First before I begin, let me say that the best thing about epinions.com is that it's just that...a user's opinion. At the time of this review there was one other review posted for this product on this site. The other reviewer gave this product a 'poor' review in my opinion, stating that it was very buggy and poorly written. He/she went on to point out all the problems he/she had using the product. This is where it gets difficult, especially for you the reader to make your own opinion. My review will be quite positive for this product and while I will not be addressing the other review's issues, I will say that I am a Windows software developer and this product is just as well written as other commercial Windows software. Sure there are issues, especially when using it with Windows 2000 but when it comes to Windows software, it's rare that you can install software that does alot (such as this product) and not experience a problem or two. Now on to the review:

Pagis Pro Millennium Scanning Suite by ScanSoft is a software bundle of 5 different software programs for use with scanners. I am not going to go into details here on each product, that you can find at www.scansoft.com/products/pagismill/

What I can tell you about this software is that it's highly functional and makes the archiving, viewing, and printing of documents very easy. Beyond these capabilities it also have a very good OCR engine, OCR is where you can scan a document such as letter and have the computer recognize the letters and turn the document into a word processing document.

I purchased this product for a specific use, to scan and archive typical household paperwork such as bills, insurance paperwork, etc. I could have simply used the software that came with my scanner but I wanted a little more then just scanning a document then saving it to a directory. This software provides some management of the documents allowing me to scan documents, add and remove pages to an existing scanned document, view, fax and print my documents, etc.

There aren't too many packages like this out there. If you 're interested, the product that comes closest is called DocuXplorer and information about that product can be found at www.docuxplorer.com

Basically the way it works is when the software is installed it places an icon on your desktop and creates a folder called "Pagis Inbox". You create sub directories of your choice such as "Bills", then if you want sub-sub directories such as "Gas", "Electric", etc. When you want to scan something you simply pick a folder, load your document and press the scan button. When complete press save and name it (I usually use the date in YMD order for sorting purposes) and the document will appear in the folder you chose. Later you can click on the document to bring it up in the viewer. From the viewer you can view and print the scanned document.

As stated earlier, this package also comes bundled with other software titles. Pagis Pro, the scanning and viewing application is the main application in this package and I consider the rest add-ons and don't have the need for them today.

This suite lists for $100 but you can find it on eBay usually for around $40-$50. I bought my copy at a computer show for $10...I think this price however is the exception.

Recommended: Yes