioneer PaperPort routinely have scanning errors. Card images that I scanned with my PaperPort and transferred to the CardScan application also have a way of occasionally making the application program crash.
Cards that I scan with the CardScan 300 scanner, on the other hand, normally scan with no errors. The scanning process is smooth and simple. And unlike other scanning applications that I've used, you can do all of your scanning at once, then leave your computer alone while it does the optical character recognition in the background.
The new 4.0 version of CardScan allows you to transfer your cards into more than 40 different applications, including ACT!, Day-Timer Organizer, Lotus Organizer, and Microsoft Outlook. You can also synchronize the CardScan application directly with a 3Com Palm Pilot.
For more information, check out the Corex Web site at http://www.corex.com.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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