Overview
The displacement of the proverbial "paper trail" with digital information is commonplace in today’s business environments. Fueled by the wildfire spread of corporate intranets, as well as the evolution of E-mail into a readily accepted business communications tool, digital information is now the communication medium of choice. In addition to spawning both corporate culture and business process shifts within many work environments, this move toward digital communication is breathing new life into a technology that, to date, had never really found its place: the scanner.
Scanner Technology: In Search of a General Business Application
Scanners were introduced into the marketplace over a decade ago. Despite the consistent release of feature improvements and price reductions, the technology has never enjoyed widespread acceptance as a business productivity tool. Rather, the scanner was generally viewed as a novelty item hooked to the desktop system of the most computer-savvy user in the office. As a result, most office environments didn’t see an immediate need or mission critical application for scanners. Few were willing to spend upwards of $1,000 per user to place scanners on every desktop. An ancillary result was that most people never stopped to consider how scanners might be used in their day-to-day work.
The proliferation of digital information in the workplace is helping propel scanner technology to the forefront of the office communication space. Many businesses are now discovering how significant the cost savings can be once they make the "digital move." The increasing acceptance of E-mail as a primary means of internal and external communication, coupled with the rapid growth in the number of intranets, has created an environment where distribution of information in digital form is not the exception, but the norm.
Making scanner technology available throughout an organization so nearly anyone can digitize information for document distribution, E-mail communication or Web-posting is an obvious early step in making that digital move. If for no other reason than to streamline the flow of communication within a workgroup or with the outside world, ensuring that everyone can digitize information is important. Providing network access to a scanner is in many respects becoming a requirement, rather than a choice. Today, scanners are being moved off of the office peripheral junky’s desktop system and reintroduced into workgroups as shared critical resources--assisting in the deployment of digitized information.
The Impact of the Internet on the Peripheral Landscape
You can hardly pick up a newspaper these days without seeing something about how the Internet is impacting everything from the way people make flight reservations to the way we educate our children. But what has the impact of the Internet been on the types of desktop and network configurations as well as the ancillary peripherals we feel we need to conduct business day-to-day?
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), nearly $19 billion was spent on Internet and Intranet products and services in 1996. The network server market also enjoyed 55% growth. It seems apparent that building the infrastructure needed to support the Internet and/or Intranets is quickly circumventing the PC as the engine for growth in the IT industry.
For the peripheral market this trend means two things: peripherals that support or enhance Internet/Intranet use will thrive; and traditional single user peripheral solutions better find a way to get connected. Scanners fall into both of the aforementioned categories. Obviously with the increasing acceptance of digitized information through E-mail, fax or online, the need for tools that digitize documents and images is going to grow. But we will probably not see the day when every desktop is equipped with a scanner. Rather, network access to these peripherals will be key. IDC reports that worldwide scanner unit shipments grew 70 percent from 1995 to 1996. What’s more, high speed scanners are forecasted to increase 25 percent in unit sales from 1996 to 1997. The growing acceptance of digitized information as a primary communication tool as well as increased use of images in personal communication, promises to continue fueling the rapid growth in the scanner market.
Digitization Driven By Necessity
Three billion sheets of file folder material is created each day. That includes among other things, 600 million computer printouts, 76 million printed letters and 21 million general office documents. Even if one ignores the proliferation of E-mail and the Web as primary communication tools, the sheer mass of paper being used is forcing businesses to consider digitizing information for distribution.
In fact, there are entire businesses built around helping companies manage the flow and lifecycle of their documents. Buzzwords and acronyms are cropping up all over just to put a name to the process of "flowing documents through an organization." From Enterprise Document Management (EDM) to Document Lifecycle Management (DLM) to Just Get It Distributed (JGID), everyone is trying to find faster, more efficient ways to create, capture, store, retrieve, distribute, present and utilize information. This inherent desire to streamline communication and processes makes digital distribution look more attractive all of the time.
Changing views on when and how to use paper in business environments is also part of the driving force behind the acceptance of digital information, and the resulting rebirth in the use of scanner technology. Simply put, paper has lost its foothold as the distribution and storage medium of choice for most businesses and people. For many, having information stored and accessible in electronic form on a removable media storage cartridge such as disk or tape, or on a server or other device is generally adequate.
