Introduction
Designed as a new direction in document management, SmartSearch has quickly become the definition of Document Intelligence for today’s business. SmartSearch offers businesses of all sizes a powerful, comprehensive and value driven solution built on the strength of Service Oriented Architecture and the Microsoft .NET platform.

Offered as a workgroup product, SmartSearch utilizes the power of Microsoft SQL Server ™ to drive the rapid retrieval of documents archived on the network. Through stored queries or content based searches, users can now locate any record in only a matter of seconds.

Once retrieved a document can be annotated, redacted or launched prior to its distribution to other users or outside parties. Easily emailed or faxed, information stored in SmartSearch is now available for others to use in their daily decision making processes. The integrity of annotated documents is always maintained as annotations are stored outside of the image file. This approach has an added benefit of allowing documents written to WORM media to be annotated.

Committed to its adherence of industry standards and open architecture, SmartSearch offers network administrators no restrictions to where records are archived. SmartSearch requires only local, mapped, or UNC drive access from the SmartSearch server for the secure storage of records to your network. Archived documents are now immediately available to users via LAN or WAN or VPN access.

SmartSearch offers options for extending the value of your investment through strategic partnerships with some of the most powerful products on the market including Kofax Capture for image and data capture, eCopy and NSi Autostore for MFP Panel Integration, Biscom and Castelle for fax management, and Objectif Lune for variable data and conditional print management archival.

Ramsey, N.J. – February 25, 2010 – Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A., Inc. (Konica Minolta), a leading provider of advanced imaging and networking technologies for the desktop to the print shop, today announced BERTL® Inc (BERTL) has awarded the 2009 BERTL's Best Award for Best Integrated Scanning Solution to Konica Minolta and Nuance for the eCopy ShareScan® solution designed for integrated Konica Minolta multifunctional printers (MFPs – print, copy, fax, scan all-in-one system).  Introduced in Fall 2009, this award-winning solution was launched through Konica Minolta’s bizhub® Extended Solution Technology (bEST) Developer Support Program.

Offering Konica Minolta customers enhanced workflow efficiency by converting paper documents into easily managed digital files, eCopy ShareScan gives IT administrators the ability to manage document scanning functionality from a central location, which decreases administration costs.  Customers can choose from two configurations – eCopy ShareScan Essentials or eCopy ShareScan Suite – both of which provide cost-effective alternatives for customers to address their specific document management environment.

"Congratulations to Konica Minolta and Nuance eCopy for earning the well-deserved BERTL's Best Award for this new and innovative document solution" said Margie Davis, Managing Director, BERTL, Inc.  "Evaluated by the BERTL team of analysts as part of our user-focused testing, eCopy ShareScan more than meets the needs of Konica Minolta users requiring an easy and secure solution to share and work with paper documents via Email, fax and desktop systems."

By Jamie Bsales, Associate Editor, December 14, 2009

In October, Nuance Communications, Inc. announced that it had acquired eCopy, Inc. from a consortium of owners (including Canon, venture-capital firm Ascent Venture Partners and private-equity player Landmark Partners) in an all-stock deal valued at $54 million. The purchase adds eCopy’s industry-leading network scan capture and routing platform, eCopy ShareScan, to Nuance’s portfolio of OCR, document imaging, document management and speech recognition products. To find out what the combination will mean for MFP OEMs and their channel partners, BLI spoke with Robert Weideman, general manager and senior vice president of the Nuance Document Imaging Division. Weideman and his team are planning to leverage the complementary products, technologies and channel strategies of the two companies to give MFP makers and dealers more robust product offerings, as well as to make scan capture easier for end users.

One-Stop Shop For The Hardware OEMs

Both Nuance and eCopy have had long-standing relationships with MFP OEMs. Nuance licenses its capture and OCR technology to the leading manufacturers, several of which sell it under private labels—Ricoh Personal Paperless Document Manager and Xerox Scan to PC Desktop Professional, for example. Many equipment makers also bundle Nuance’s OmniPage, PaperPort and PDF desktop applications with scanners and MFPs. eCopy, for its part, was the first third-party application available for Canon’s MEAP embedded platform and has since forged relationships with nearly all of the MFP players of note. In fact, eCopy’s ShareScan solution is supported either as an embedded application or via the company’s add-on ScanStation on more than 75 percent of Segment 2 through 6 MFP models currently offered in the U.S.

But Weideman noted that the strategies of the two companies differed when it came to their OEM relationships. “At Nuance, we were willing to do private-label products, while eCopy focused on maintaining the eCopy brand,” he said. “We believe in both paths. When there’s an opportunity to be a private-label supplier for OEMs that want general purpose and desktop solutions, we’ll do that. But OEMs like the eCopy brand for the high-end.”

The purchasing department at Arizona State University had become overrun by paper-bound processes. For construction purchase orders, each purchase order request required a large packet of information to be copied and routed. Upon completion of processing, a purchase order was generated and up to five copies were made for archiving, departmental records and to be mailed to the vendor.

The purchasing department’s costs for printing, paper, and postage were mounting. With its filing room filling up, the department was almost out of storage space when it turned to the University’s Business Applications and Fiscal Control team to reinvent its purchase order process for construction purchasing.

In a redesigned business process, construction purchasing at the University now accepts purchase order request documentation, scans the documentation and converts it into PDF files to automate workflows. In many instances, departments now send the documents to construction purchasing as a PDF file via email rather than submitting paper documents.

All information goes into a Microsoft SharePoint repository where each construction purchase request is reviewed, processed and tracked. To add the scanned documentation and related information to SharePoint libraries, Arizona State uses Nuance’s eCopy desktop document imaging software.

This business process improvement has saved the University $10,000 per year in office supplies, paper and postage costs. It also contributes to advancing Arizona State University’s sustainability initiatives by reducing paper usage and the overall carbon footprint of the process.