Document Imaging Blog

Welcome to eCopy's Document Imaging Blog

Businesses are adopting technology to address electronic workflows and processes --- but these processes are slowed by paper. Document imaging can help solve the paper problem by converting paper into electronic images and distributing those images into digital workflows.

This blog provides eCopy's perspectives on document imaging based on 15 years experience working with end users, MFP and scanner manufacturers, software vendors, and reseller channels. It is our goal of this blog to foster better understanding of document imaging technology through examples of companies who have benefited from implementing the technology and by sharing the experiences/problems/challenges.  We look forward to hearing from you!

Four Tips for Document Imaging and SharePoint

"Companies are turning in droves to Microsoft’s SharePoint platform, quickly recognizing the benefits of a system that enables better collaboration and document workflows, and therefore improving information worker productivity and efficiency. However, many processes and workflows require information that’s only available in paper documents."

This is the start of an article this week in WindowsITPro, and is a statement that more and more end user organizations can relate to as they implement SharePoint and face the problem of integrating their paper-based and electronic workflows. Document imaging software – made available to any office worker – is the best solution, but there are many choices of which software to use.

When considering document imaging software for use with Microsoft SharePoint, four considerations can help you make a good decision:

1) The document imaging software should have a zero footprint on the SharePoint server.

2) Look for software that offers out-of-the-box functionality and navigation into your SharePoint environment. Document imaging software should adapt immediately to the environment that you have setup – even if you have done extensive customization to the environment.

3) The document imaging software should offer support for all SharePoint Content Types, Metadata, Workflows (Workflow Foundation Server), etc.

4) Security – The software should match the user authentication and access rights settings that have been set on the SharePoint server. There should be no need to setup separate authentication processes for document imaging.

There are lots of additional resources to learn about document imaging for SharePoint, including archived Webinars and case studies, at this link.

Distributed Capture Platforms

Frost & Sullivan has released a new white paper: “Distributed Capture Platforms: Reducing Costs, Removing Bottlenecks and Mitigating Risk”. It provides a great overview of distributed capture, the opportunities that it presents across multiple industries and challenges that may face. In full disclosure, eCopy co-sponsored this report with EMC. Download the report here.

A particular phrase within the report struck a chord with me.

“Regardless of why a distributed workforce exists, the use of distributed capture technology can help ensure employees in decentralized settings are successful.”

A distributed workforce no longer just the realm of the sales team and a few specified industries like retail and banking. The fact is -- when considering how to capture paper – if that paper has to be moved from its point of origin than a distributed workforce exists and there is an opportunity for distributed capture.

If you are heading to EMC World in a couple of weeks, be sure to stop by the eCopy booth (#323), the EMC booth (#425) or the Burntsand booth (#413) to chat about distributed capture and how the three companies can combine to deliver a powerful distributed capture solution.

Guarding against insider security threats

Alan Joch wrote an interesting post on the Printing & Imaging Blog this week about insider security breaches and steps companies are taking to protect their information. He suggests that companies investigate print logs – paying attention to what is printed, who is printing that information and when (during or after business hours, for example).

This is a good practice, especially for companies that deal with compliance and audit concerns, and should also be considered for scanned documents. It reminds me of a story a colleague shared recently about a customer of ours in the Securities industry. Being in the business of securities and trading – and therefore under the watchful eye of the SEC -- the company had concerns over who was sending what information, and where it was being sent. They wanted to allow employees to scan and e-mail documents from the MFP and therefore need to choose a document imaging solution that could meet those security requirements. This company recognized two core document tracking needs to address when it came to choosing their document imaging solution:

1) They needed to be able to track & log information such as the sender, time, date, # of pages and recipient for any document scanned and sent from the MFP
2) They needed to be able to log and store the actual content of the scanned document

Some document imaging solutions are able to address #1, and some can also address #2. However, this company also wanted the ability to encrypt scanned documents, a very common document imaging requirement. By adding encryption to the mix, the ability to log and store the actual content of scanned documents is a much more difficult task. But it is an important need to address. Think about it. An employee may very well think that they can go up to an MFP, scan a document, encrypt that document and send it via e-mail. Because it has been encrypted, they believe that no one could see what the contents were.

