Document Imaging Blog

Nuance Acquisition of eCopy

It has been an exciting week here, as Nuance Communications, a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions, announced that they have acquired us. The combination results in a product set and organization that are complementary, expanding Nuance's imaging portfolio with the eCopy ShareScan, ScanStation and PaperWorks product lines, strengthening our mutual MFP vendor and channel partnerships, and enhancing our channel sales, training and support resources in North America, Europe and Asia.

 

The eCopy and Nuance management teams have already begun to work together on integration plans, and we will be reaching out to our partners and customers throughout the process. There are a few items that we can share with you immediately:

 

1. Nuance is committed to the full line of products from both companies

The eCopy and Nuance products are complementary, and Nuance is committed to the full line of eCopy products, including ShareScan, ScanStation and PaperWorks.

 

2. Nuance is committed to eCopy customers, MFP partners and channel partners

All of your eCopy and Nuance contacts remain unchanged, and can be reached through their existing email and phone numbers. The eCopy web site and support resources are also unchanged. 

 

3. Nuance is committed to a strong, combined organization

eCopy has developed an excellent team, with great products and great sales, sales support and online resources, all of which are highly valued by Nuance.  Throughout the integration process we will insure that we can maintain the high levels of product quality and service that eCopy customers and partners need to be successful.

 

Below are a couple of links to some of the initial industry commentary in the blogosphere about the acquisition. And please drop a comment to us here if you would like to weigh in.

InfoTrends InfoBlog

Xerox – Future of Documents

What Works for Distributed Capture

Check out the short article online in Infonomics Magazine providing four tips for using multifunction peripherals and scan to pdf software for distributed capture. The article was written by yours truly.

What Works for Distributed Capture

http://www.aiim.org/capture/infonomics/what-works-distributed-capture.aspx

eWeek Article on Document Imaging and Microsoft Apps

Many organizations struggle with how to best integrate document imaging technologies with their Microsoft applications. A recently published article in eWeek by eCopy's Ed White covers the critical considerations when marrying document imaging with Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Access and SQL Server. The three-part article is a must read for IT managers implementing document scanning in conjunction with Microsoft technologies. You can read the article by clicking here.

Centralized Versus Distributed Capture at EMC World

As distributed capture gains in popularity, more and more organizations are asking: Should we implement centralized or distributed document imaging or both.

EMC's Captiva product marketing manager Bill Galushia was seeking to help organizations answer this question with a customer panel at EMC World today.

Panelists from Conseco and Eaton Vance, two firms that provide financial services, provided their guidance on why they decided to use both types of capture.

Panelist Patti Bishop, assistant vice president of mutual fund operations for Eaton Vance, revealed that her company decided to invest in decentralized capture because the content being captured is completely unstructured. Often she needed the document owners to characterize the document to get the right process started. After all, who knows more about the documents than the document owners.

Bishop is certainly doing it right at Eaton Vance. She is saving 30 - 35% by bringing document imaging in house and she has increased the number of pages being captured by 200%. She has accomplished this, in part, by using EMC Captiva InputAccel with eCopy software at her MFPs.

LinkedIn Document Imaging Group Reaches 2,000 Members

The Document Imaging Group on LinkedIn recently reached a major milestone, surpassing the 2,000 member mark. The Group is the companion social networking group to this Blog.

eCopy created the Group to help people involved in the document imaging market to expand professional relationships for business and employment opportunities. You can join the Group by clicking here.

Whitepaper: Distributed Capture Platforms

EMC has sponsored a whitepaper that looks at how to improve business processes in decentralized work environments through the use of distributed document capture. Jarad Carleton from the industry analyst firm Frost & Sullivan wrote the whitepaper, which outlines the steps organizations should take to capture documents from remote sites using MFPs.

The whitepaper covers automated document classification, extraction and validation of data, as well as delivering documents and data to central content repositories and business applications. It also reviews how EMC Captiva and eCopy work together to address distributed capture requirements at remote offices. You can read the whitepaper here.

Improving paper-intensive business processes

We’ve just completed a new paper on improving paper-intensive business processes. Among the topics covered is how integrating document imaging with the systems underlying BPM, and performing document scanning at the front-end of business processes, organizations can develop a bridge between the paper work and the electronic work that improved productivity and enables continuous improvement of business processes.

 

Enterprise software applications that drive document-centric workflows — such as enterprise content management (ECM) applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing, and human resources applications — are all strong candidates for most organizations seeking to automate BPM and reduce enterprise dependency on paper- based processes. While BPM tools model, monitor, analyze,
and drive business processes, it is the business applications that both execute the steps within the processes, and that contain and manage the content and data. Cross-platform document imaging solutions provide the necessary integration points to include paper-based information into the electronic workflows managed by BPM suites.

 

   

 

 

Additionally, the paper includes an overview of some of the typical business problems caused by paper-based processes and discovery questions that can be used to identify these problems. Clearly, identifying and dealing with paper is only one step in process improvement. But without addressing paper-based processes, any BPM initiative will leave a large process improvement opportunity on the table.

