We went through a lot of iterations trying to find a scanner that would match our AP process well. It’s very interesting that they don’t really make a class of scanner that fits what we wanted. We liked the simplicity of the Canon ScanFront http://www.ilinxcapture.com/Solutions/ScanFront/index.htm but we learned that if we got a larger scanner we would be able to turn our invoices to landscape and get much better paper feeding. The typical creases that come from being stuffed in an envelope tend to stick pages together. When you look at the higher end scanners all of them require a computer to be connected with either USB or SCSI. This makes sense when you think of the processing that would be required to handle 60-70ppm duplex scanning. Then again, why can’t anyone just bundled an embedded XP box inside the scanner and call it good? Well, that’s basically what we ended up doing. We mounted a PC using the VESA mounts onto the back of a Canon 7550C this gives us good paper handling (landscape!), an easy to use Scan-To button, and very decent software that rotates pages based on text + Advanced Text Enhancement. All and all, the scanning part of our ECM projects has gone into very quiet IT/It just works mode. This is where I try to drive all of our technologies so that our small IT group can continue moving forward with new initiatives instead of getting bogged down in the OPERATIONS side of the IT business.

My new favorite quote:  A laggard IT operation ‘monitors.’  A follower ‘manages.’  A leader ‘automates.’ Bob Laliberte

A picture of our FrankenScanner, it works pretty well!