To my knowledge, eCopy ShareScan is the only imaging solution that can handle this requirement. Our document tracking feature, which is accessed through the administrative console, can be set to both log document scanning activity and send a copy of the scanned document to a storage location that has access dictated by network security policies. If the document has been encrypted during scanning, the copy sent to the storage location is stored unencrypted. The beauty of this is that is doesn’t restrict functionality such as encryption that is used for “good”, it just lets you track abuse.

So if there is a need for “Big Brother” in an organization, you should make sure that both the ability to log print and scan jobs is included. And make sure that there are no loopholes, such as encrypted documents, that can poke holes in these security measures.

AIIM Webinar Q&A – Part 4

Time to answer the last question posed during the April 9th AIIM webinar, Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Organizations. If you missed the webinar, a recording is available on our Website.  And please post a comment to this blog post if you have further questions that you would like me to answer. I’m happy to keep this Q&A going as long as the questions come in!

Our final question is around document services and came in from an IT executive at a professional services company. He asks:

Does eCopy have the ability, when dealing with a common document format to, while scanning the doc, pull data in certain areas for OCR, then using that data for naming, routing, or storing metadata in a database?

Yes and no. eCopy ShareScan comes bundled with an OCR engine for full text indexing and search purposes. For example, a document can be OCRd during the scanning process to create a searchable PDF for improved search and retrieval from databases or back end application. Our product does not automatically extract portions of data (i.e. zonal OCR) for purposes of indexing and routing. However, eCopy ShareScan is an open development environment with a published API and document services interface. Through this services interface, capabilities such as metadata extraction, barcode recognition, and image compression and cleanup can be easily added. For example, one of eCopy’s partners, I.R.I.S., has used the SDK to offer a set of document services for ShareScan.

Thanks again for all the great questions around document imaging & Microsoft. And please, if you have any other questions, please post them as a comment to the blog.

Bill DeStefanis
Director of Product Management

AIIM Webinar Q&A – Part 3

In part 3 of our Q&A follow-up to last week’s AIIM Webinar (see part 1 and part 2), I’m going to answer a couple of questions around getting paper documents into Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint, not surprisingly, is top of mind with Microsoft-driven organizations who are implementing the technology in droves to enable better collaboration and document workflows. And one of the big challenges that these organizations face is how to ensure that knowledge workers are able to include information that resides on paper inside SharePoint.

Our first question asks: How does eCopy know where to send documents and metadata content to SharePoint?

Our integration with SharePoint is done through our Connector to eCopy ShareScan. Our SharePoint connectivity is predicated upon authenticated user access, i.e. the username/password assigned to users who access SharePoint. With this information, users are logged into their SharePoint repository at the MFP and can self-determine where to deposit information by browsing to the site, subsite, document library, etc. at the MFP. Alternatively, eCopy’s SharePoint connectivity can be pre-configured for a dedicated capture operation, for example, scanning resumes to a dedicated folder accessible by Human Resources. In this configuration, there is no user interaction with SharePoint, but the application intelligently knows where to store the document and what indexing information should be included with it, i.e. username, date, document type, etc.

The second question asks: What are the benefits of eCopy with MOSS 2007. And is eCopy a good connector for MOSS 2007?

The answer to the second part is yes, of course.  We recently upgraded our connector to support many of the features that were added to SharePoint in MOSS 2007, including support for multiple content types and workflows.

As for the benefits, I’ll list three of the biggest. 1) Our SharePoint Connector replicates the user’s desktop experience with SharePoint at the MFP, allowing navigation through sites, subsites, document libraries, etc. This leads to high user adoption and a reduction in errors because the workflow process is unchanged.  2) The Connector features dynamic connectivity to a live environment, meaning that a user is working with a live environment vs. a static image of the application. So in that environment, if new folders or other destinations are added to the SharePoint environment, these are automatically available to the user during the capture process.  3) From an IT perspective, our SharePoint connectivity requires no changes to the SharePoint environment and there are no modifications or additions necessary to the MOSS server.

We’ll be back next week with the final questions from last week’s webinar (view a recording here).

