Sunday, January 20, 2013

Copiers & MFP's "Scan2Cloud Middleware Reveal"

Scanning from MFP's, every business is doing it, everyone I speak to admits it's been a boon to saving them time.

All of your current manufacturers MFP's now have standard scan2email and scan2folder. In recent months MFP manufacturers have sweetened the pie by adding additional background functionality when you scan2folder.

Such as creating a text searchable .pdf, performing OCR (optical character recognition) back to a word doc or an excel doc, or even scan2 a power point file, and least we no forget scan2cloud functionality.

It's  truly is amazing that you can walk up to the MFP and have these time saving features at the touch of a button, right?

Well, kinda, if you're a small account and all you need is to create searchable /pdf's here and there, or the occasional scan2word or scan2excel, these systems will work fine.  But what about more intensive users, lets say accounts that want every document scanned as a searchable .pdf and every document is 30-50 pages and you want to drop them off to the cloud?  This is where it can get
dicey,  because the processing power that the manufacturers put into their MFP's is nowhere close to the processing power of a pc.  You can expect bottles necks, scan lag times, and files not being optimized  properly because of the MFP's OS and the limited processing power. As more companies adopt these wonderful work flows, they and the sales people that sold them these wonderful devices are just asking for headaches.



All of this leads me to a really neat package of middleware that I found called CC SCAN.  CCscan is specifically designed for scan2cloud applications from the MFP.  Remember what I stated about the processing power of the MFP's right.  Now, dig this, for those accounts and prospects that have the need for scan2cloud, they have a decent volume, along with the need to create searchable .pdfs,  OCRing, file naming, bar code detection, along with the ability to stack unrelated documents together in the MFP and have them scanned all at once with the result of several .pdf files in several different locations all with unique names.  CCscan seems like a viable solution.

The key to eliminate the bottlenecks, scan lag times and files not be optimized properly is to place a small pc next to the MFP (the power of the dedicated PC is what your prospects needs) , connect with the TWAIN driver (they all have that).  You can even get a fancy mount for the flat screen, keyboard and mouse. Really when you consider the cost of a new pc with screen and mounting brackets on a lease what could the additional cost be $20 per month? Less than a Dollar a day, that's a no brainer to have this type of productivity for scan2cloud applications for MS Sharepoint, Box, Google docs, Dropbox, SkyDrive, Azure, Amazon S3, and Salesforce.



The point is that now a dealer can make their own scanning kiosk, let the customer choose their scan2cloud provider, and then we can reap the professional services manage the pc, charge for pro services for training if we want (or let cc scan do it), but more importantly to provide an advanced scan2cloud solution that really doesn't exist from the copier manufacturers.  ccScan offers an SaaS model and is available for as little as $15 per month and tops out at $30 per month.

If you have the time check out ccScan here.

Sell the solution, offer something different, be unique and special in your market, sell the sizzle!

-=Good Selling=-






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