As some readers may be aware, it’s only been about six months since Nuance, the developer of voice-to-text recognition software and the widely-used optical character recognition (OCR processing) application, Omnipage, finalised its purchase of eCOPY. For those of you completely new to the world of Document Management and document distribution, eCopy is about as close to a household name as it gets. eCopy ShareScan, the developer’s flagship document distribution software solution is currently the best-selling paper-to-electronic document scanning package for use with Multifunction Printers (MFP’s) and such is its popularity, ShareScan is currently being marketed by Canon, Xerox, HP, Océ, Konica Minolta, Ricoh and Toshiba – that’s just about every major name in the reprographics industry.
ShareScan Expanded Development Kit (SDK)
Since Nuance’s purchase of eCopy, the company has been eagerly seeking to expand the product’s developer base, both with its own customers as well as third parties. As was widely reported at the time, almost immediately after the company’s purchase, eCopy’s bases and other valuable assets, such as its connectors, were made available. At this year’s On Demand, in the US, Nuance seems to have taken its development ambitions one step further. The company announced, it will now be providing all of its eCopy customers, as well as authorised third-parties, with an expanded development kit, to include a number of additional development tools (what is known as an API set), that were previously unavailable. This unprecedented move now makes Nuance the only document scanning solutions software vendor in the industry to provide full OCR software and document processing software development kit to third party developers. Authorised third-parties will now all have access to the expanded eCopy SDK, including the OmniPage SDK, for developing solutions for use within eCopy ShareScan system.
OmniPage Capabilities for eCopy Solutions
This will mean all of OmniPage’s capabilities – such as advanced image processing, 3D capture, document and OCR conversion, forms processing, zonal OCR and 100 format export can now be combined with eCopy Application Connectors or used in the creation of new eCopy Processing Extenders. For example, third party developers could potentially use OmniPage extensions to add scan-to-redaction capabilities to their eCopy Connector or eCopy solution. This would allow for the use of keywords or phrases to automatically remove certain unwanted information from documents which are being scanned at the MFP. Bank account details, for instance, could be removed from a client record which is being digitised. The digitised version could then be printed with that redaction or simply sent on to the user’s personal mailbox as a redacted Adobe PDF. The expanded eCopy SDK with OmniPage API’s also supports Scan-to-Highlight. Scan-to-Highlight is a paper-search feature which finds and highlights information that could be difficult or quite painstaking to find manually. Again, the highlighted document can either printed out or sent to the user’s mailbox in PDF.
Another stated ambition of Nuance has been to expand the use of eCopy solutions, from larger enterprises to smaller ones. Nuance’s Robert Weideman, general manager for the company’s Document Imaging Division commented at On Demand
You don’t need to be a large company…you just need to want to process documents more efficiently.
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