Bill DeStefanis
Director of Product Management

“Easy to Use” Scanning

Visioneer’s VP of Marketing wrote a post on Xerox’s “Big I, Little t” blog about easy to use scanning solutions. He said that what his customers have told him is that it is important for them to be able to scan documents and send them to a destination such as a back end application by touching a single button – something that Visioneer’s OneTouch solution can deliver. Granted, this is very easy to use. However, it is not always appropriate for companies’ various document workflows.

His post specifically mentions Microsoft SharePoint as a backend application that customers would want to include paper-based information in. This is a perfect example of why it is important to offer employees a scanning solution that is both easy to use AND supports various document workflows. SharePoint is a powerful collaboration and workflow tool for knowledge workers. And those knowledge workers want to be able to include paper-based information inside SharePoint. But it is rare that every document will need to go to the exact same destination, or will need advanced imaging processing. Most of the time, knowledge workers are interested in converting that paper document to a PDF file, possibly OCRing the document and/or adding some simple indexing information for improved search and retrieval, and then choosing the destination (site, subsite, document library, etc.) within SharePoint to send it to. They can not do this when the scan task is pre-defined.

There may, of course, be some cases where a choice of “one touch” scanning for a repeatable scanning task and destination may be the preferable method. An example of this could be scanning in timecards to a destination that the payroll department can access. This type of scanning can be combined with more flexible options in a solution that provides users with the choice to scan and send documents in the way that best meets their workflow needs.

In this scenario, when that user walks up to a scanning device, they may be presented with two (or more) choices – Scan to SharePoint (which allows them to select scan settings and navigate to areas of SharePoint that they have access to) and Scan to Payroll (which automatically chooses the scan settings and routes the document to the destination with one touch). The point is that a document imaging solution that is flexible enough to support any workflow is, in fact, the easiest to use because it does not make knowledge workers change the way that they work.

Choice -- especially when presented in an interface at the scanning device which is comparable to the interface at their desktop -- does not equal complexity. And it benefits employees by saving time and effort, improving accuracy and increasing job satisfaction – all while increasing the value of a shared scanning device.

AIIM Webinar Q&A -- Part 2

I’m back again with more Q&A from last week’s AIIM Webinar, Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Environments”. In part one of this series; I covered questions primarily dealing with the process for ensuring proper indexing of documents in a distributed environment. Today, I’m going to address a couple of questions around the topic of MFPs, or multifunction peripherals.

The first question is around the operating environments of MFPs:

How soon do you foresee having a large number of Web services enabled MFPs in the market?

Well, today approximately 9 million (laser) MFPs are put into the market each year and a growing number of those will have a Web services operating environment. A few vendors, such as Xerox, Sharp and Toshiba, are shipping devices with these environments today. But even with that being the case, the main challenges for the ISV community remains that while each of these are Web services based, they still remain different -- and proprietary -- development environments.  The ideal for the ISV community would be a single, “standard” Web services based development environment. Unfortunately, that is not the development landscape available from the MFP vendors today.  What is available are document imaging platforms like eCopy’s, which works on all of the major MFP and scanner brands and provides a single development environment (SDK) from which ISVs and end users can connect to a variety of MFPs.

Today’s second question is about whether MFPs are appropriate for processing back files, and asks, “this can’t really be done on an MFP?”

Agreed, that is not what MFPs are designed to do.  MFPs are great capture environments for low-volume document scanning by office workers.  Back file scanning is task that is best suited for high-speed, high volume scan operations with a dedicated scanning professional. One thing to think about however, is if “one-off” documents enter the organization that would need to be added to an archive. In those cases, the ability to have an office worker scan that document to the archive at a later date using an MFP can be beneficial. So, it is not so much that it can not be done on an MFP, but there are certainly processes that are better suited for other scanning processes.

I’ll be back later this week with some questions around scanning documents into SharePoint.

Bill DeStefanis
Director of Product Management

Document Imaging for Microsoft-Driven Organizations – Webinar Q&A

I co-presented a Webinar on document imaging for Microsoft-driven organizations with Forrester Research last Wednesday afternoon.  A terrific audience of nearly 400 attendees posed a number of questions at the end of the Webinar and I will be posting those questions and answers on the blog this week. If you missed the Webinar last week, you can download a recording here.

