Fujitsu ScanSnap is a Snap
Following up on Isaac O’Bannon’s very well-timed post about the paperless office, I wanted to share my experience with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300.
Promoted as an instant PDF mobile scanner, I had my doubts about quality and ease of use - but am, instead, completely blown away by how simple the ScanSnap is to use. I had previously used my Lexmark all-in-one printer as a scanner - and it was neither easy nor exhibited the kind of quality I need.
The ScanSnap can scan 8 double-sided color pages in less than a minute, with a feeder that holds 10 total pages. That’s right. I said double-sided. Once the scan is complete, a pop-up window asked me to decide where I wanted it - as a file on my system, attached to an e-mail, or in Word or Excel.
It can be powered by AC or USB, and took less than 5 minutes to set up. USB-capabilities enable it to be truly mobile - perfect for staff working remotely.
I’m sold on this. Now if I can just break away from scanning everything in the office, I can get back to work.
We’ve been working with Fujitsu as a partner of ScanSnap to provide scanner users more value to the one button scanning solution. With Oxygen, ScanSnap also offers convenient scan and share through LeapFILE’s latest product - Oxygen.
Oxygen helps users easily share all scanned documents. It creates a folder on your desktop that can be used as a scan-to destination. You can invite others to the folder to share all scanned documents,
and all shared users have direct access to the scanned files from their own desktop. Users can share and collaborate on scanned documents in real time, without the hassle of emailing back and forth. All scanned documents are also automatically and safely backed up in the cloud, and encrypted to protect confidential information.
http://scansnapcommunity.com/tips-tricks/1583-how-can-i-scan-and-share-my-documents-in-the-cloud/
ScanSnap and Oxygen creates a complete Paperless Office Cloud solution. Let me know if you have any questions Scott!
Julia - thanks for your additions to my posting; I know this is information readers will want.
Hi Scott,
I couldn’t agree more about the ease and quality of the ScanSnap.
In addition to the points you mentioned, the ScanSnap also creates a searchable PDF using imbedded OCR (Optical Character Recognition) from essentially any document. This increases the utility of the document immensely in that now when you open it in Acrobat you can quickly search on any text string using the built in Find command. But even more interesting, is the ability to leverage this within a tool to help manage and track scanned documents.
The ScanSnap beautifully performs the first step of getting paper documents into electronic format. The next step is how to efficiently organize the scanned documents so they are easy to find and track. Anyone who uses computers can likely identify with the daily, maybe even hourly, challenge of trying to decide where to store and find files. Did I put it in this folder or that, or should I put this invoice in a folder for the customer, or one for the invoices that month, or both? In companies with multiple people doing this the result can be a confusing folder structure with lots of redundant information, or at best, within which is is difficult to locate documents.
My company Motive Systems also recently began working with Fujitsu after discovering how incredible these scanners are. We develop a software product called M-Files that provides easy management of any type of electronic document, especially those just scanned in with the SnanSnap. The idea is that once a file is scanned you simply save it to the “vault” and tag it with a few descriptive keywords, the customer or project it is associated with, and so on.
The ScanSnap can be easily configured to save to any folder which M-Files will then check and automatically deposit recently scanned files to the vault for you. You never worry about folders again, all files are saved to and opened from the vault, and all Windows commands are supported. So now any time you need to access the scanned document you just launch acrobat, choose File Open, select the M-Files vault (which looks like any other hard drive) and type in a descriptive term — or any text string that was in the scanned document (another benefit of the searchable PDF). And this can be done with one employee or thousands. You can even set up workflows to help with processing scanned documents. For instance, the person responsible for processing an invoice would get an email indicating a new invoice was available with a link to the invoice in the vault.
This type of document management software used to be complicated and expensive, but not any more.
Here are some links to an interesting case study and more information on M-Files at the ScanSnap community site:
The Cure for Clutter Case Study: http://scansnapcommunity.com/features/1754-the-cure-for-clutter/
While this happens to be for a medical office, we have thousands of customers in a number of industries including accounting and finance, retail, architecture, manufacturing, etc.
How M-Files works with the ScanSnap: http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/COMP/fcpa/scanners/m-files.pdf.
I hope my post wasn’t too long or promotional, but this type of solution is a key part of the recipe to truly achieve the paperless office.
-Greg