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

Top 7 Solutions @ Transform 2012 Conference "Intellinetics @ #1"

Cost Per Page Billing for Document Management Services

Photiizo’s Global Transform has concluded for 2012.  I'll be attending the conference in Scottsdale for 2013. 

About two months ago I wrote a blog about "Managed Documents the Next Big Thing" which I related to Managed Print.  The thought was to have an MFP connect to the cloud, and then scan documents directly to a cloud based document management system or a folder in the cloud.  After the documents were there the dealer would then manage the documents to have them indexed, OCR’d.  The dealer could then charge either a monthly fee for the service or a click charge that could be added to the existing maintenance agreement.  The benefit to the customer would be no upfront cost, no training (except to retrieve the documents), no internal IT support, and no maintenance fees.  The dealer could then remain “more sticky” in the account and offer the value added service.

While at the Transform Conference I ran across an Enterprise Content Management solution that was right up my alley.  The Intellivue ECM platform from Intellenetics is available as a cost- per-page model where you pay a low monthly fee based on the number of pages you use to the software to manage.  There is no upfront cost!  Billing would be enabled on a cost per page model, there would be one cost per page for a black scan and one cost per page (higher than the black cost) for a color scan, the reasoning for the higher cost for the color is that the color scan created a larger file size. With this SaaS solution a company can realize and immediate return on investment from the first month Intellivue is deployed.

Another excellent benefit to the dealer is that they can charge professional services for the installation and training to the end user. I’m more of a fan of the dealer performing the indexing of the documents for the end user and I’m not entirely sure this can be accomplished with Intellivue.  I will be making a call to them to see if there is a way this can be done.

The concept is for the user to scan2file from the MFP, the user would then index the file and submit to the ECM on the cloud (this is the part I’d like to see the dealer do so you it could be a seem less solution for the customer and you would be able to bill professional services).  Intellivue then retains the document for Archival in the Cloud or Premise Solution.  Intellivue would then create a monthly total of Pages in the Archival tabulate the monthly bill based on the cost per page.  Intellivue can then feed the monthly page totals and cost to the MPS billing software (I’m hoping that this will also work with MFP billing software).  You MPS software would then generate the total bill including line items for hardware, supplies, services and Intellivue.  Royalties are paid to the reseller from the ECM revenues collected.

The power of this solution is that there is no upfront cost and I see Intellivue as a tremendous value for the SMB customer.  For too long the SMB customer has shied away from content management due to the upfront cost, the training, the IT infrastructure and the thought that they would have to dedicate and employee to operate the software.

BTW, this is the first blog in a series of 7 for the top 7 solutions at Transform 2012 Conference.

-=Good Selling=-

Daily Managed Print Service Industry Notes from Around the World!

Like other printing companies, Lexmark has placed a heavier focus on providing so-called managed print services to help offset headwinds in traditional hardware and supplies businesses. Under such services, printing companies are typically contracted ...read more here

One might not think much when clicking on the print button and taking a printout about how much energy was consumed in the process. This leads us to question how aware Indian enterprises are when it comes to the concept of Green Printing? Is it just a buzzword or is it morphing into reality, albeit slowly. ...read more here

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Feb. 1, 2012 -- Building on its reputation as a leading managed print services (MPS) provider, Mosaic Business Solutions was named as one of 'The Best Places to Work' in South Florida by the South Florida Business Journal. The organization, along with the other honorees, will be recognized at a special event on February 23rd...read more here

Nuance is a company with a plethora of products covering voice recognition, document capture and print management. As Nuance has largely grown through acquisition (about 50 in the past 10 years) it is probably better known by its product names, which include established brands such as PaperPort (desktop productivity), OmniPage (OCR), Dragon Dictate (voice recognition), eCopy (document capture and workflow) and Equitrac (print management) – its most recent buy....read more here
In its latest report on the print market, analyst firm IDC says that, after a flat trend in 2010, it now expects home and office print volumes in Western Europe to slow down even further, declining at a CAGR of 0.6 percent from 2011 through to 2015. IDC says the increasing popularity of IEMDs will contribute to this slow decline.

"New Internet-enabled mobile devices change the nature of users' relationship with documents," said Arnaud Gagneux, director, Imaging Hardcopy and Document Solutions, Western Europe for IDC. "This affects both consumers and businesses, and offers hardcopy vendors opportunities for growth in security, document solutions, and managed print services, to name a few."...read more here

-=Good Selling=-