The first question I will cover came in from an end user who works for a Credit Union. He asked:

In a distributed capture model, who captures the metadata/index information? How do you best control consistency and accuracy? And, how do you control user/site license costs?

While I hate to start off this week-long Q&A like this, the answer is it depends. A good distributed capture application should be flexible enough to automatically capture metadata information  based on items such as username, date, time, etc., AND present a Windows-like user interface that prompts the user for metadata information. In terms of control and accuracy, this can be addressed by the application designer/administrator through the use of tools such as list boxes, character limitation, mandatory indexing, and other selection fields. In the case of eCopy ShareScan, user selections would be pulled live from the backend application – for example with SharePoint, indexing fields are displayed with options such as content or document type to reflect the same metadata requirements at the MFP that users would see at their desktop. So, if you have trained your users to save electronic documents to a repository, the same process will apply at the MFP.

In terms of controlling user/site license costs, scanning at shared scanning devices like MFPs is typically not charged on a per user basis. When working with a backend application, a users SharePoint CAL is valid at either the user’s desktop and the scanning device, so no additional CAL should be necessary.

A follow-up question to this was also posed:

So, while reducing a centralized scan/capture environment, would we still need a centralized index/quality control-type environment?

Distributed scanning processes are not necessarily designed as a replacement to centralized scanning operations. So, it is very likely that both will be maintained. As far as indexing/QC operations, in an application like eCopy’s those functions are done by the user at the point of capture (preview, indexing, metadata, etc.). However, a distributed capture application can also augment a  centralized capture process, pushing the indexing/QC functions further out to the workforce.

We’ll have more questions on the blog later this week. In the meantime, please feel free to post any questions that you may have about Document Imaging in the comment field below.

Bill DeStefanis

Director of Product Management

Konica Minolta, Danka & Cross Platform Software

On April 8, MFP manufacturer Konica Minolta announced that it intends to acquire Danka, a large office equipment dealer. You can read the press release here. Danka is a well established dealer for Canon MFPs and also represents Toshiba, too.

If the acquisition is completed, Danka customers will likely face the possibility that they will no longer be able to buy Canon MFPs from Danka. In addition, they will need to consider if they want to continue with the same document scanning software. If their current document scanning software works on both Canon and Konica, then the MFP hardware (and the acquisition) won't be an issue. But if the currently-used software doesn't work on Konica and they want to continue with Danka, new document scanning software will be required. And new software means that the users will need to be retrained and any customization or application integration will need to be re-developed.

This is an extreme example of why the industry analyst firm Gartner recommends that their clients select document scanning software that works across MFP platforms. See my earlier post from the Gartner Print and Imaging Summit for more details on what Gartner recommends. Platform agnostic software is required if you want to make sure that you are not locked into a particular brand of MFP.

eCopy Open Document Services

In the April 7 issue of the Document Imaging Report, Editor Ralph Gammon has an informative interview with I.R.I.S. CEO Pierre De Muelenaere. You CAN'T read the article unless you are a subscriber, but you can click on Document Imaging Report to learn more about Gammon's publication.

The article is interesting because it discusses how I.R.I.S. is one of the first to take advantage of eCopy opening its document services layer to corporate developers, ISVs and SIs. According to Gammon, "instead of having to release documents to apply processes such as OCR, in the new services-based paradigm, a third-party OCR could be run within [eCopy] ShareScan. This would produce a full-text searchable document that could then be released through a Connector into a third-party app."

OCR is just one, easy-to-understand example of document services that could be embedded within ShareScan. Just about any document imaging service could be incorported.

The press release describing the new I.R.I.S. document services partnership can be read at I.R.I.S and eCopy Partner. I.R.I.S has created a great page on the Document Imaging Wiki. See I.R.I.S. to learn more about the company. Other ISVs that should consider writing document services modules for eCopy ShareScan include A2IA, Adlib, Atalasoft, Cvision and Accusoft. There are many, many more.