Are you haunted by the thought of papers stacked in piles throughout the office, as another year begins? If only it were possible to do that Elizabeth Montgomery trick, perfected for the 1960's sitcom 'Bewitched', and simply twitch your nose to magically make it all go away!

Strategies for dealing with paper are abundant. Now, rapid paced technological advances offer solutions to small-to-medium sized businesses--as well as individuals--that were once considered reserved for corporate giants.

Going paperless, or at least moving towards 'less-paper', takes some planning and a bit of determination. A primary strategy in making paper go away is to look at how to eliminate paper in the first place. Actively seeking out and accepting e-mailed digitally formatted documents or e-faxed documents is a great start.

Eventually, your journey to a paperless environment will lead to a point where you will want to convert paper documents into digital ones. Once in an electronic format, it is possible to manage your paperwork from a click of your computer's mouse.

To accomplish this conversion there are a number of approaches, depending upon the volume of documents to be be converted. These range from simple inexpensive document scanners capable of accommodating a few pages per minute to high production scanners able to scan tens of thousands of pages per hour.

Another strategy is one being pioneered by Pixily. This interactive document management service has been designed to help consumers and small businesses be more organized and efficient. According to Josh Lowenshon, writer for Webware.com, CNET's blog about Web applications and services, "Pixily is all about taking paper clutter out of your life by scanning it in for you and making it both searchable, and able to be organized into buckets."

Customers can send documents to Pixily in a variety of formats. Paper documents can be sent via Pixily boxes or “scanvelopes,” special water and tamper-resistant pre-paid postage envelopes designed to protect documents on their way to Pixily’s professional processing center.

At the processing center, documents are scanned as text-searchable PDF files and hosted online in Pixily’s cloud computing application. Already have your documents in a Word, Excel, or other electronic format? These electronic files can join your scanned paper files in the same online repository through a variety of simple upload options.

Once online in the Pixily system, you can organize, label, search, share, and download your files from anywhere with a secure Internet connection. The Pixily system can control invitations to view documents and even allow you and others to annotate your files.

Pixily was cited by BusinessWeek as the Web-based service that moves your paper documents online, earning a 4 out of 5 star rating for its job in turning paper clutter into searchable online documents. Even Evernote, an online tool to capture anything from an person's real and digital lives then find it all anytime, has teamed up with Pixily to help you "get rid of all the paper that clutters your very un-paperless, life."

So, maybe this is the year to go paperless...or at least less-paper!

Whether you choose to do-it-yourself, or let an organization specializing in document conversion help you, the benefits are immense.

Benefits and Advantages of Going Paperless

• Save countless hours in organizing, finding and sharing documents.
• Reclaim all that lost space to storage and save $$$.
• Find paper and digital documents by searching on their contents.
• Control how long you want to share your documents with clients, colleagues and friends.
• Organize, apply multiple labels to your documents.
• Safely share and access documents from anywhere.

i/oTrak specializes in helping organizations of all sizes deal with their specific paper challenges in an easy, open, cost-effective manner. For more information on how we can help make dealing with paper easier in your professional life, contact one of i/oTrak's solution specialists for a free assessment.