Today, excuses like "I have to go to the office to do that" start to be even less believable than "My car exploded but I got away somehow, and that's why I am late", because if you're a serious businessman, your office should be "with you" all the time. There are only two ingredients needed to make this reality: a laptop and an office application suite.

Since the MacBooks' prices are going slowly down, I see no reason to avoid getting one, and if you are wondering about the office suite to use, I have such a solution for you too, and its name is DEVONthink Professional Office, its latest public beta being available for 150 free trial hours without any limitations. Of course that if you want to buy it, the price shouldn't be much of a problem, since this paperless office's Professional version costs 140$.

DEVONthink is the only document manager for the Mac that claims to be an intelligent one, and I can't deny that, but we humans still have an advantage - while our intelligence is natural, this program is based on artificial intelligence. The new additions include paper capture, email archiving and sharing of your documents on the web.

The interoperability with other programs has been improved, and the best example is the email archiver, which is able to connect to the major email programs to import messages or entire mailboxes to a database, and without changing the text formatting or attachments, of course.

In order to have a paperless office, you have to get rid of the existing papers first, of course, and this can be done by scanning them, since you can't send everything to the paper shredder, and this software handles paper capture via the Fujitsu ScanSnap or flatbed scanners.

The operating system required to run this program is Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, and the final release is scheduled for January 2007, so if everything works fine, you'll be able to start the new year with a new office assistant, the only intelligent one available!