Simple Doc Organizer Free Edition

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on July 26, 2011

So you're in business, and you've got a PC and a scanner. You're dutifully scanning and saving all your business documents (hopefully not jumbled together in your scanner's default archive). Simple Doc Organizer Free Edition is a free document organizing utility designed specifically for small- and medium-size businesses. It makes it easy to store and find your scanned, saved, or imported documents.

We downloaded and extracted the program's zipped installer, which then downloads and installs the program files. We also had to disable our User Account Control settings, which required a reboot. A Configure Wizard then walked us through the process of setting up SDO, including setting user names and passwords for remote access and the program's archive, if needed. SDO has an attractive, efficient, tabbed interface based around a central Dashboard displaying pie graphs for Documents and Dossier/Folder holdings, similar to the disk space display in Windows. A left-hand Document Tree displayed our Archive holdings, while each selection's holdings and stats showed up in a right-hand Properties panel that we could keep open with a pushpin. SDO offers various search options, including a Quick Search feature, and we could quickly toggle between full and panel views. From the program's toolbar, we could import documents and data via scanner, browsing in Windows Explorer, or by adding templates, and export data to SAR (Simple Archive Reader), PDF, or by browsing in Explorer.

Despite its somewhat involved installation process, Simple Doc Organizer proved easy and intuitive in use. You can scan documents directly into it or import them in a variety of ways, or create new documents with archived or scanned content. We opened the Create New Dossier wizard and created a dossier, which is an archive for documents. Documents we added to our dossier appeared in the main window as thumbnails. We could also add and edit templates as well as select them from a list that included new Minute and Note templates, blank OpenOffice and Word docs, and an empty text file. Clicking System on the menu bar accessed a settings toolbar that included a scanner wizard, Masks and Flags options, a Table Assistant, and Application General Settings (via the Config button) that included e-mail settings. The Web-based manual included videos and tutorials as well as User/Admin Guides and other documentation.