Choosing a Document Imaging Solution for SharePoint

I continue to see a lot of discussions amongst blogs, discussion boards and other Web forums about how to deal with one of the identified “shortcomings” of SharePoint…imaging. The proliferation of SharePoint licenses in organizations of all sizes has shone a new light onto the struggles that organization’s face with paper, and the question, “How do I get paper documents into SharePoint” is being asked more and more.

And, not surprisingly, many vendors (hardware and software) have released products that offer a way to scan documents and load them into SharePoint. So how do you select which is the right product for you? Here’s a couple of questions you may want to consider:

 

1. How will scanned documents be searched for once saved to SharePoint? You should look for an imaging solution that offers both the capability to manually add metadata to a document at the point of scanning and perform OCR (optical character recognition) on the scanned image to create a full-text searchable PDF, or capture certain key pieces of data from the document and include them as metadata.

2. Are SharePoint workflows supported by enforcing metadata requirements for rules-based processing?  If you are using the workflow capabilities of SharePoint, it is important to be able to kick-off those workflows for paper-based documents at the time of scanning. Your document imaging solution should prompt users to include the necessary information needed for these workflows (such as content type and necessary metadata), at the capture device when scanning the document.

3. Are changes to the underlying SharePoint site structure reflected dynamically at the point of capture? SharePoint is a very fluid system and changes to sites, document libraries, lists, etc. are commonplace. When capturing paper documents, users need to be able to see the most recent version of the site that they are saving the document to. Document imaging solutions that use pre-defined routing (either using barcodes, embedded directives, or hot folders) can not easily stay up-to-date with changes. Using a document imaging solution that has dynamic integration with SharePoint ensures that users have access to the most up-to-date site layout because they are logged into SharePoint when scanning.

4. Does the document imaging solution require components to be added to the SharePoint server? This is important for two reasons. First, the less third-party software that has to be installed on the SharePoint server the better, as it reduces the risk of that software causing problems. Secondly, if the document imaging solution has components on the server, it can not support hosted SharePoint environments.

There are of course many, many other factors that go into choosing the right document imaging solution for SharePoint. For additional information, download the white paper series: Distributed Document Imaging: Maximizing Your Investment in Microsoft Technology.

Information Input and Output Relationships

I was talking to an IT director at a large customer of ours recently about his information management strategy and was impressed by his realistic and holistic view of information management…or Enterprise Content Management (ECM), to use AIIM’s industry term. Like many organizations, he has an ECM application in the center of his content management strategy. And, like many organizations, he has mapped out the connections from that ECM system to his line of business applications, Intranets, Extranets, desktop applications and email systems, as well as paper.

 

Where this conversation became interesting was his view of the input/output relationships between every one of these parts, including paper. This input/output relationship is often forgotten when considering paper, with the focus being solely on the act of converting paper-based information to electronic form (input). But conversion and input is only half of the story. Understanding how users work with electronic files (both scanned and digitally originated), is critical to the success of an information management strategy. What he has delivered is an information management strategy that encompasses the complete document or content lifecycle.

 

 

Think about your users’ work processes. Getting a paper document into an electronic system is good for storage, but most of the time that document needs to be accessed again, edited, possibly combined with other documents, and either shared or checked back into the system. These tasks typically consist of performing multiple steps and opening multiple applications. However, using standard document formats like PDF, and working with PDF software that is integrated directly with your other applications, can significantly reduce the number of steps…improving productivity, saving labor costs, reducing resource contraints, and creating a better work environment.

MFPs and Network/Data Security

I wanted to pass along a link to a great article on MFPs and security in Computer Technology Review, written by Sharp's Vince Jannelli.  It is a very succint and well-written summary of security concerns around  MFPs and I agree with nearly everything in it.

However, I want to address the following statment that Vince made in relation to platform virus security:

"A proprietary platform is idea, since it won't be susceptible to viruses designed to attack more popular oprating systems available on personal computers."

I don't dispute the statement. But, it is important to weigh the trade offs between a proprietary platform and an open platform. While the risk of viral attack is lower because it is unlikely hackers will develop malicious code aimed at proprietary MFP platforms, the costs of managing those proprietary platforms are significant -- particularly for those companies that have mixed fleets (brands) of MFPs.

This problem is becoming more apparant as MFPs increasingly fall into the realm of IT and become increasingly integrated into business and IT infrastuctures. Some costs of proprietary platforms include:

• IT Training and Staffing costs
• Limited options fo 3rd party integrations (ISVs resist developing on proprietary  platforms unless that platform has a significant majority of marketshare)
• Integration code isn't portable to other platforms (what happens if you switch brands, or acquire a brand through M&A, etc.)

Furthermore, there are open platform solutions on the market today for MFPs that are secure and meet the criteria that Vince laid out for solutions: data security, access control, audit trails, network security, fax security and platform virus security. To read more about how these and other security concerns are addressed in an open platform, check out the white paper, Addressing Document Imaging Security Issues.