Jeff Segarra
When one compiles a list of upper echelon solutions providers, one name firmly entrenched at or near the top is Nuance Communications. After years of acquisitions, the company has an impressive suite of solutions that are standards within the document imaging industry with three of the most prominent being eCopy, Equitrac, and now AutoStore.
A few weeks ago Nuance announced the latest enhancements to its solutions portfolio with new versions of its capture software, Nuance AutoStore 7 and eCopy ShareScan 5.4. I was fortunate to get a pre-briefing with Jeff Segarra, senior director, image product marketing for Nuance, about the latest versions of these two products and what it means to dealers who are reselling these products.
The latest versions of these two distinct solutions are designed to improve document capture across two categories identified as business process capture workflows and collaborative capture workflows.
For anyone keeping track, this represents the first announcement related to AutoStore since Nuance acquired NSi last year. Any questions as to Nuance’s intentions for AutoStore and even eCopy are answered with this announcement.
“We want to assure the dealer channel that we’re not end of ‘lifing’ anything, but are improving these products significantly and will continue to improve them significantly,” reports Segarra.
While one might assume that the two products are interchangeable, Nuance has a distinct strategy for each.
For example, AutoStore 7 is targeted at business processes capture workflows where participants submit documents and data into a predefined workflow. AutoStore has a responsive and intuitive interface that allows for quick capture of critical document information with as little interaction as possible using real-time connections to business systems for rapid and reportedly error free processing. Regardless of where business documents are captured and entered into the workflow, whether from PCs, laptops, smartphones, tablets, MFPs scanners, e-mail and the web, AutoStore integrates the information into the organization and its operations.
eCopy ShareScan 5.4 is aimed at collaboration work streams where team members contribute documents and content to the team for further review and enhancements. By using the MFP within the workgroup’s area, eCopy guides workgroup members through the document capture process.
“The announcement for our capture and workflow solutions and the whole purpose of all the Nuance solutions is to control uncontrolled documents and workflows, which are the root cause of inefficiencies,” explains Segarra.
And those inefficiencies, he adds, have the potential to cost an organization money, waste time, reduce quality, damage moral, and increase risk.
“For dealers these points are critically important to connect with their customers because they have one or all of these problems going on relative to not just paper documents, but digital documents,” says Segarra. “And these solutions deal with both paper and digital documents in a workflow.”
For anyone wondering how to determine if a customer needs a business process solution, Nuance has put together some questions that a dealer can ask a customer. Depending on the answers, they’re going to lean on one solution vs. the other. It starts with discovering how documents are currently captured, i.e., paper sourcing devices such as MFPs, fax machines, scanner or electronic documents sourced from e-mails, digital fax, tablets, and smartphones.
Also important is identifying who’s in control of the scanning process, i.e., is it owned by a business process team with procedures that are well defined, secure, rigid, and automated for speed?
With the updates to AutoStore 7, Nuance has made significant progress in several areas, including an enhanced installation and administration experience.
“The reason this is key is because when you’re dealing with dealers who may not have extensive professional services capabilities to wire stuff up or spend all day at a customer installing software, they want it to be an easier experience,” saysSegarra.
Another notable enhancement is a Unified Client.
“AutoStore allows you to have one interface [on the MFP control panel] for capture and print that looks exactly the same, which is helpful to end users,” emphasizes Segarra.
Other enhancements include:
- Improved OCR performance and advanced PDF support
- New and updated document routing components
- Forms overlay that unites paper and electronic forms processing
- The ability to safeguard confidential information with dynamic text redaction
- Improved camera and smartphone image-handling
- Windows 8.1 and Windows 2012 R2 support
The document imaging industry continues to focus on security and it’s not surprising that this is another enhancement. One of the critical components in Nuance’s OmniPage is security, i.e. blacking out areas you don’t want people to see. The new version of AutoStore takes that security a step further.
“In AutoStore you can [identify] an area, words, such as a name or social security number,” explains Segarra. “You can color code it so every time a purple area came up you’d know it’s your name and every time a green a social security number, but no one can see that information.”
eCopy has long been popular with multi-line dealers as collaborative workflows are popular in SMB, which makes the enhancements within eCopy ShareScan 5.4 particularly notable and arguably overdue. These enhancements include optional document preview, Work-while-scanning capability, share and collaborate (new connectors), and SmartForms.
“One of the issues we had with eCopy it was slow compared to an Autostore because of the way it dealt with a collaborative workflow,” states Segarra.
In this new version Nuance concentrated on the speed for scanning on any machine that eCopy supports—Xerox, Ricoh, Canon, KM, HP, etc.
“eCopy has always had a document preview,” says Segarra. “That’s one of the things that made it a great collaborative scanning solution. Previously you had to scan doc and wait for preview and that held people up. Now it’s an option.”
Work-while-scanning is another interesting enhancement.
“On a traditional MFP without eCopy you walk up to MFP, place documents in there, enter B&W, color, number of copies, etc., then go scan to email screen and type an e-mail address, subject, description of document, then start scanning, so you have to wait for scanning to stop,” states Segarra. “We now allow you to scan and while it’s scanning you can enter the data. I can take a two-minute workflow and collapse it down to the rated speed of the scanner, cutting my scanning speed by 50 percent.”
He says that eCopy is currently the only product that offers this capability.
It’s also easier to install than ever before.
“The key message we dealers to take away is that eCopy is ridiculously easy to install,” says Segarra. “I can install it into Sharepoint in under 25 minutes.”
The other key message is that Nuance remains committed to both products, and Segarra suggests dealers should be as well.
“What the dealer community should be doing is looking at the products they’re trying to solve for their customer and how they can be most successful in keeping competition out,” he says.”If they really understand how both products work, and how the customers work, and have both in their portfolio like we do, they’re going to be much more successful than if they just stick with one product.”