Sending information electronically is faster, less expensive and requires no one to staple collate and distribute the mass of paper that generally includes a cover sheet, as well as the document itself. Digital information is in all respects a less costly and less time consuming means to distribute large and even small amounts of information.
That’s not to say that there is no longer a need to have anything on paper. People will always print paper copies for reading or other reasons, but rather than cramming file cabinets full with paper copies, they are more likely than ever to toss (or recycle) the documents once they’ve completed the task at hand. In today’s business culture, you no longer need the paper "original." What is needed is something you can fax or E-mail.
Networked Scanning Defined
That reality has created the recently discovered desire to inexpensively provide network access to scanners. To clarify, networked scanning is the ability to access a scanner that is not attached to a particular workstation or computer platform, digitize paper-based information and then distribute the digitized documents and images via E-mail, an intranet and/or the Internet.
While peripheral sharing is well-understood, the idea that a scanner can be shared or networked is relatively new. In fact, to date shared scanning meant bumping the person who had the scanner in his or her office off of the computer so that you could use it. As the need for digital information becomes more prevalent and the need for scanners better understood, the desire to share this resource via the network has become more pressing. Now scanners, just like other peripherals such as printers, can be shared over the network – making digitizing information a cost-effective and highly productive option in a wide range of environments. Having the option to scan a document so that you can store it in a computer file would be a huge paper crunch relief for many.
PC-based scan stations have been at the forefront of making scanners a network-available technology. However, they have not been deployed widely enough to propel them into the mainstream. New "thin" technologies that allow the scanner to be put on the network without any need for a fileserver may be the catalyst for mainstreaming networked scanners.
For example, take the distribution of a financial report available only in hard copy. The report needs to go to a large number of geographically dispersed people. In a networked scanning environment, the user can walk up to the scanner, place the report in the scanner and simply press a few buttons to scan and distribute the digitized information to its destination(s). The solution is fast, simple and extremely cost-effective. It is ideal for any organization that is looking for ways to reduce the number of paper-based documents and images floating around or between offices, as well as for those looking to move as much data as possible onto an intranet or Internet Web site. This scenario will become even more prevalent as an increasing number of businesses rely on digital information distribution for internal and external communications.
Shared Scanning: The Fax Alternative
According to the research firm Coopers & Lybrand, today, an average of 3 billion sheets of file folder material is created each day. Reducing that number by even a fraction through the digitization of information that is then shared electronically could help relieve the proverbial paper jam that most offices find themselves trapped within. Legal, medical, architectural, accounting and construction firms, not to mention government agencies, could all net substantial cost and organizational benefits from the simplified manipulation, distribution, and archiving of digitized information.
The now commonplace use of E-mail and the Internet also opens up additional uses of digitized information. A shared scanning solution integrating E-mail can easily be used in place of a fax machine. One of the advantages of this approach is that E-mail is nearly always sent to an individual instead of a central location for rerouting. This adds to the security of the information and greatly reduces the risk of things getting lost in the process of rerouting via paper or E-mail.
Significant savings can also be garnered by using a shared scanner solution in place of a fax. Especially when you consider that in 1996, more than 350 billion pages were sent via fax machine and that fax traffic accounted for as much as 50 percent of many Fortune 500 companies' telephone charges. What's more, images generated by a scanner and transferred digitally e.g. via E-mail typically offer higher quality (higher resolution, and color) than fax images. Also, E-mail is in practice a more reliable means for transporting information than fax. Rarely, if ever do your E-mail messages get attached to the back of someone else’s and inadvertently set on another desk, only to reach you once the unintended recipient realizes that whatever it is yours and feels compelled to find you and return it.
The Digital Way: A Small Business Customer Example
Tylers Architectural Firm has 12 employees split between two regional offices. Tylers is in the running to win a major building renovation job, but has only one day to get its final proposal together. The firm has an old proposal available to work from as a template. However, in today’s multimedia-intensive environment, templates, simple schematics and text explanations are not nearly enough to win business in the highly competitive architectural market. To communicate their plans for the building fully, Tylers wants to add a color image and several photographs to the proposal package. One problem: The color photographs are in the other office and it is too late to send the information overnight.
