eCopy’s products include ShareScan, ScanStation and PaperWorks. Over 100,000 copies of ShareScan have been sold.

eCopy supplies and integrates its tools for taking scanner documents, converting and distributing them, and connecting them with a wide range of back-end data managing systems (including SAP, SharePoint, Oracle, and many others). It works closely with major copier/MFP companies, including Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Océ, Ricoh, Toshiba and Xerox.

Nuance’s current offering are seen as complimentary to eCopy’s. Nuance is best known for its two commonly used OCR programs, PaperPort and OmniPage. The company also sells industry-leading software for voice recognition and voice annotation, as well as tools for converting and editing PDF files. In addition, the company sells a variety of products to medical processes, a hot area where data management, voice annotation, and security are critical issues.

Our take: a good move for Nuance. As copier/MFP hardware from various vendors looks more and more identical, software availability becomes more and more crucial, especially embedded software accessed from the control panel as well as the desktop. Both companies offer among the most commonly used software in their respective fields. The closer integration of their products (combining, say, voice recognition and document annotation) looks like a winning combination. Best of all, much of their sales and marketing efforts are aimed at the same audience, though with distinct product areas. That should make for very good crossover.

According to a survey of 100 execs by eCopy, Inc., 47% of companies routinely copy documents containing financial information, and 30% copied legal documents.

Also, though most companies recognize the need to shred sensitive data, 25% fail to dispose of it properly — recycling or throwing away entire sheets of paper, leaving the data available for anyone who finds it.

Obviously there’s a need for a more organized system of copying classified documents. Companies have found they can gain control and enhance privacy by placing scanned documents into a secure electronic workflow. Document imaging solutions come with a number of benefits:

1. Improved organizational procedures: Document imaging solutions allow companies to establish a systematic way of copying, storing, and discarding sensitive documents. Now you can make sure everyone follows business protocol when it comes to copying.
2. More control: You can password protect the document to control who gets to view, edit or print the scanned information. This helps guard against fraud and stolen information.
3. Less paper: Electronic copying and storing does away with the need for most paper copies. It also eliminates the increased risk of fraud when disposing of them, not to mention all the extra storage space you’ll have around the office.
4. Better compliance with tough rules: Privacy regulation is becoming tighter, but you can get ahead in the game by creating an effective audit trail with electronic copying.
5. Increased returns on investment: Electronic capture and distribution of data that would otherwise be in paper documentation allows for better integration into existing business applications.

Improving workflow — for many people it’s something between a dream and a nightmare. The very words conjure up visions of lost IT time, messy upgrades and lots of training. That might be fine in a big company, but not for smaller businesses, right?

Not necessarily.

Most companies know that they have to move at some point from paper to digital, that the long-term benefits are real and the risk of falling behind the competition are certain. But how to get started?

The key is that you don’t have to go paperless immediately. We talked with Bill Brikiatis, director of Corporate Marketing at software company eCopy, about how the easy steps small- and mid-size businesses can make to switch to digital document archiving and management:

1. The power of searchable PDF

Most companies create plenty of paperwork, whether for proposals, invoices, spreadsheets, contracts, legal documents or reports. They also need to re-find this information so they can review what they have done, or so they can base the next proposal, contract, or report on an earlier one. The problem, then, becomes where to look. That’s especially the case when you want take a document intended for one client and repurpose it for another.

Many companies have tried scanning the pages to create images, and then indexing them by client ID, invoice number or other information. It’s a time-consuming prospect, and it doesn’t help you when you want to find anything that hasn’t been indexed, such as specific language in a contract or a specific delivery address.

The easiest solution to the problem is scanning to a file format called searchable PDF. This allows you to create industry-standard, universally readable PDF-files, which are small in size and can include such things as signatures, handwritten notes and original fonts, along with searchable text, so that you can enter something like “warranty” and find all documents with that phrase.

The best part is you don’t have to spend time indexing the documents. You need special, but inexpensive, software to create searchable PDFs from scans, software that uses high-quality OCR to create searchable files. To start out, for example, you can get eCopy Desktop for about $200. You can create the files directly from scanned paper documents, a task that can be performed by almost anyone on staff, as it does not require elaborate training or special equipment. The scanning can be done on an office copier or an inexpensive desktop scanner.

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