Scanning

By Corey Smith

Tristam Wallace, at the Document Imaging Blog, had a very interesting post on SharePoint and Document Imaging. I think that one of the most common misconceptions is that if you have SharePoint in your office that you have a fully featured document imaging system.

SharePoint can certainly help increase your productivity through collaboration and document storage, but if you have a lot of unstructured data (documents that have been scanned), you probably need to look at integrating your document imaging system (capture/scanning or storage) with SharePoint to help your employees increase their document management productivity.

From ScanGuru

The Capture Applications on the market today are outstanding when it comes to automation. For any organization that has a large scanning project, or requires minimal time and maximum efficiency from its scan operators, some level of automation is a necessity. So what does automation mean when we are discussing capture applications

Below are some key feature that will minimize the time and effort required to scan and process documents:

Document Separators – with most scanners, if you have 10 documents to scan, you will need to run each set of pages through the document feeder, and save them off individually to your repository. Applications that allow document separators provide a means to place separator sheets between each of your document sets, place the entire pile into the document feeder, and let the software split the stack into individual files. This is a huge time saver, even with a small number of documents.

From ScanGuru

The Capture Applications on the market today are outstanding when it comes to automation. For any organization that has a large scanning project, or requires minimal time and maximum efficiency from its scan operators, some level of automation is a necessity. So what does automation mean when we are discussing capture applications

Below are some key feature that will minimize the time and effort required to scan and process documents:

From ScanGuru

What should a Law Firm look for in a scanning application?

Here are some suggestions:

Barcode Separator Functionality - Separator pages allow the user to insert a specially coded page between documents in a stack. Once scanned, the software uses these pages to determine when a document begins and ends. This allows the scanning of many documents at once, rather than scanning one at a time. There is also the notion of "intelligent separators" which allow you to encode data on the separator page, such as case, matter, attorney, etc.

Image Enhancement - These tools will automatically adjust contrast and brightness, remove problematic colors, remove speckles, and thicken fonts. If you want the highest quality image, with the least amount of scanning operator intervention, this is a key component to any scanning system.

by Jon Reardon

In an unpublished InfoTrends’ research project conducted slightly more than one year ago, we surveyed the US financial services industry to learn about the adoption rates and technology usage behaviors of office/workgroup document solutions. Compliance matters loomed large in this study.

We surveyed more than 350 businesses in the segments of: banking, insurance, investment, and credit and lending. Approximately 50% of the respondents came from large businesses with 1,000 employees, followed by an even split between medium (100-999) and small (1-99) at 25% each.

I know of a lot of people that have a need to create a document as an image. They first print the document then put the document into their scanner so they have an image. I don’t get it.

There are plenty of tools that can be used to create an image of your documents. You could use Adobe Acrobat, eCopy Desktop and a myriad of other tools. You could even use the Microsoft Document Image Writer that comes free with your computer. All you have to do is go to file and select print. Select the Microsoft Document Image Writer as your printer and then choose to save the file as an image that can be converted into a tiff image.

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, one choice may be better than another. If you need help, let us know what you want to accomplish and we can give you a solution. You may already have all the technology you need to get it done and all we'll have to do is teach you how to do it.

Source: Quocirca Business and IT Analysis

With businesses striving to find ways to increase efficiencies, lower costs and improve productivity, many are looking towards leveraging their investments in digital multifunction peripherals (MFPs) to merge their paper and digital workflows.

Whilst many businesses are moving towards digital document workflows, paper continues to play an important role in many business processes. It is now widely accepted that the paperless office anticipated by the digital age has not materialised, as glancing around any office environment will illustrate.

Growing usage of technologies like email, online collaboration and electronic documents, has driven an increase in paper consumption rather than a reduction. Paper remains the preferred choice of medium for consuming and digesting information - people prefer to read from paper rather than a screen, it is tangible and easy to annotate and is personal and portable. Despite technology advances in e-paper display technology to mimic paper readability on-screen, and e-paper reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle e-book, our attachment to paper is likely to long continue.

If you are looking to implement a scanning solution, it is very important that you have three, very important features. Those features are not scanning to email, scanning to folder and scanning to document management. Then, what do you think they are? Scan to email, folder and document management systems are very important features that can not be over looked. They are never the most critical components, but these are the features that most people consider. Most often, people forget to look at the most critical features first. Most Important Feature 1 - Ease of Use There are so many types of systems out there right now. Some are incredibly complicated. Some required too many buttons to push for something as simple as a scan to email. They require the push of one button to enter an email, the push of another button to add the subject and yet another button to add the note. Not to mention the little screens and virtual keyboards that make any button push cumbersome. Most Important Feature 2 - Tight Integration In order for your scanning solution to be effective, you should look for integration with your current environment. You shouldn’t have to come up with work-arounds to tie it seamlessly to your MS Exchange server. You should be able to send an email from your scanner and have the message appear automatically in your sent items folder. If you want to password protect the system, it should authenticate against your existing server and not have to create a new password system. More over, you want it to integrate with your document management system so that you don’t have to take extra steps to get your documents where you want them when you want them there. But, remember that the definition of "tight" depends on your situation and needs. Don't confuse a product's claim of integration for solving your particular needs. Most Important Feature 3 - Security and Compliance Did you know that most scan to email and scan to folder are open to abuse from malicious users? In most scan to email systems, I can send an email anonymously, or worse, put someone else’s name as the return address? Did you know that in most scan to folder locations, security settings need to be turned off so that scanning can work easily on the network. These problems allow for violations in regulatory compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and SOX. Don’t forget these key features when looking for a scanning solution. – Corey Smith has fifteen years of document management industry experience and maintains the Master the Business blog.