In the past, Tylers would have used conventional methods such as faxing copies, excluding the photos, or having packages sent from both offices to the potential client. None of these traditional alternatives would communicate the image the firm is trying to project.
This problem is not uncommon, but the approach that Tylers took to solve it is cutting edge. Rather than relying on poor copies or multiple packages, Tylers scanned (digitized) the color images and sent them electronically to the second office. And from the same shared scanner, they E-mailed the photographs directly to the people working on the proposal and posted the documents on their internal Web site under "Project Proposals in Progress" so they all could access them. This was done in a matter of moments directly from one office's shared scanner.
For small businesses like Tylers, the benefits of networked scanning are "resource leverage-based." With networked or shared scanning, instead of putting an inexpensive scanner on every desktop, the company gains multiple uses from a single scanner.
The Digital Way: A Document Management Solution
The Craig Brothers Bank is a large international financial institution. To streamline their communication efforts they have set up a comprehensive document management and workflow system which includes shared network scanners for digitizing the paper before feeding it into the system.
Like all financial institutions, Craig Brothers is inundated with paperwork and documentation requirements. By implementing shared scanners, they have been able to effectively replace all paper-copying and faxing within the bank and between its branches. They are also free to choose the price/performance of the scanner equipment at different places to optimize costs.
All documents to be archived are posted from the branches to the central document management system. Managers, loan officers and auditors then access the archived information via Web browsers installed on their PCs, as everything archived in the document management system is published on the bank's intranet. Documents that need to be cleared are then distributed via the workflow system. Comments are added to the distributed information as it passes through the organization, and finally gets archived after processing.
Fileserver Overload, Internet Growth Spur New Approach
Deploying shared scanning throughout an organization can simplify the distribution of digitized information. But how does one add to the network without burdening the fileserver? Even before the explosive growth of the Internet, fileservers were supporting a staggering array of user services, including file, print, fax, and server-based applications, as well as E-mail, security and CD-sharing. As a result, fileservers are expensive, less efficient and unable to scale to meet the needs of a fully distributed environment. This problem is driving companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Axis Communications to develop ways to bypass the fileserver to provide shared resources. The first real application of this move toward fileserver-circumvention was the "network print server" which offered shared printer access. It's no surprise that use of this faster, smaller, less expensive and easier-to-install alternative to shared printing caught on quickly and grew exponentially.
Implementing a Shared Scanning Station
Workgroups are becoming more decentralized and users are growing accustomed to sharing peripherals such as printers, copiers and faxes that are networked and physically located in a common area. The addition of a group scanner is a natural addition to this scenario. And like these other peripherals, a networked or shared scanner solution can be implemented without requiring a dedicated PC.
ThinServer Technology in a Shared Scanning Environment
One way to cost-effectively implement a shared scanning solution without burdening the fileserver is to leverage some of the new thin technologies that are now available. For example, the ThinServer Technology from Axis Communications enables any device to be connected to any computer network cost-effectively and seamlessly. Rather than utilizing PC and fileserver technologies, ThinServer Technology combines custom RISC hardware, "thin" embedded servers and Web management that includes connectivity capabilities within the device itself. The integration of this technology is what makes it possible for the scan server to bypass a traditional fileserver to provide network access to scanners.
ThinServer Technology was specifically developed to connect devices such as scanners and other peripherals to networks and is therefore optimized for superior price/performance, usability and ease-of-use in network environments. It includes all network functionality on a single chip. This means plug-and-play operation and shared resources are made feasible for users and that many network administration challenges have been overcome. In other words, shared scanning is simple.
Summary
With the ever-growing number of documents being produced, as well as the rapid emergence of the corporate intranet and the Internet as communication tools, there is a clear and immediate need for simple mechanisms to digitize paper-based information, as well as distribute and archive the data and images. Making scanners available via the network is one of the most viable and cost-effective alternatives.