Office Lens is one of the stars of the Windows Phone platform and Microsoft just added a big new function to its portfolio. Already, this camera-based utility could scan and convert documents, whiteboards, and so on - you can now use it to 'scan' business cards - and, albeit a little meanderingly, get the contact information into your Windows Phone People database. Which is pretty darned cool, given that this is almost part of the platform now.

Of course, I took the update for a decent test, using a couple of old business cards acquired at a trade show as a test:

Getting going with the new version of Office Lens - 'business card' is now on the list of document modes....

Snapping the card is child's play - the framing and focussing and cropping is all done for you, ending up with a tremendously crisp result; (right) saving this to OneNote results in automatic OCR too, with data stripped out and intelligently assigned to a contacts field.

Below the fields in OneNote are the original cleaned-up image, plus contact data in a downloadable .VCF 'BizCard' file, you can grab this on any platform, including right here on Windows Phone.

This opens immediately into a new contact entry in People, as shown here; (right) I also tried cards in vertical format, with equally good results.

Every detail, every field was correct in my tests, though perhaps this should be expected for such 'clean' business cards - those with photo backgrounds would be harder!

Recommended. You can download Office Lens in the Store here, for free.