Until Paper Is Extinct Scanning Solutions Are Important

Although many companies try to get as close to a paperless solution as they can, they'll never achieve that goal. Why? The US Postal Service, FEDEX, UPS and DHL still bring us documents. Lawyers and clients still demand that we "sign" things and "fax them". We still "print out" long attachments for safe keeping as we know once it's in our email system we'll never see it again.

eCopy recently released PaperWorks desktop document imaging software that lets your business mix paper and electronic documents. You can secure and preserve information contained across document types into a single, easy-to-manage PDF software file.

It's one thing to scan documents. It's another thing to have your email archived and searchable. But when you have client projects that also include faxes, or when you add in Power Point presentations, it can be maddeningly confusing to keep all of these files together.

A document management solution is important so you can not only merge the documents together, but also be able to find information within the combined documents and mark up the documents. Annotating pages using drawing tools, text tools, highlight, blackout, whiteout, and notes could be quite useful.

Finally, be able to save the documents to existing work flow systems, such as the popular Microsoft Sharepoint or small business tools like Box.net or Basecamp could be useful as well.

I thought that maybe with the rise of more digital communication, including social media tools, service like eCopy would not be needed but Bill Brikiatis, eCopy director of corporate marketing said this is not so.

He told me, As opposed to a decline, it’s only natural that users will look to include all the various forms of information, including paper documents, with microblogs and social media - a trend will make document imaging and management software increasingly important to SMBs.

He wrote to me via email that He sees e-mail as a good model for how microblogs and social media will transform. Back in the 90s when e-mail was first introduced outside the enterprise environment, it drove new applications and features. For example, eCopy started around the need created by users to attach paper documents to e-mail messages.

With the ability to post any hardcopy information to social media sites for anyone to see in an instant, companies will also look for document scanning software that safeguards security. Those that include features such as creating an audit trail are increasingly important, to show who in an organization scanned a particular document and when it was scanned.

Additionally, companies will look to pull in Twitter and other online conversations into document management repositories, as a means of recording a nontraditional exchange of information. This will be especially important for firms that are publicly traded, or are business partners with larger companies that are publicly held.

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